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 constructed.

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, 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 on 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, and 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 rebuts the cynicism of the "post-truth" age by defending the possibility and value of social truth.