Sage:
“I’m just not sure how to approach the issue, so I’d like to see how philosophers think about it.”
Here’s one philosopher’s thinking on the issue:
“…thought all the social phenomena with which we can possibly deal may have physical attributes, they need not be physical facts for our purpose. That depends on how we shall find it convenient to classify them for the discussion of our problems. Are the human actions which we observe, and the objects of these actions, things of the same or a different kind because they appear as physically the same or different to us, the observers—or for some other reason?”
“It is easily seen that all these concepts…refer not to some objective properties possessed by the things, or which the observer can find out about them, but to views which some other person holds about the thing.”
“…they can be defined only be indicating relations between three terms: a purpose, somebody who holds that purpose, and an object which that person things to be a suitable means for that purpose. If we wish, we could say that all these objects are defined not in terms of their “real” properties but in terms of opinions people hold about them.”
“What I am arguing is that no physical properties can enter into the explicit definition of any of these classes, because the elements of these classes need not posses common physical attributes, and we do not even consciously or explicitly know which are the various physical properties of which an object would have to posses at least one to be member of a class. The situation may be described schematically by saying that the objects a, b, c,…, which may be physically completely dissimilar and which we can never exhaustively enumerate, are objects of the same kind because the attitude of X toward them all is similar. But the fact that X’s attitude toward them is similar can again be defined only by saying that he will react toward them by any of of the actions x, y, z,…, which again may be physically dissimilar and which we will not be able to enumerate exhaustively, but which we just know to “mean” the same thing.”
“The common attributes which the elements of any of these classes posses are not physical attributes but must be something else.”
“…whenever we interpret human action as in any sense purposive or meaningful, whether we do so in ordinary life or for the purposes of the social sciences, we have to define both the objects of human activity and the different kinds of actions themselves, not in physical terms but in terms of the opinions or intentions of the acting persons,…”
(Hayek, “The Facts of the Social Sciences”, from Individualism and Economic Order)
On an unrelated note, would you care to comment on the OP here:
Adam