Cultural Evolution and Naturalized Social Ontology

This chapter connects studies in cultural evolution to the project of constructing a naturalized social ontology. Naturalized social ontologies provide accounts of what exists in the social world in a manner continuous with results in the social sciences. The chapter argues that when constructing an ontology, we should base our ontological commitments on social scientific results that rest on the most discerning methods available, that is, those methods that can best adjudicate possible answers to a social scientific question. Further, it argues that those methods are empirical and quantitative. The chapter does this by discussing two types of inquiry in cultural evolution, pure modeling-based inquiries and empirical studies. It illustrates how the latter are more discerning than the former. Finally, it examines how my discerningness-based naturalized ontology addresses ontological individualism, the view that the social world is exhaustively determined by individual people. It compares that argument to similar treatments from non-naturalist social ontologists.