Social Construction and Meta-Ground

The notion of social construction plays an important role in many areas of social philosophy, including the philosophy of gender and sex, the philosophy of race, and the philosophy of disability. Yet it is far from clear how this notion is to be understood. One promising proposal in the recent literature is that social construction may be analyzed in terms of the notion of metaphysical grounding. In this paper, I introduce a new problem for this ground-theoretic approach to social construction, and I argue that extant ground theoretic accounts are unable to avoid this and other problems. I then propose a novel ground-theoretic account of social construction which avoids these problems. The core idea is that cases of social construction involve a distinctively social means of construction. I develop this idea using the notion of meta-ground, so that on the resulting view the distinctive feature of socially constructed facts is that their associated meta grounds include a suitable connective social fact.