Transparency, Collective Intentionality, and Social Power: Commentary on Burman’s Nonideal Social Ontology

This commentary on Åsa Burman’s Nonideal Social Ontology tackles three major aspects of her work. First, it discusses the distinction between opaque and transparent social kinds, distinguishing it from the distinction between represented and non-represented social kinds, and that between overt and covert social kinds. Then, it exploits these distinctions in characterizing the nature of the social, proposing that social phenomena might be understood in terms of collective intentionality, though there may be weaker notions of sociality involving interaction and mutual responsiveness among individuals. Finally, it deploys the three distinctions mentioned to clarify various different kinds of social power identified by Burman.