One inquiry involves the “construction” or “set-up”

One inquiry involves the “construction” or “set-up”

A related but somewhat separate inquiry involves the “products” of the construction

One might inquire about what sets up or constructs a legal category, and also inquire about the “real definition” of the category that has been constructed.

natural and human contributions in the construction of familiar features of the world.

Social entities as products of covenants:

uses the term ‘convention’ as the basis for law and language

we can have tacit conventions

Social entities as products of God and Nature

divine commandment and in human nature

Social entities as products of the individual mind

nominal essence

A nominal essence is a definition of a species or sort of thing,

which people assemble in their minds out of ideas.

sources

construction

social order arises from aggregates of individuals interacting with one another, even if the individuals did not plan the order

derive laws governing such aggregates

derive laws governing such aggregates

derive laws governing such aggregates.

with individuals a product of the societies in which they are brought up

it depends on our having a sense of ourselves as individuals as distinct from others, which in turn depends on mutual interactions

universal human spirit, of which individual actions are a manifestation

social entities are fundamental, independent, or autonomous entities

individualism

holism

revealing that they have darker (or at least richer) underpinnings than we realize

The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof

Karl Marx argues that certain social categories that might appear natural are in fact the

products of social and economic relations among people

constructedness of social entities

at the center of social critique.

it turns phenomena that arise from an oppressive economic system into features of the world that we regard as natural (see also Lukács 1964–68 [1986]).

a metaphysical theory of the nature of social reality

he argues that prevailing moral categories were tools intentionally wielded in a struggle for power

the sources of such categories are largely

cognitive and intentional

second nature

social order is maintained, at least in part, by the causal effects of our treating social entities and categories as if they were natural

If oppressive structures are to be dismantled, the social nature of the everyday world first needs to be revealed.

entities

properties

shared intentions

remove the mystery behind shared intention by analyzing it in terms of non-social mental states of individual people

“psychologistic” theories of the social world

all social facts are determined by the psychological states of individual people.

oncerned with a particular class of social properties

projectible

understood in terms of

their essential dependence on certain mental states.