Truth and social reality : a metaphysical inquiry /

This volume argues that there are truths about our social world and that those truths are produced by that social world. It looks at questions around truth, reality, objectivity, social construction, and relativism, and provides an account of how gender, race, class, and disability are socially cons...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Griffith, Aaron M. (Author)
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2025]
Subjects:
Online Access:Connect to the full text of this electronic book
Description
Summary:This volume argues that there are truths about our social world and that those truths are produced by that social world. It looks at questions around truth, reality, objectivity, social construction, and relativism, and provides an account of how gender, race, class, and disability are socially constructed.
Abstract:"Truth and Social Reality: A Metaphysical Inquiry presents a new theory of social truth and social construction. The book weds truthmaker theory with recent work in social ontology, arguing that social truths are true in virtue of socially constructed portions of the world. It focuses on the construction of human social kinds like gender, race, class, and disability. The book offers novel accounts of social construction (one in terms of truthmaking), realism, social kind pluralism, social context, the context dependency of social truth, and social vagueness. Overall, Truth and Social Reality presents a realist picture of the social world in which there are objective truths about the way things are in the social world. Social truth is not socially constructed despite being grounded in a socially constructed reality. The theory it provides nonetheless captures the contingency, alterability, vagueness of the social world, and the context dependency of social truth. The book also addresses the relationships between truth, power, and justice. It argues that truth itself is not a tool of oppression, as some maintain. Rather, truth and truth-telling play an essential role in upending oppression and achieving justice. Truth and Social Reality aims to rebut the cynicism of the “post-truth” age by defending the possibility and value of social truth"-- Oxford Academic.
Physical Description:1 online resource : illustrations.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:9780198948483
0198948484
9780198948476
0198948476