Social Ontology, Misc

Dans l'activité de renseignement, le problème ontologique est lié à la nature et aux caractéristiques des entités qui menacent et sont menacées. La menace est un objet ontologique très complexe et, par conséquent, une ontologie appropriée doit être construite conformément aux principes métaphysiques formels qui peuvent prendre en compte la complexité des objets, des attributs, des processus, des événements et des relations qui composent ces états de choses. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.22693.73446.

Pope Benedict XVI argued that it is "necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason" and to understand "theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith." (Ratzinger 2006) The idea that faith per se can be reconciled with rationality per se presents a delicate analytical task for philosophy of religion, to consistently ground a belief system which is regarded by nonbelievers as inherently ungrounded and inconsistent, without negating any grounding postulates internal to the dogma. (...) Focussing on Abrahamic theism, with special emphasis on Christianity, I interpret the Biblical narrative as a symbolic representation of a universal normative structure grounded in social ontology and the value-commitments intrinsic to agency. (shrink)

Marriages come in a very wide variety: if the reports of anthropologists and historians are to be believed, an extraordinarily wide variety. This includes some of the more unusual forms, including marriage to the dead; to the gods; and even to plants. This does suggest that few proposed marriage relationships would require 'redefining marriage': but on the other hand, it makes giving a general theory of marriage challenging. So one issue we should face is how accepting we should be of (...) the reports: to what extent reported 'marriages' really are marriages. This paper defends the view that almost all of these reported marriages are in fact marriages, and suggests some theoretical approaches that may be generous enough to account for this. (shrink)

Some of the reasons one acts on in joint action are shared with fellow participants. But others are proprietary: reasons of one’s own that have no direct practical significance for other participants. The compatibility of joint action with proprietary reasons serves to distinguish the former from other forms of collective agency; moreover, it is arguably a desirable feature of joint action. Advocates of “team reasoning” link the special collective intention individual participants have when acting together with a distinctive form of (...) practical reasoning that purports to put individuals in touch with group or collective reasons. Such views entail the surprising conclusion that one cannot engage in joint action for proprietary reasons. Suppose we understand the contrast between minimal and robust forms of joint action in terms of the extent to which participants act on proprietary reasons as opposed to shared reasons. Then, if the team reasoning view of joint intention and action is correct, it makes no sense to talk of minimal joint action. As soon as the reason for which one participates is proprietary, then one is not, on this view, genuinely engaged in joint action. (shrink)

This project retraces activations of Kierkegaard in the development of polit­ical theology. It suggests alternative modes of states of exception attributed to him. Several Kierkegaardian themes open themselves to 'something like pure potential' in Agamben, namely: living death, animality, criminality, auto-constitution, modification, liturgy, love and certain articulations of improbabilities. (*Accompanying file includes only front matter, abstract, and endnotes*).

Analytic metaphysics has become increasingly extended into the social domain. The aim of this article is critical self-reflection on the challenges of transferring the tools of analytic metaphysics from classical cases such as the very existence of abstract or composed objects to socially-contested phenomena such as gender and race. In reflecting on the status of metaphysics of race, I formulate a polemical hypothesis of misalignment according to which the tools of analytic metaphysics are not suitable for engaging with complex racial (...) phenomena and politics. In addressing this challenge of misalignment, the article sketches a perspective on critical metaphysics of race as interdisciplinary action research. (shrink)

Roberto Frega’s Pragmatism and the Wide View of Democracy reformulates the question of democracy posed by our current historic conjuncture using the resources of a variety of pragmatic thinkers. He brings into the contemporary conversation regarding democracy’s fortunes both classical and somewhat neglected figures in the pragmatic tradition to deal with questions of power, ontology, and politics. In particular, Frega takes a social philosophical starting point and draws out the consequences of this fundamental shift in approach to questions of democratic (...) and political theory. This turn to social philosophy as a theoretically more sufficient conceptual vocabulary, extended in detail by Frega, raises questions regarding the work that a social ontology does in clarifying the role of economic and political approaches to democracy that are worth further exploration. Likewise, the practical proposals for moving beyond methodological nationalism with respect to forming publics for the sake of problem-solving, while providing a clarifying and fresh starting point, are still too beholden to models of agency and expressions of coordinated action that themselves are the very fruit of those systems which undermine democratic power in the first instance. (shrink)

The creation of new institutions and the initiation of new forms of behaviour cannot be explained only on the basis of constitutive rules – they also require a broader commitment of individuals who participate in social practices and, thus, to become members of a community. In this paper, I argue that the received conception of constitutive rules shows a problematic intellectualistic bias that becomes particularly manifest in three assumptions: (i) constitutive rules have a logical form, (ii) constitutive rules have no (...) normative force, and (iii) rules are essentially tied to a sanctioning authority. I discuss these three claims in light of real-life examples. The goal of this discussion is to show that the normative force of constitutive rules is based on the shared commitment of participants who engage in the relevant practices. The inner cohesion and the persistence in time of these practices is possible only because participants continuously calibrate their own forms of behaviour to that of the other members of the community, which underscores the social dimension of constitution. (shrink)

In this article, I explain and defend the concept of multicultural nationhood. Multicultural nationhood accounts for how a nation can have a cohesive identity despite being internally diverse. In Canada, the challenge of nation-building despite the country’s diversity has prompted reflection on how to conceive of the national identity. The two most influential theories of multiculturalism to come from Canada, those of Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka, emerged through consideration of Canada’s diversity, particularly the place of Québécois, Indigenous peoples, and (...) immigrants in society. I begin by synthesizing Taylor’s and Kymlicka’s theories. I then propose a new subjective definition of nation, wherein the character of a nation is determined by how its members conceive of themselves. Once these concepts are explained, they are combined in an account of multicultural nationhood. Multicultural nationhood involves the cultivation of a national identity wherein various cultural groups are recognized as constitutive of the nation. (shrink)

False consciousness requires a general explanation for why, and how, oppressed individuals believe propositions against, as opposed to aligned with, their own well-being in virtue of their oppressed status. This involves four explanatory desiderata: belief acquisition, content prevalence, limitation, and systematicity. A social constructionist approach satisfies these by understanding the concept of false consciousness as regulating social research rather than as determining the exact mechanisms for all instances: the concept attunes us to a complex of mechanisms conducing oppressed individuals to (...) mistake social understandings of themselves as natural self-understandings—the limits lie where these overlap (sometimes), or are entirely absent. (shrink)

In ordinary discourse, a single duty is often attributed to a plurality of agents. In "Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals", Stephanie Collins claims that such attributions involve a “category error”. I critically discuss Collins’ argument for this claim and argue that there is a substantive sense in which non-agential groups can have moral duties. A plurality of agents can have a single duty to bring about an outcome by virtue of a capacity of each to practically (...) reason about what they ought to do together. I also argue that Collins’ attempt to give a reductive account of such “we-reasoning” fails. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is argued that, in certain particular conditions related to the intellectual character of the deliberators and their cognitive diversity, small research teams that engage in deliberation in the analysis of data and involve citizens can better promote good epistemic results than those teams which do not involve citizens. In particular, it is argued that certain communities within the social sciences that lack the relevant cognitive diversity among their professionals can take advantage of the diversity found in the citizenry (...) to increase the epistemic quality of their research, as long as the citizens possess the relevant virtues. (shrink)

Disaster response requires the cooperation of multiple emergency responder organizations (EROs). However, after‐action reports relating to large‐scale disasters identity communication difficulties among EROs as a major hindrance to collaboration. On the one hand, the use of two‐radio communication, based on multiple orthogonal frequencies and uneven coverage, has been shown to degrade inter‐organization communication. On the other hand, because they reflect different areas of expertise, EROs use differing terminologies, which are difficult to reconcile. These issues lead to ambiguities, misunderstandings, and inefficient (...) exchange of data and information among those involved, which can impede the response process and slow decision making. We, therefore, hypothesize that promoting semantic interoperability across ERO information systems might improve information exchange among stakeholders and thereby allow a more coherent response to the disaster. We propose an ontology‐based messaging service on the basis of the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) standards. The parties involved will continue to use the terminologies to which they are accustomed, but the system will resolve inconsistencies and thereby enhance mutual understanding among EROs by ensuring semantic translation of the exchanged information. The evaluation of the semantic translation demonstrated the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed service. (shrink)

Recent political critiques and appropriations of Emmanuel Levinas’ work demonstrate the need to fundamentally re-evaluate the meaning and status of his philosophy. Both the Marxist critiques and ‘third wave’ applications interpret Levinas’ singular and unique relation to others—a bond which prohibits even the slightest trace of historical, hermeneutic, or political context—as the greatest obstacle to a Levinasian politics. From this standpoint, Levinas offers little more than a hyperbolic ethics that, at best, ignores, and, at worst, provides philosophical cover for, the (...) political status quo. To counter this established link between Levinas’ philosophy and his potential for political thought, this article reexamines the significance of the decontextualized social relation. I argue that such interpretations misapprehend the intended analytical depth of Levinas’ thought, which, in turn, misconstrue the relationship between Levinas and more traditional social ontologies. As a consequence, Levinas’ valuable normative import for political theory is obscured. By shifting our perspective, we can understand Levinas as articulating a philosophy of political utopianism well-suited to the challenges we face in our present conjuncture. (shrink)

The term ‘intelligence’ as used in this paper refers to items of knowledge collected for the sake of assessing and maintaining national security. The intelligence community (IC) of the United States (US) is a community of organizations that collaborate in collecting and processing intelligence for the US. The IC relies on human-machine-based analytic strategies that 1) access and integrate vast amounts of information from disparate sources, 2) continuously process this information, so that, 3) a maximally comprehensive understanding of world actors (...) and their behaviors can be developed and updated. Herein we describe an approach to utilizing outcomes-based learning (OBL) to support these efforts that is based on an ontology of the cognitive processes performed by intelligence analysts. Of particular importance to the Cognitive Process Ontology is the class Representation that is Warranted. Such a representation is descriptive in nature and deserving of trust in its veridicality. The latter is because a Representation that is Warranted is always produced by a process that was vetted (or successfully designed) to reliably produce veridical representations. As such, Representations that are Warranted are what in other contexts we might refer to as ‘items of knowledge’. (shrink)

In Group Duties, Stephanie Collins proposes a ‘tripartite’ social ontology of groups as obligation-bearers. Producing a unified theory of group obligations that reflects our messy social reality is challenging and this ‘three-sizes-fit-all’ approach promises clarity but does not always keep that promise. I suggest considering the epistemic level as primary in determining collective obligations, allowing for more fluidity than the proposed tripartite ontology of collectives, coalitions and combinations.

John Searle has mistakenly claimed that emergence is the central concept in the account of social ontology defended by Tony Lawson, the central figure in the project now regularly referred to as Cambridge Social Ontology. This is not the case. Rather, if any concept can be considered central for Lawson, it is organisation. In this paper, I explain how Searle could misunderstand Lawson and, in doing so, I bring out the importance of organisation for understanding how phenomena, both social and (...) non‐social, are constituted. (shrink)

Individualists claim that collective obligations are reducible to the individual obligations of the collective’s members. Collectivists deny this. We set out to discover who is right by way of a deontic logic of collective action that models collective actions, abilities, obligations, and their interrelations. On the basis of our formal analysis, we argue that when assessing the obligations of an individual agent, we need to distinguish individual obligations from member obligations. If a collective has a collective obligation to bring about (...) a particular state of affairs, then it might be that no individual in the collective has an individual obligation to bring about that state of affairs. What follows from a collective obligation is that each member of the collective has a member obligation to help ensure that the collective fulfills its collective obligation. In conclusion, we argue that our formal analysis supports collectivism. (shrink)

Social categories play a central role in inquiry. Some authors have argued that social categories can only play this role because they have a particular metaphysical status, such as a connection to natural kinds or to comparatively joint-carving properties. This reflects the broadly realist idea that categories that play important roles in inquiry do so for metaphysical reasons. In this paper I argue that such metaphysical views of social categories cannot accommodate ‘empty’ social categories, cases in which social categories that (...) cannot have the metaphysical features attributed to them by such accounts still play a central role in inquiry. I defend an alternative approach: context-dependent naturalness, an analogue of metaphysical naturalness that concerns context-dependent, rather than metaphysical, structure. (shrink)

This book takes up the tension between globalization and community in order to articulate a new theory of global justice. Although the process of globalization is not new, its current manifestation and consequences are. At the same time, there is a growing recognition of the importance of community, identity and belonging. These two facts have generally been understood to be fundamentally in tension, both theoretically and descriptively. This book seeks to resolve this tension, and then draw out the implications for (...) a theory of global justice and an understanding of the value and purpose of community. Importantly, the book argues, not only does an acceptance of the significance of the fact of globalization and the importance of community call for cosmopolitan duties and obligations, but it also calls into question the legitimacy and justification of the traditional nation-state. (shrink)

I argue that a central claim of Ásta’s conferralist framework – that it can account for all social properties of individuals – is false, by drawing attention to class. I then discuss an implication of this objection; conferralism does not meet its own conditions of adequacy, such as providing a theory that helps to understand oppression. My diagnosis is that this objection points to a methodological problem: Ásta and other social ontologists have been fed on a “one-sided diet” of types (...) of examples, resulting in a limited view of the paradigmatic social phenomena, thus making conferralism too narrow to fulfill its intended role. (shrink)

On the premise that people achieve knowledge of things by sharing mental resources, what are the scope and philosophical significance of acts of shared intentionality in social discourse? Some philosophers and scientists of social cognition, most notably Jane Heal and Michael Tomasello, have drawn upon insights about the capacity of individual people to share mental resources and contents to argue for the importance of sociality in shaping mental activity. In this paper, I synthetize these strands of research with the aim (...) of comparing different claims about shared intentionality, and facilitate an assessment in the debate on the social aspects of self and mentality. (shrink)

The prevailing assumption in literary studies tends to be that a ‘we’ narrative voice is either that of an individual purporting to speak for a group, or that of a collective of people whose perspectives have coalesced into a unified one. Recent work on social agency across the cognitive humanities suggests another way of understanding what might be conveyed by such a ‘we’. Social cognition research shows that individuals can have their capacities changed and enhanced when they interact with others, (...) and suggests that ‘we-representations’ in the individual mind may result from the transformative effects of interaction. In this paper, we draw on a specific instance of storytelling in the plural, William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’, to articulate a theory of this ‘individual we’, and to show its potential in refining our understanding of ‘we’ narratives. We also propose that in future research the interdisciplinary study of the ‘we’ could engage with insights from literature as well as from philosophy and science. (shrink)

When considering the impact of stigmatization on society, we tend to think of one aspect of stigmatization while ignoring another. Drawing from historical and fictional cases, I argue that acts of stigmatization can be direct or indirect. Acts of direct stigmatization are acts taken by individuals or groups against an entity, while acts of indirect stigmatization are the specific acts taken by potential targets of stigmatization to prevent themselves from becoming victims of direct stigmatization. If we want a full understanding (...) of the impact that stigmatization has on society, then we need to consider the impact of both direct and indirect acts of stigmatization. (shrink)

Punishing groups raises a difficult question, namely, how their punishment can be justified at all. Some have argued that punishing groups is morally problematic because of the effects that the punishment entails for their members. In this paper we argue against this view. We distinguish the question of internal justice—how punishment-effects are distributed—from the question of external justice—whether the punishment is justified. We argue that issues of internal justice do not in general undermine the permissibility of punishment. We also defend (...) the permissibility of what some call “random punishment.” We argue that, for some kinds of collectives, there is no general obligation to internally distribute the punishment-effects equally or in proportion to individual contribution. (shrink)

Within feminist theory and a wide range of social sciences, intersectionality has emerged as a key analytic framework, challenging paradigms that consider gender, race, class, sexuality, and other categories as separate and instead conceptualizing them as interconnected. This has led most authors to assume mutual constitution as the pertinent model, often without much scrutiny. In this essay we critically review the main senses of mutual constitution in the literature and challenge what we take to be a problematic assumption: the problem (...) of reification, here understood as the conceptualization of social categories as entities or objects. We then present the properties framework, together with the emergent experience view, which conceptualizes categories and social systems in a way that maintains their ontological specificity while allowing for their being deeply affected by each other. (shrink)

In the social constructionist literature, little has been said about what it means for social factors to cause X in such a way that X would count as causally socially constructed. In this paper, I argue that being caused by social factors – and thus being causally socially constructed – is best defined in terms of a contrastive counterfactual notion of causation. Unlike some plausible alternatives, this definition captures what is at stake in actual social constructionist debates. It makes transparent (...) which factors the truth of a causal constructionist claim may depend on. By doing so, it sheds light on what the disagreements over whether X is causally socially constructed may turn on. It also helps us to see under which condition the claim that X is socially causally constructed is compatible with the claim that X is caused by biological factors. (shrink)

The issue of political violence is mostly absent from current debates about power. Many conceptions of power treat violence as wholly distinct from or even antithetical to power, or see it as a mere instrument whose effects are obvious and not in need of political analysis. In this paper, I explore what kind of ontology of power is necessary to properly take account of the various roles that violence can play in creating and maintaining power structures. I pursue this question (...) by contrasting the views of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. For Arendt, power is generated and maintained by communicative practices. She argues that power and violence are ‘opposites’ because violence can only destroy but not create these practices. In contrast, Foucault’s conception explicitly allows violence to play a constitutive role in generating power. I argue that while Arendt is right to insist that power and violence are not identical, it does not follow that violence cannot play any role in constituting power. Guided by Foucault’s approach, I formulate a non-dualist account of the relationship between power and violence that takes seriously the role that bodies, material things, and built infrastructures play in making social relations ‘more durable’ and constituting power. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: The general aim is to shed light on the structure of species discoveries new to biology by bringing together a practice-oriented philosophy of science perspective with a philosophy of language perspective. The more specific aim is to argue that and to show how the overall structure of biological species discoveries comprises aspects of both institutional and non-institutional reality. The author proceeds as follows: he shows that placing the focus on the topic of scientific (...) discoveries enables us to circumvent two long-standing problems. He analyzes three fictional cases of discoveries in order to bring about a greater sensitivity for the concept of discovery. He takes a closer look at a real example – the discovery of a deep-sea anglerfish – and identifies the main structural features of species discovery processes in biology. In order to connect these results with Searle’s account of institutional reality, he provides an overview of the conceptual apparatus needed here. In bringing Searle’s account together with the structural features of species discoveries developed before, he shows to what extent declarative speech acts play a central role in species discovery processes in biology. (shrink)

For almost three decades, Margaret Gilbert has introduced a new account of social facts taking “joint commitments”, not only explicit but also implicit, as the cement of sociality properly understood. Gilbert has used this original account of collective phenomena to clarify a variety of issues, both in the philosophy of rights and in the philosophy of the social sciences. This paper focuses on the latter domain; it argues that although Durkheim and Mauss are central references in her pioneering work, On (...) Social Facts, Gilbert’s model has been underestimated in the fields of sociology and anthropology. This may come from the fact that Gilbert provides the reader with only imaginary examples. To overcome this difficulty, Bouvier investigates several historical examples in two related domains:, the political and the religious. Another reason for this relative lack of interest may come from Gilbert’s very unconventional interpretation of the Durkheimian explanation of social beliefs. Although, on the one hand, her “contractualist” interpretation permits a sharp illumination of certain social facts, it may, on the other hand, impede the recognition of the specificity of other kinds of beliefs, which sociologists and anthropologists—including Durkheim—usually consider as collective beliefs. Bouvier, by contrast, introduces alternative models, illustrating them with similar, although ultimately distinct from previous, historical examples. (shrink)

I respond to William Lynch’s critique of the sympathetic reading of my work provided by Remedios and Dusek in Knowing Humanity in the Social World: The Path of Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. Lynch harks back to my early works, which he sees as a promoting a ‘naturalism’ lacking in the later works. In response, I observe that my commitment to naturalism has always been ‘reflexive’, which has led me to break with conventional forms of naturalism, though sticking closely to the (...) spirit of science. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that Gricean communication is necessarily a form of cooperative or ‘joint’ action. A consequence of this Cooperative Communication View is that Gricean communication could not itself contribute to an explanation of the possibility of joint action. I argue that even though Gricean communication is often a form of joint action, it is not necessarily so—since it does not always require intentional action on the part of a hearer. Rejecting the Cooperative Communication View has attractive consequences for (...) our theorising about human cognitive development, since it opens up the possibility of appealing to communicative interaction to explain the emergence of joint action in phylogeny. (shrink)

In his own words, Herbert Gintis’s latest book is “an analysis of human nature and a tribute to its wonders” (3).1More prosaically, it is a collection of essays, some of which are original and others published elsewhere. Instead of being structured around topics in decision and game theory,like his previous book (2009), this book develops interrelated themes, such as the evolutionary origins of moral sense, its central role in political games, and the socially entangled nature of human rationality and individuality. (...) Some chapters develop Gintis’svision of the unified behavioral sciences by model-building demonstrations; others do so by reflecting on history and methodology. (shrink)

Recently, Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues have introduced the Theory of Constructed Emotions (TCE), in which emotions are constituted by a process of categorizing the self as being in an emotional state. The view, however, has several counterintuitive implications: for instance, a person can have multiple distinct emotions at once. Further, the TCE concludes that emotions are constitutively social phenomena. In this article, I explicate the TCE*, which, while substantially similar to the TCE, makes several distinct claims aimed at avoiding (...) the counterintuitive implications plaguing the TCE. Further, because of the changes that comprise the TCE*, emotions are not constitutively social phenomena. (shrink)

In this paper, we engage with the question of the normative content of the resilience concept. The issues are approached in two consecutive steps. First, we proceed from a narrow construal of the resilience concept – as the ability of a system to absorb a disturbance – and show that under an analysis of normative concepts as evaluative concepts resilience comes out as descriptive. In the second part of the paper, we argue that (1) for systems of interest (primarily social (...) systems or system with a social component) we seem to have options with respect to how they are described and (2) that this matters for what is to be taken as a sign of resilience as opposed to a sign of the lack of resilience for such systems. We discuss the implications of this for how the concept should be applied in practice and suggest that users of the resilience concept face a choice between versions of the concept that are either ontologically or normatively charged. (shrink)

This article offers an approach that combines, on the one hand, the philosophical notion of reflexivity, which is related to the ideas of self-reference and paradox, and, on the other hand, the sociological discussion of epistemic reflexivity as a problem of coherence, which was mainly initiated by certain branches of ethnomethodology and social constructionism. This combinatory approach argues for reflexivity as an epistemic criterion of ontological coherence, which suggests that social ontologies should account for the possibility of self-reflective subjectivity – (...) for otherwise they result in a paradoxical conclusion according to which a social scientist reflects on her or his ontological commitments even though these commitments deny her or him the capacity for self-reflection. This analysis presupposes that all human sciences are categorically premised on social ontologies; and it argues for an analytical distinction between self-reflection, which refers to the agential capacity for reflecting on one’s own commitments, and the epistemic criterion of reflexivity hereby proposed. These two analytically distinct though interdependent socio-theoretical concepts are frequently conflated in the literature; thus, this article also aims at a ‘clearing of the ground’ that can be of categorical use to the human sciences. (shrink)

There are many ways to advance our understanding of the human mind by studying different kinds of sociality. Our aim in this introduction is to situate claims about extended cognition within a broader framework of research on human sociality. We briefly discuss the existing landscape, focusing on ways of defending socially extended cognition. We then draw on resources from the recent literature on the socially extended mind, as well as the literature on collective intentionality, to provide a framework for thinking (...) about the social dimension of individual minds. We then turn to a brief overview of the individualistic approaches advanced by Ludwig and Spaulding in this volume. And we close with a discussion of the transformative role of the social mind in individual life presented by Kern and Moll, as well as the distributed approach to interacting systems defended by Goldstone and Theiner. (shrink)

Communities of respect are communities of people sharing common practices or a (partial) way of life; they include families, clubs, religious groups, and political parties. This book develops a detailed account of such communities in terms of the rational structure of their members' reactive attitudes, arguing that they are fundamental in three interrelated ways to understanding what it is to be a person. First, it is only by being a member of a community of respect that one can be a (...) responsible agent having dignity; such an agent therefore has certain rights as well as the authority to demand that fellow members recognize her dignity and follow the norms of the community, norms compliance with which they likewise have the authority to demand from her. Second, by prescribing or proscribing both actions and values, communities of respect can shape the identities of its members in ways that others have the authority to enforce, thereby revealing an important interpersonal dimension of the identities of persons. Finally, all of this is grounded in a distinctively interpersonal form of practical rationality in virtue of which we jointly have reasons to recognize the dignity and authority of fellow members and so to comply with their authoritative demands, as well as to respect (and so comply with) the norms of the community. Hence we persons are essentially social creatures. (shrink)

This paper is about the status of collective actions. According to one view, collective actions metaphysically reduce to individual actions because sentences about collective actions are merely a shorthand for sentences about individual actions. I reconstruct an argument for this view and show via counterexamples that it is not sound. The argument relies on a paraphrase procedure to unpack alleged shorthand sentences about collective actions into sentences about individual actions. I argue that the best paraphrase procedure that has been put (...) forward so far fails to produce adequate results. (shrink)

The family presents an interesting challenge to many conceptions of collective activity and the makeup of social groups. Social philosophers define social groups as being comprised of individuals who knowingly consent to their group membership or voluntarily act to continue their group membership. This notion of voluntarism that is built into the concept of a social group rests upon a narrow conception of agency that is difficult to extend beyond able-minded autonomous adults. Families, however, are often comprised of members who (...) supposedly lack this developed sense of agency and are therefore considered incapable of consenting to join or remain in a group: infants and small children. So, the family seems to be an odd fit for the designation of social group, even though it is often heralded as a paradigm example of one. In this paper I argue that children and infants are in fact agents who are capable of collective intentionality, especially in the context of the family where they act cooperatively and reciprocally with their caretakers. In doing so, I present an understanding of the family as a social group that has degrees of voluntarism for all members in the forms of joint readiness and joint commitment. I argue for this in three steps. First, I employ Margaret Gilbert’s concepts of joint commitment and joint readiness as a framework for collective intentionality. Second, echoing Carol Gould, I argue that we ought to expand our understanding of agency beyond the ideal case. Third, I draw upon recent research from Michael Tomasello that demonstrate a child’s ability to act cooperatively and reciprocally. Together these steps provide a strong foundation for the claim that children and infants are agents capable of collective intentionality within families. (shrink)

This dissertation offers an account of the different ways in which putatively idealist and transcendental models of sociality, which grounded the subject’s relation to other human beings in the subject’s own cognition, were rejected and replaced. Scrapping this account led to a variety of models of sociality which departed from the subject as the ground of sociality, positing grounds outside of the subject. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer represent alternative positions along a spectrum of models of (...) sociality which reject the idealist concept of sociality. The central argument of this dissertation claims that the responses to idealism and transcendental models of sociality ultimately find fault with an inadequate ontology, one which grounds sociality in the cognition of the subject. The ontology of the transcendental model locates the subject as initially unconnected to other subjects such that the first move in relating them together must be epistemological. The social relation is grounded in the subject’s cognitive grasp. Each of the thinkers I examine identifies this as the key problem with idealism; however, their solutions to this problem differ. The differing solutions of Gadamer, Levinas, Rosenzweig, and Bonhoeffer can be identified as occupying different representative positions along a continuum, call it the “scale of social grounding.” What I offer here is a topography of responses to the idealist model of sociality. The ontological ground of sociality, instead of being the subject, is posited as situation of dialogue, the face of the other, or divine revelation. In each of these alternative models, we see that the subject is conditioned rather than autonomous, that sociality is enacted through temporality and language, and that sociality is principally a normative relation rather than an epistemological one. The story that emerges from my analysis, then, is a richer topography of responses to idealism than has hitherto been mapped out. The responses, represented by Gadamer, Levinas, Rosenzweig, and Bonhoeffer each provide an alternative ontology on which any adequate model of sociality must rest. While my account of the spectrum of ontological responses to idealist sociality does not claim to be exhaustive, it does give a better topography of the field of responses than has hitherto been offered in studies of models of sociality in the 20th century. Finally, this dissertation shows the centrality of providing an alternative ontology to idealism in these projects. Far from rejecting ontology wholesale or merely offering moral revisions to the existing social order, each of the figures I examine in this study radically revise the ground of sociality by articulating a fresh ontological vision which can support social life. (shrink)

The predictive inadequacy of the social sciences is well documented, and philosophers have sought to diagnose it. This paper examines Brian Epstein’s recent diagnosis. He argues that the social sciences treat the social world as entirely composed of individual people. Instead, social scientists should recognize that material, non-individualistic entities determine the social world, as well. First, I argue that Epstein’s argument both begs the question against his opponents and is not sufficiently charitable. Second, I present doubts that his proposal will (...) improve predictive success for the social sciences, which I support with Edith Penrose’s resource-based theory of the firm. (shrink)