Styles of Social Kinds: A phenomenological understanding of interpersonal kinds

In this paper I initiate an important dialogue between the phenomenology of social perception, and analytic social ontological discussions of how our perception of others (and concurrent conferrals of social kinds) can be sites of ‘ontic injustice’. Katharine Jenkins develops the concept of ontic injustice to theorise how your being of a social kind can consist, at least in part, of wrongful constraints and enablements. Taking Jenkins’ discussion of interpersonal kinds as the focus, I argue that the phenomenological concept of style enables a more experientially accurate account of how such (oftentimes unjust) interpersonal kinds come into being. My central claim is that Jenkins’ indicator/base property distinction performs a theoretical abstraction from actual embodied lived experience, and that these properties are experientially subordinate to how other subjects are first and foremost given stylistically in experience, that is, as unified meaningful wholes. To support this claim, I engage with Jenkins’ example of gender presentation and show how its misalignment with base properties is better made sense of through the tripartite distinction of style, indicator properties, and base property. Introducing this phenomenological perspective enriches the experientially descriptive aspects of Jenkins’ social ontology.