The Myth of the “Physical”

Discourses on social reality are still influenced by a conception of logical positivism that regards all empirically unverifiable statements as pseudo-statements and the entities to which these statements refer as non-existent.  Elevating the reality of social kinds and social facts to the same level as that of natural kinds and natural facts could ensure the legitimacy of such discourses. I will not offer such a positive defence, but rather a negative one. I am going to argue that the latter kinds and facts do not have a more definitive or indisputable status than the former ones. In support of my claim, I’ll draw on two ideas that are, in my view, converging on the question of revisability and relative status of conceptual frameworks: The first is Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophical criticism of the ‘categorial given’, and the other is Özséb Horanyi’s communication-theoretical framework, the Participation Theory of Communication (PTC). One consequence of these approaches is the idea that the privileged status of the brute, natural facts and kinds is merely contingent fact: it is only because the concepts belonging to physical objects and perceptual properties are fundamental components of the conceptual framework (in PTC: capacity) that we acquire as our first language.