On some connections between social studies and analytic philosophy in the context of ontology of agency

The article explores the problem of correlation between the concepts of social action arising in the framework of actor-network theory (ANT) developed by Bruno Latour and object-oriented ontology (OOO) developed by Graham Harman in the context of metaphysics of agency. At the first stage of the research, the ontological foundations of ANT and OOO are considered. Harman develops his concept as a theoretical extension of ANT by replacing the metaphysics of “relations” with a flat ontology of objects. For ANT, all objects are agents, since they appear only in action. For OOO, all agents are objects, since they are opaque and cannot be exhaustively described either by reduction to their components or by identification with their functions. But such an extension, while saving ANT from radical relativism, in turn, creates problems with the definition and classification of objects as agents. In the author’s opinion, in this case, the choice of a description language should be justified not by setting ontological axioms (as Latour and Harman do), but by less abstract considerations about the explanatory power or the possibility of reducing one description language to another, in particular, as Donald Davidson does in the discussion about agent-causal and event-causal approaches to agency. He shows that the description of the action does not require the postulation of a separate entity of the agent, but can be produced using an event-causal scheme, in which the litmus test of the action is the presence of at least one description under an aspect that makes action intentional. This approach can be specified to describe a social action within ANT framework, for example, using the following criterion: an action is social action if there is a description under intentional aspect and if its result does not depend on the agent’s intention. Such a criterion allows us to identify cases where the agent acts intentionally and the result of the action coincides with the intention, but this coincidence is accidental (“rainmaking ritual” has the intention to cause rain and may actually coincide with the event of rain). Within the framework of such a criterion, it is assumed that an action is recognized as social when it is intentional, and when its intentionality is not identical with the actual result of the action, since the result is partially or completely determined by the social structure, and the agent, according to Latour, never “acts alone.” The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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