Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T22:44:23.584Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Reification, practice, and the ontological status of social facts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2020

Simon Frankel Pratt*
Affiliation:
University of Bristol, School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies, 11 Priory Rd., Bristol, BS8 1TU, UK
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

In this reply to Miles Evers, I clarify some of my positions and argue that social facts should not be reified. Just as with norms, they should be defined as arrangements of practices rather than as social objects.

Type
Original Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adler, Emanuel. 2019. World Ordering: A Social Theory of Cognitive Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berger, Peter, and Luckmann, Thomas. 1966. The Social Construction of Knowledge: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Cochran, Molly. 2002. “Deweyan Pragmatism and Post-Positivist Social Science in IR.” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 31 (3): 525–48. http://mil.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/03058298020310030801 (November 24, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dépelteau, François. 2008. “Relational Thinking: A Critique of Co-Deterministic Theories of Structure and Agency.” Sociological Theory 26 (1): 5173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dewey, John. 1929. The Quest for Certainty. New York: Milton, Balch, & Company.Google Scholar
Dewey, John, and Bentley, Arthur. 1949. Knowing and the Known. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Elder-Vass, Dave. 2010. The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure, and Agency. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evers, Miles M. 2020. “Just the Facts: Why Norms Remain Relevant in an Age of Practice.” International Theory 12 (2): 220–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Honneth, Axel. 2008. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. 2006. Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lukács, Georg. 1971. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” In History & Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingstone, 83222. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCourt, David M. 2016. “Practice Theory and Relationalism as the New Constructivism.” International Studies Quarterly 60 (3): 475–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 1987. “Rethinking Reification.” Theory and Society 16 (2): 263–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pratt, Simon Frankel. 2020. “From Norms to Normative Configurations: A Pragmatist and Relational Approach to Theorizing Normativity in IR.” International Theory 12 (1): 5982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, John. 2010. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar