Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition (Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality Book 4)

**__Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition__** brings together contributions discussing issues arising from theoretical and empirical research on social ontology and social cognition. It is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary collection in this rapidly expanding area. The contributors draw upon their diverse backgrounds in philosophy, cognitive science, behavioral economics, sociology of science and anthropology. Based largely on contributions to the first Aarhus-Paris conference held at the University of Aarhus in June 2012, the book addresses such questions as: If the reference of concepts like __money__ is fixed by collective acceptance, does it depend on mechanisms that are distinct from those which contribute to understanding the reference of concepts of other kinds of entity? What psychological and neural mechanisms, if any, are involved in the constitution, persistence and recognition of social facts? The editors’ introduction considers strands of research that have gained increasing importance in explaining the cognitive foundations of acts of sociality, for example, the theory that humans are predisposed and motivated to engage in joint action with con-specifics thanks to mechanisms that enable them to share others’ mental states. The book also presents a commentary written by John Searle for this volume and an interview in which the editors invite Searle to respond to the various questions raised in the introduction and by the other contributors. Front Matter....Pages i-viii Objects in Mind....Pages 1-13 Front Matter....Pages 15-15 Are There Social Objects?....Pages 17-26 Deflating Socially Constructed Objects: What Thoughts Do to the World....Pages 27-39 How Many Kinds of Glue Hold the Social World Together?....Pages 41-55 On the Nature of Social Kinds....Pages 57-68 Normativity of the Background: A Contextualist Account of Social Facts....Pages 69-86 Social Ontology and the Objection from Reification....Pages 87-100 Front Matter....Pages 101-101 Constraints on Joint Action....Pages 103-123 How Objects Become Social in the Brain: Five Questions for a Neuroscience of Social Reality....Pages 125-134 Materializing Mind: The Role of Objects in Cognition and Culture....Pages 135-148 Perceiving Affordances and Social Cognition....Pages 149-166 Social Cognition as Causal Inference: Implications for Common Knowledge and Autism....Pages 167-189