Anchoring as Grounding: On Epstein’s the Ant Trap

The project of social ontology is built on the observation that social facts are not “brute” facts in nature. The fact that Tufts is a university, that the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates, that the word ‘Aristotle’ refers to Aristotle, and that Mario Batali is a restaurateur, are all the case—at least in part—in virtue of various facts about people. Theories of social ontology identify, implicitly or explicitly, some cohesive set of social facts or objects such as “institutional facts,” “semantic facts,” “artifacts,” etc. For that set, they work to provide an account of the other facts in virtue of which social facts are the case, or in virtue of which social objects exist. (Epstein 2013: 54)