Graduate Talk Series: Erim Bakkal

A Fictionalist Social Ontology

This paper develops a fictionalist approach to social ontology, particularly concerning certain social kinds, with a focus on action explanation. Section 1 provides a brief overview of social realism. Section 2 develops a fictionalist social ontology. In Section 3, I compare social fictionalism with social realism. I argue that the fictionalist approach offers a novel perspective on the foundations of social reality, explaining human actions while maintaining theoretical virtues to a greater extent than its realist alternatives.