Martin Kusch
University of Vienna
“Political metaphysics of knowledge” investigates the relationship between knowledge and social power. My investigation is political metaphysics rather than political epistemology since I investigate the relations between different kinds of entities (knowledge, social power), or different kinds of properties (epistemic properties, social-political properties), and how these entities and properties exist. Put differently, political metaphysics of (scientific) knowledge uses metaphysical concepts and tools in order to analyse the “social construction” of (scientific) knowledge.
My paper is an experiment in political metaphysics of knowledge. I shall focus on two contributions to the “Sociology of Scientific Knowledge”: one is highly theoretical and abstract, the other a historical case study. In both cases, I try to capture explicit and implicit assumptions about the relations between power and knowledge in terms of important metaphysical concepts, and especially, “supervenience”, “strong emergence”, “grounding” and “integrated whole”; the relationship between causation and metaphysical “building relations” will also be important. I also try to show that my two cases suggest some refinement of the metaphysical machinery.
The experiment would be a success if my reconstruction of the two texts were to help us to better understand what “social construction” of knowledge might mean.
Time: September 8th, 16:45 – 18:15
Location: E.002
SOPhiA 2026 