Allegory, Discourse, and Truth: The Ontological Grounding of Social Being

Abstract

This chapter offers a critique of the affirmative forms of thought that attempt to ground the ontology of social being through subjective-idealist terms. Some recent examples came in the form of notion of truth grounded in subjects' experience and in rationality of language and discourse. The first part of the chapter demonstrates the perilous implications of such an approach for social theory tasked with ontology and for the conception of truth necessary for its task. The second part scrutinizes the paradigm of society that stems from this subjective-idealist notion of truth and social ontology that adopts discourse, language, and literary metaphors to comprehend social being. As an alternative, the final part of the chapter offers a preliminary sketch of the relation of ontology, normativity, and mediation, as well as the notion of critique necessary for social theory tasked with ontology.

Citation

Kadakal, R. (2023), "Allegory, Discourse, and Truth: The Ontological Grounding of Social Being", Dahms, H.F. (Ed.) Planetary Sociology (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 40), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 209-225. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-120420230000040014