Effective without Warrant: Causal-Normative Networks and the Social Life of Status

Social explanation faces a forced choice: treat social statuses as causal patterns with moral labels, or as normative facts whose social uptake is incidental. Neither fits a person effectively hounded for a promise they never made, or a standing that a practice successfully confers while morality rejects it. Status-assignments, I argue, are projectible: observing one licenses defeasible expectations about duty, recognition, and response. From a promise we project duty and reliance; from release, lapse even while demand continues; from judgment, records, enforceability, and preclusion; from discriminatory standing, credibility loss, exclusion, and anticipatory adjustment. Extending Khalidi (2018) on projectible kinds, I model these projections as travelling through a causal-normative network: a typed structure joining causal uptake, recognitional representation, directed status-transition, and non-directed correlative ties within a practice or field. Interventionist tests type the edges, and misrecognition supplies the diagnostic case: the framework separates what a false recognition can still cause from what a wrongfully conferred standing has become. The payoff is an account of how status-assignments can be socially effective, institutionally valid or communally conferred, enforceable or final, recognitionally mistaken, and morally unwarranted in different combinations.