Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Social ontology — what social facts, groups, institutions and social kinds are, and what makes them exist — collective intentionality, joint commitment, status functions, convention, social construction, and whether groups can be agents or minds (group: philosophy; ADR-017).
92 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-125 v2 | The moral psychology of obligation | Tomasello (2019), DOI-10.1017/S0140525X19001742. Tomasello proposes that the human sense of obligation is “the internalized social/rational pressure from a joint or collective self-regulating agent ‘we’… to do what ‘we’ expect me to” (§3). It arises first, around age 3, inside joint-commitment collaboration with a partner, and then, from about 3–5 years, toward in-group members through collective identification. It is a “self-conscious motivation” whose coercive force is a threat to one’s cooperative identity. The support is a synthesis of developmental and comparative experiments, mostly from his own lab, on WEIRD children versus chimpanzees; the paper runs no new experiment. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-185); worth reading as the standard statement of the shared-intentionality account of obligation and, above all, as a treatment. The commentaries by Bratman, Darwall, Gilbert and Pettit, and the response, are where the naturalistic claim is actually contested. The target article alone is a review-cum-hypothesis, not a demonstration. |
| LIT-159 v4 | If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious | Schwitzgebel (2014), DOI-10.1007/s11098-014-0387-8. A conditional, informal argument. Any materialist criterion liberal enough to credit rabbits (and rabbit-level distributed aliens, the “squidbits”) and behaviourally human-like but oddly built aliens (Sirian supersquids, Antarean antheads) with consciousness also credits the United States. On this argument the US meets the usual materialist marks of consciousness: sophisticated information processing (roughly 10^14 person-to-person visual “connections”, comparable to the brain’s about 10^14 synapses), goal-directed environmental responsiveness, self-representation and historical embedding. The only exits are eliminativism, extreme sparseness or neurochauvinism, each costlier than the conclusion. The paper argues for no universal criterion. It ends undecided between three readings: US consciousness, a challenge to materialists, or grounds to distrust universal metaphysics of mind. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-131); read in full (manuscript) 2026-09-26; the canonical over-generation argument against liberal materialist criteria of consciousness, and the standard critique of anti-nesting and exclusion principles, worth reading for anyone who attributes consciousness from functional or indicator properties. |
| LIT-188 v5 | Scaffolding individuality: coordination, cooperation, collaboration and community | Griesemer & Shavit (2023), DOI-10.1098/rstb.2021.0398. The paper sets out an idealized three-stage sequence of interaction types, which it calls a “first and rough sketch” (§1). Stage 1 is coordination in collections (pairwise, “aggregative” interactions of co-located individuals). Stage 2 is cooperation in conexuses (a connected web of binary interactions whose benefits can still be counted per member). Stage 3 is collaboration in communities: heterogeneous multi-way interactions around a shared goal, in which generatively entrenched “core” interactions give organizational closure. Table 1 puts the transition to a new level of individuality between stages 2 and 3 only. The paper asserts, rather than argues, that this describes evolutionary transitions non-circularly and that individuality is a special case of collectivity. Its one argued conclusion is hedged: community-level inheritance “seem[s] likely to evolve in tandem” with community-level individuality (§3). | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-173); a short programmatic sketch, and the authors call it one. It is worth knowing as the compact statement of Griesemer’s scaffolding, reproducer and generative-entrenchment view applied to human social transitions. Its headline claims (non-circularity; individuality as a special case of collectivity) appear only in the abstract. Two things would settle it: the model of community “reliability” and endogenization the authors promise in §2 (“We hope to explore such models in future work”), or an application of the 3Cs to a worked case, such as the companion Neolithic paper (LIT-1935, registered unread), that separates collection, conexus and community by measurable criteria. Re-read 2026-11-01 (NOTE-173, version 3). |
| LIT-391 v4 | Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents | List & Pettit (2011), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199591565.001.0001. Per its publisher, the book argues that “there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them”, and that social science, law, morality and politics must take account of this. The account is said to be “entirely unmysterious” and grounded in social choice theory, economics and philosophy. Three parts: the logical possibility of group agents (conditions of agency, aggregation of attitudes, structure), their organisational design (epistemic, incentive-compatibility and control desiderata), and their normative status (responsibility, personhood, identification). Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, and neither author has posted the book or draft chapters), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the book-length case that organised groups are agents over and above their members, which is the composition side’s premise in the Minsky–Schwitzgebel bridge; whether it says anything about group consciousness is unknown from what was seen. Rechecked 2026-10-04 with no lawful copy found; two shorter papers by the authors stating Part I’s supervenience thesis were read and filed instead (LIT-705, LIT-700), and the book stays Unavailable because a paper is not a reading of it. |
| LIT-401 | What is it like to be a group agent? | List (2016), DOI-10.1111/nous.12162. Group agents (firms, courts, states) are real agents in a thin functionalist sense, and they can have consciousness as awareness. Whether they have phenomenal consciousness depends on which psycho-physical bridge principle is true. Under IIT, List argues informally that a group agent’s Φ is low: groups decompose into self-contained units, their steering bodies keep working when partly randomised, and most of their processing happens inside individuals. The exclusion postulate would deny group consciousness even if group Φ were high. So group agents are (close to) not conscious, which List uses to ground a normative asymmetry: groups have only derivative rights. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-340); the standard reply to LIT-159 from the group-agency side: it grants that organised groups are agents with functional awareness and argues, conditionally on IIT, that they have little or no phenomenal consciousness. Worth reading for its separation of agency from experience and for its three reasons why a group agent’s Φ should be low. The low-Φ verdict is argued informally, with no Φ computed for any group, and the paper never answers the reply Schwitzgebel had already made to the objection its third reason restates. |
| LIT-426 v2 | Macrocognition: A Theory of Distributed Minds and Collective Intentionality | Huebner (2014), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199926275.001.0001. Per its publisher, the book argues that genuine cognition requires flexible goal-directed behaviour, which requires specialised representational systems integrated so as to cope fluidly with the environment, and so that collective mentality “should be posited where and only where specialized subroutines are integrated to yield goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to the concerns that are relevant to a group as such”. On this view there are many kinds of collective minds, some more like honeybees or cats than people, and groups are unlikely to be full “believers”. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, the Internet Archive copy is lending-only, and no author-posted draft was found), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Of the four works filed for the Minsky–Schwitzgebel bridge it is the one whose criterion for a collective mind is itself a decomposition criterion: mentality wherever specialised subroutines are integrated into goal-directed behaviour sensitive to the group’s concerns. A close reading is the most likely of the four to change the bridge. |
| LIT-470 v2 | Foundations for a Social Ontology | Thomasson (2003), ProtoSociology 18–19:269–290. Per its abstract: the social world poses a metaphysical puzzle (how facts and objects created by human intentionality can be real) and an epistemological one (how such products can include objective facts for the social sciences to discover). Searle’s account in The Construction of Social Reality is too narrow to solve either; rules for constructing social reality that parallel rules for make-believe give a more comprehensive ontology, but talk of social reality is not pretence. Unread: filed from the abstract. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s abstract; no lawful full text was reachable (the Philosophy Documentation Center sells it at $20, PhilPapers returned 403, and the Academia.edu copy sits behind a bot check), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. By its abstract it argues that Searle’s account of social facts is too narrow and that rules modelled on the rules of make-believe give a fuller social ontology; how, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-471 v2 | Shared Cooperative Activity | Bratman (1992), DOI-10.2307/2185537, The Philosophical Review 101(2): 327–341. Bratman analyses activities such as singing a duet or painting a house together. A shared cooperative activity is marked by mutual responsiveness, commitment to the joint activity, and commitment to mutual support, and it rests on a shared intention built from each participant’s intention that “we J”, with meshing subplans. The account is reductive: it uses only the intentions of individuals and their interrelations. Unread: filed from metadata and from Bratman’s later précis. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata; no lawful full text was reachable (JSTOR and PDC are paywalled, the CUP reprint is paywalled, and the one course copy found returned 401 Unauthorized), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the paper that set out Bratman’s reductive account of acting together; its developed form is Shared Agency (LIT-488), whose author’s précis the record has read. |
| LIT-472 v2 | Understanding Institutions: The Science and Philosophy of Living Together | Guala (2016), DOI-10.1515/9781400880911. Per its publisher, a unified theory of institutions combining three views (equilibria of strategic games, regulative rules, constitutive rules), applied to money, private property and marriage. It then addresses reflexivity, realism, Verstehen and fallibilism in the social sciences, criticises Hacking’s looping effects and interactive kinds, and asks whether causal and ontological dependence can demarcate social from natural science. Only the sample chapter 1 was read: it restates Hindriks & Guala’s case against a rules-only account. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, table of contents, sample chapter and index, not read: the book is not lawfully readable in full online (De Gruyter and Princeton are paywalled, and the Internet Archive has no copy). Only chapter 1, Rules, the publisher’s free sample, was read; it is a lightly expanded version of the first section of Hindriks & Guala (LIT-481). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-473 v2 | Convention: A Philosophical Study | Lewis (1969), DOI-10.1002/9780470693711 (the 2002 Blackwell reissue). The founding analysis of convention as a self-perpetuating solution to a recurring coordination problem with more than one equilibrium, sustained by a system of mutual expectations rather than by agreement, with conventions of language and communication as the main application. Unread: filed from catalogue records and chapter titles; the content summary is as Hindriks & Guala and the SEP entry state it. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from catalogue records and the chapter list, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The Harvard 1969 edition is lending-only at the Internet Archive (access-restricted, printdisabled), and the Wiley-Blackwell reissue of 2002 is paywalled. What the book argues is known here only through readings that state it (Hindriks & Guala, LIT-481; the SEP entry, LIT-487), and is labelled as theirs. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-474 v2 | The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge | Berger & Luckmann (1966), Doubleday. A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. By its contents: the reality of everyday life and its language; society as objective reality (institutionalization, sedimentation and tradition, roles, legitimation, symbolic universes); society as subjective reality (primary and secondary socialization, identity). Unread: filed from catalogue records and the table of contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from library catalogue records and the 1966 edition’s table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is in copyright, the Internet Archive scans of the 1966 Doubleday edition and a 1967 printing are lending-only, and there is no author-posted text), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the sociology-of-knowledge treatise whose title phrase ADR-017’s topic blurb uses; what it claims, beyond its contents page, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-475 v2 | The Social Construction of What? | Hacking (1999), Harvard University Press. A book on social-construction claims whose title asks what they are claims about. By its chapter titles: why ask what; too many metaphors; the natural sciences; madness; kind-making; weapons research; rocks; the end of Captain Cook. Unread: filed from bibliographic records and the table of contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the Crossref records for the book and its chapters and the Open Library records of its editions; no lawful full text was reachable (Harvard University Press and JSTOR pages did not load, the e-book is licensed through JSTOR, and there is no author-posted draft), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Its title asks of social-construction claims what they are claims about; what its answer is, beyond its chapter titles, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-476 v2 | We-Intentions | Tuomela & Miller (1988), DOI-10.1007/BF00353512, Philosophical Studies 53(3): 367–389. The paper introduces the we-intention: roughly, a group member’s intention to do her part of a joint action, together with beliefs that the conditions for the joint action obtain and that this is mutually believed. The concept is applied to simple social practical reasoning and offered as basic to social theory. Unread: filed from metadata, with the content as search summaries report it. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata and reference list; no lawful full text was reachable (Springer is paywalled, the University of Helsinki portal holds only the citation, and the 2020 De Gruyter reprint is closed), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the founding paper of Tuomela’s we-intention account, the main analysis Searle’s 1990 paper (LIT-490) is reported to argue against. |
| LIT-477 v3 | Walking Together: A Paradigmatic Social Phenomenon | Gilbert (1990), DOI-10.1111/j.1475-4975.1990.tb00202.x, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 15: 1–14. Gilbert takes going for a walk together as the model case of acting together and of a social group. Two analyses built from shared personal goals are rejected, because they cannot explain the walkers’ obligations and rights to appropriate behaviour. Her alternative is that the walkers must constitute the “plural subject” of a goal. Unread: filed from metadata and the abstract as search indexes give it. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata; no lawful full text was reachable (Wiley and PDC are paywalled, the author’s SSRN posting and a public PDF at humanitiesmontana.org both sit behind bot challenges that returned 403, and the Wayback Machine copy of that PDF could not be fetched through this session’s proxy), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the short canonical statement of Gilbert’s plural-subject account, and the record’s only reading of Gilbert is second-hand, through Tomasello’s commentaries (NOTE-185). Free copy: ssrn.com/abstract=1071242 (Gilbert’s SSRN posting). |
| LIT-478 v2 | The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences | Epstein (2015), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199381104.001.0001. Social science works with an “anthropocentric” picture on which the social world is built out of people, as an ant colony is built out of ants. Part One separates the facts that ground a social fact from the facts that anchor the frame principle saying how such facts are grounded, and argues ontological individualism false. Part Two argues that even facts about groups, including group action and intention, are grounded in more than the members. Unread: filed from the introduction, the author’s précis and the publisher’s description. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the author’s own posted introduction and table of contents, not read: the book is not lawfully readable in full online (Oxford Academic is paywalled; the author posts only the introduction). The introduction and the author’s open-access précis were read. Its framework, grounding versus anchoring, is stated in the record from the précis and from the author’s SEP entry (LIT-487, read). Part Two argues that facts about groups, including their actions and intentions, are grounded in more than their members, which bears directly on THEORY-043. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-479 | What are groups? | Ritchie (2012 online; Philosophical Studies 166(2), 2013). Six criteria any theory of groups must meet: members can differ across times and worlds, groups exist contingently and temporarily, are located, and coincident groups of one kind can be distinct. Groups as non-singular pluralities, fusions, aggregates (Burge) and sets (Effingham) each fail at least one. Proposed instead: a group is a realization of a structure of functionally defined nodes, existing while every node is occupied; identity at a time needs the same members and the same relations. A sketch; it is silent on agency and minds. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-390); worth reading as the cleanest statement of what a metaphysics of organised groups has to deliver and why pluralities, fusions, aggregates and sets fail to. Its six criteria (members can change across times and worlds, groups are contingent and located, and coincident groups of one kind can be distinct) are the useful part, and the case against each rival is short and checkable. Its own view, groups as realizations of structures whose nodes are functionally defined, is sketched in four pages; it says nothing about agency or minds, and the author amended its membership definition in her 2018 paper (LIT-486). |
| LIT-480 | Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be? | Haslanger (2000), Noûs 34(1):31–55. Distinguishes conceptual, descriptive and analytical answers to “what is gender/race?” and takes the analytical one: define the terms for what a feminist antiracist theory needs. S is a woman iff S is regularly observed or imagined to have bodily features presumed to indicate a female’s reproductive role, this marks S in the dominant ideology for subordinate positions, and that plays a role in S’s subordination; men and racialized groups are defined in parallel, ethnicity and gender in general as the non-hierarchical genus. Stipulative by design; no evidence offered. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-394); worth reading as the founding statement of ameliorative (“analytical”) social ontology and of gender and race as hierarchical social positions. It is short and explicit about its method: it defines woman, man and racialized group for the purposes of a feminist and antiracist theory, says so, and accepts the consequences (non-oppressed females are not women in its sense, and the goal is a world with none). Read it for the three-way distinction between conceptual, descriptive and analytical projects and for the definitional schema (marked by assumed bodily features, positioned by a dominant ideology, subordinated or privileged as a result), not for evidence: its “matters of established fact” about race are asserted without citation, and its definitions are stipulated, not discovered. |
| LIT-481 | Institutions, rules, and equilibria: a unified theory | Hindriks & Guala (2015, online 2014), DOI-10.1017/S1744137414000496. Institutions are rules in equilibrium: correlated equilibria of coordination games with several equilibria, which the players represent to themselves as rules. Searle’s constitutive rules (“X counts as Y in C”) are obtained from a regulative rule by splitting it with a new term, a base rule (X is Y) and a status rule (if Y then Z). The new term is conservative and eliminable, so the constitutive-rules account reduces to the rules-in-equilibrium account, and Lewis’s theory of theoretical terms says the term refers if the rules are true. Shown on one toy institution (first-occupancy property); general reduction asserted. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-395), with the authors’ reply to their six commentators in the same issue; worth reading as the shortest statement of the rules-in-equilibrium theory of institutions and of the claim that Searle’s constitutive rules are regulative rules with a name added. The equilibrium half is a clear synthesis of Lewis, Aumann, Aoki and Greif. The reduction of constitutive rules is shown on one toy institution and asserted in general, and it leans on a reading of “collective acceptance” loose enough to make it hard to fail. |
| LIT-482 | Social ontology: Some basic principles | Searle (2006), DOI-10.1177/1463499606061731. Institutional reality is built from three primitives: collective intentionality, the assignment of function, and constitutive rules of the form “X counts as Y in C”. The Y status is held only by collective acceptance, and it carries deontic powers, which are desire-independent reasons for action. Institutional facts need language because they exist only as represented. Two revisions of the 1995 book: status indicators (after De Soto), and “free-standing Y terms” (after Barry Smith), such as corporations and money without currency. In those cases there is no X, and “We accept (S has power (S does A))”, a formula from later in the book, is ranked as the more general form. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-388), in its parallel English printing in Papers: Revista de Sociologia 80 (2006), pp. 51–71, not in the Anthropological Theory typesetting the DOI names; worth reading as Searle’s own short restatement of The Construction of Social Reality (LIT-485), and as the place where he concedes that “X counts as Y in C” is not the general form. Status functions imposed by collective acceptance carry deontic powers, and deontic powers are desire-independent reasons for action. Read it for the structure, not for an argument about collective intentionality: that is taken as a primitive and referred to his 1990 paper (LIT-490), not defended here. |
| LIT-483 v3 | Groups as Agents | Tollefsen (2015), Polity. Per its publisher, a survey of whether groups can literally intend, whether there is a collective mind, and whether groups should be held morally responsible, arguing “the unorthodox view that certain groups should, indeed, be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable”. Chapters on group belief, intention, agency, cognition, interpreting groups and the moral responsibility of groups. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is in print with Polity, licensed as an e-book, and no author-posted draft was found), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is a short introduction to group belief, intention, agency, cognition and responsibility that, per its publisher, argues “certain groups should, indeed, be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable”; which groups, and on what view of agency, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-484 | Qu’est-ce qu’un fait social ? | Durkheim (1894; book 1895), ch. I of Les Règles de la méthode sociologique. A social fact is “toute manière de faire, fixée ou non, susceptible d’exercer sur l’individu une contrainte extérieure”, or equivalently one general in a society while existing independently of its individual manifestations. Such facts are neither organic nor individual-psychic, so their substrate is society. They are general because collective, not collective because general: “il est dans chaque partie parce qu’il est dans le tout”. Ways of being (morphology) are consolidated ways of doing. A definition argued from examples, not proved. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-391); worth reading as the founding definition of a social fact, and as a short text later social ontology still cites (Ritchie 2018 does, for the group as more than a sum). Fifteen pages define the object of sociology by two marks, exteriority to individual consciousness and external constraint, with diffusion plus independent existence as an equivalent second test. It is a definition, not an argument: Durkheim calls it “un simple résumé des données immédiates de lobservation” (n. 3), and its two load-bearing steps (that what is neither organic nor individual-psychic must have society as its substrate, and that constraint is present even where nobody feels it) are asserted from examples. Read for the vocabulary and the part-whole thesis (“il est dans chaque partie parce qu’il est dans le tout”), not for a proof. |
| LIT-485 v2 | The Construction of Social Reality | Searle (1995), Free Press, New York (xiii + 241 pp.). The founding book of Searle’s social ontology. Per its catalogue description, it argues that some facts are independent of human observers and some require human agreement. Its chapters move from the building blocks of social reality and the creation of institutional facts through language and a general theory of institutional facts, to a defence of external realism and the correspondence theory of truth. Unread: filed from the catalogue record and contents; the record reads the theory in Searle’s 2006 restatement. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from catalogue records and a library scan of the table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is in print with Free Press / Simon & Schuster, the Internet Archive copies are either lending-only or unauthorised uploads, and Searle posted no draft), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. The record reads the theory through Searle’s own 2006 restatement (LIT-482, read in full), which is the entry to start from. |
| LIT-486 | Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups | Ritchie (2018 online; PPR 100(2), 2020). Social structures are networks of relations constitutively, not merely causally, dependent on social factors, and can be overt or covert, intentionally or unintentionally created, internal or external to what realizes them. Organized social groups (teams, courts, families) are structured wholes with internal social structures whose nodes people occupy; feature social groups (women, racial groups, classes) are social kinds, nodes in external social structures. Both meet a “Goldilocks Constraint”: intuitive and explanatory groups in, arbitrary collections out. Silent on agency. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-389); worth reading as the one framework in the record that covers both kinds of social group, the organised ones the group-agency literature is about and the race, gender and class groups the social-construction literature is about, and says why they differ. Organized social groups (teams, courts, firms) are structured wholes with internal social structures; feature social groups (women, African Americans, economic classes) are social kinds, nodes in external social structures. It is a framework offered to “motivate”, not a proof, and its anti-overgeneration work is done by a restriction to structures that “intuitively exist” or “figure in explanations”, imported rather than derived. It says nothing about agency or minds. |
| LIT-487 | Social Ontology | Epstein (2018; rev. 2024), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-ontology/. A survey that splits social ontology into two inquiries: what determines (grounds) a social fact, and what constructs or “anchors” the category it falls under, likened to semantics and metasemantics. §3 surveys determination bases (psychologism, atomism, bodies and practices, physicalism, holism, flat ontologies) and reports that ontological individualism is widely assumed and recently contested. §4 surveys anchoring theories (agreement, Lewis’s convention, Hart and Searle’s collective acceptance, patterns, practices, language). §5 covers groups, group minds and agency, institutions, race and gender, artifacts, money, law and language. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-393); worth reading as a survey: the best single map of social ontology in the record, organised around its author’s distinction between what grounds a social fact (§3) and what anchors, or sets up, the category it falls under (§4). It is also the record’s readable source for what The Ant Trap’s grounding–anchoring framework is (LIT-478 is not lawfully readable). Read it as a survey written by a partisan: Epstein’s own positions organise the entry, and the critics of anchoring are named but given a sentence each. |
| LIT-488 v2 | Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together | Bratman (2014), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199897933.001.0001. The planning structures that organise an individual’s agency over time are also at the core of small-scale shared agency. A shared intention is constructed from each participant’s intention that “we J”, by way of each other’s intentions and meshing subplans, with persistence interdependence and common knowledge. These conditions are offered as sufficient, not necessary. No group subject and no new primitive is needed: the account is reductive “in spirit”, against Gilbert and Searle. Unread: filed from the chapter list and the author’s précis. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata, the chapter list and the author’s open-access précis; no lawful full text of the book was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, and Bratman has not posted the book or draft chapters), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the developed statement of the reductive, planning-theory account of shared agency, and the précis, read in full, says plainly where it parts from Gilbert and Searle. |
| LIT-489 | Institutions | North (1991), DOI-10.1257/jep.5.1.97. Institutions are “the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction”: informal constraints (taboos, customs, codes of conduct) and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). With technology they set transaction and production costs, and so the incentive structure of an economy. Tribal exchange, the Suq and the caravan trade did not evolve from within; early modern European trade did, through merchant law, bills of exchange, insurance and a state bound not to confiscate. Institutional change is path dependent because the institutional matrix has increasing returns. A narrative essay; the definition is stipulated. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-392); worth reading as the economist’s canonical one-paragraph definition of institutions (“the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction”) and as a compact statement of the transaction-cost and path-dependence programme. It is an essay, not an argument: the game-theoretic motivation is one paragraph, the history is narrative, and the definition is stipulated, not defended. For what an institution is, read it beside Hindriks & Guala (LIT-481), who take it as the exemplar of the rules account and say what it leaves out. |
| LIT-490 v2 | Collective Intentions and Actions | Searle (1990), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/3839.003.0021, in Cohen, Morgan & Pollack (eds.), Intentions in Communication (MIT Press), pp. 401–416; reprinted in Consciousness and Language (2002). The paper in which Searle introduces collective intentionality, intentions of the form “we intend”, as a phenomenon of individual minds that is not a sum of individual “I intend” states plus mutual belief. Unread: filed from metadata, and from how Searle’s own later paper uses it. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata; no lawful full text was reachable (the MIT Press chapter is paywalled and returned 403, the CUP reprint is paywalled, the Internet Archive copy of the volume is lending-only, and no author or course copy was found), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the paper that put “collective intentionality” into analytic philosophy and the source Searle’s later social ontology (LIT-482) sends readers to. |
| LIT-491 v2 | Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories | Ásta (2018), OUP. Per its publisher, a theory of social categories built on the question “what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful?”; its main idea is that “social categories are conferred upon people”, and its “conferralist” framework is applied to sex, gender, race, disability and other categories, and to their tendency to oppress. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is not open access, Oxford Academic is paywalled, and the author’s site posts replies and related essays but no chapters or drafts), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the book-length statement of conferralism, the main rival to Haslanger’s account of social categories (LIT-480); what it argues beyond the description is not recorded here. |
| LIT-492 v2 | On Social Facts | Gilbert (1989), Routledge (reissued by Princeton University Press, 1992; DOI-10.1515/9780691214627). The book asks whether social groups are real over and above individuals’ thoughts. It analyses everyday concepts of social action, social groups, collective belief and social convention, in dialogue with Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and David Lewis, and proposes that core social phenomena are “plural subject” phenomena. Unread: filed from the publishers’ descriptions and the chapter list. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publishers’ records and the chapter list; no lawful full text was reachable (the Princeton reissue is sold as an e-book on De Gruyter, and the Internet Archive’s copy of the Routledge edition is lending-only), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is Gilbert’s book-length treatment of plural subjects, collective belief and social convention; “Walking Together” (LIT-477) is the short version. |
| LIT-493 v2 | The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms | Bicchieri (2006; print December 2005), DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511616037. Per its publisher, an integrated account, drawing on social psychology, experimental economics and evolutionary game theory, of how social norms such as fairness, cooperation and reciprocity emerge, why and when people follow them, when they attend to the relevant norm, why inefficient norms survive, and how psychological dispositions can lead to fairness norms like ours. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. Cambridge Core is paywalled. The author’s own copy of chapter 1 on her University of Pennsylvania pages and the publisher’s excerpt at assets.cambridge.org both failed (HTTP 403; connection reset), and the Internet Archive has no copy. It is the standard equilibrium-and-expectations account of social norms; what its definition of a norm says was not seen. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-504 v2 | A Natural History of Human Morality | Tomasello (2016), DOI-10.4159/9780674915855. By the publisher’s account, a reconstruction from experiments comparing great apes and children of how early humans became “an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species”. The chapter titles give the steps: an interdependence hypothesis, a second-personal morality of collaborating partners, an “objective” morality of the cultural group, and human morality as “cooperation-plus”. Unread: filed from the description and chapter list. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The book is lending-only at the Internet Archive (access-restricted, printdisabled) and paywalled at Harvard University Press and De Gruyter. Its relation to Tomasello’s later “The moral psychology of obligation” (LIT-125, read in NOTE-185) is inferred from the chapter titles and that reading, and is labelled as inference. An author’s précis exists (Philosophical Psychology, 2018, DOI 10.1080/09515089.2018.1486605) and was not read; it would be the natural first step. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-507 | Moral psychology is relationship regulation: Moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality | Rai & Fiske (2011), DOI-10.1037/a0021867. Relationship regulation theory: moral judgments are not about features of acts (harm, unfairness, impurity) but about whether acts fit the relationship model in force. Fiske’s four relational models each carry a moral motive: Unity (communal sharing), Hierarchy (authority ranking), Equality (equality matching) and Proportionality (market pricing). The motives are universal; cultures differ in where they apply them. So violence, inequality and “impure” acts can be morally required, and purity and ingroup loyalty are one motive. A review, with no new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-405); worth reading as the relational alternative to both Moral Foundations Theory and morality-as-cooperation, and as the source of the Equality/Proportionality split the MFQ-2 later adopted. It is a theoretical review with no new data. It agrees with morality-as-cooperation that morality exists to sustain cooperative relationships, and differs from it on purity (a Unity motive, the same motive as ingroup loyalty), on harm (violence can be morally required) and on the units (four relational models, not seven game-theoretic problems). |
| LIT-542 | The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization | Barrett (2017), SCAN 12(1):1–23. The brain runs an internal model of the body in the world for allostasis. Its predictions are “concepts” issued from agranular limbic cortex and refined by prediction error. Interoceptive predictions are felt as affect (valence, arousal). An emotion is an instance of categorizing sensation with an emotion concept, built the same way as any perception. Since instances of an emotion are “created by multiple spatiotemporal patterns” (degeneracy), the categories have no neural essences, and the classical view, basic-emotion and causal appraisal theories included, is rejected. Emotions are “constructions of the world, not reactions to it.” | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-434); worth reading as the shortest complete statement of the theory of constructed emotion and of its link to predictive processing. The brain’s core task is allostasis, run through an internal model whose predictions are “concepts”. An instance of emotion is what happens when the brain categorizes predicted interoceptive and exteroceptive sensation with an emotion concept. On this account emotion categories have no neural “essences”, and causal appraisal theories are “highly doubtful”. The paper is a theoretical synthesis: its own data are a few figures, and the rest is cited evidence and explicitly labelled hypotheses. |
| LIT-567 | A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time | Bratman (2018), essay 11 of Planning, Time, and Self-Governance (OUP). A planning agent’s self-governance over time is self-governance at each time along a planned activity, plus cross-temporal links of intention that parallel the interlocking intentions of shared agency: in diachronic self-governance one acts “together” with oneself. Standpoints are “diachronicalized” by a conditional, reflexive end of one’s own diachronic self-governance. That end can make willpower and resistance to “shuffling” self-governed, while anticipated regret at “plan’s end” excludes drinking Kavka’s toxin. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-464), in the author’s pre-publication draft of 10 July 2017, not the typeset chapter. Worth reading as the read substitute for Planning, Time, and Self-Governance (2018) and, through its summary of the planning theory, for Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (1987, LIT-593). A planning agent governs herself over time when she is self-governing at each time along a planned activity and her intentions at those times interlock like the intentions of people acting together, so that she acts “together” with herself. Her standpoints are “diachronicalized”: they include a conditional, reflexive end of her own diachronic self-governance. That end explains how willpower and resisting “shuffling” between incomparable options can be self-governed, and anticipated regret at plan’s end rules out drinking Kavka’s toxin. A philosophical model argued by cases; nothing in it is tested. |
| LIT-571 | Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition | De Jaegher & Di Paolo (2007), Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4):485–507. Coordination between coupled systems is cheap and common. When patterns of coordination and the course of an encounter shape each other, the interaction acquires its own operationally closed, precarious organization. Social interaction is then regulated coupling between autonomous agents that constitutes an autonomous relational organization without destroying the agents’ autonomy. Because sense-making is embodied in movement, interactors can coordinate their sense-making, along a spectrum from modulated individual sense-making to jointly created meaning. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-456), from the published version posted on De Jaegher’s own site. Worth reading as the founding statement of participatory sense-making. A social interaction is defined as regulated coupling between autonomous agents that itself becomes an autonomous organization in the relational domain, without destroying the agents’ autonomy; coordinating sense-making in interaction can generate meanings neither individual had. The argument is conceptual, illustrated by everyday cases and by the perceptual-crossing experiments; nothing is measured in the paper. |
| LIT-587 | The Normative Constitution of Agency | Korsgaard (2014), in Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman (OUP), pp. 190–214. Two conceptions of agency are set side by side: natural (action is movement caused by the right mental state) and normatively constituted (action is movement backed by a unified agent, whose unity is achieved by following norms). Following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives gives action “the form of self-determined efficacy”. Choosing maxims under that form constitutes one’s practical identity. Self-consciousness of one’s own attitudes sets the task of unification. Unity of agency “is an achievement, not a given”, so people can literally act together. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-455), in the author’s posted manuscript, not the typeset chapter. Worth reading as the read substitute for Self-Constitution (2009, LIT-597), which it summarises and extends, and as Korsgaard’s direct engagement with Bratman. Agency is “normatively constituted”: an action is a movement “backed by the agent as a whole”, and that unity is achieved by following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives, which give action “the form of self-determined efficacy”. The content of the maxims we choose under that form constitutes our “practical identities”. So “we make ourselves into agents”, and unity of agency, individual or collective, “is an achievement, not a given”. Argued, not proved; the account of reason as unification is said to be “lifted” from her other work. |
| LIT-696 v2 | Towards a Theory of Collective Emotions | von Scheve & Ismer (2013), Emotion Review 5(4):406–413. Collective emotion is synchronous convergence in affective responding towards an event or object. Three literatures (face-to-face contagion and effervescence, culture and shared knowledge, social identification) are recast as bottom-up mechanisms on three levels: social cognition (shared appraisals; collectively intentional appraisals), expressive behaviour (contagion, “facial dialects”) and symbolic practice (collective memory, group-based sentiments, norms, cultural sharing). Mutual awareness and group membership amplify convergence and can turn I-mode into We-mode collective emotion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-552); worth reading as a compact map of how collective emotion has been theorised across sociology, social psychology and philosophy, and as the source of a working definition: collective emotion is synchronous convergence in affective responding across individuals towards one event or object. Shared appraisal structures give the minimal case. Mutual awareness (contagion, sharing) and group membership (identity, collective intention, norms, collective memory, sentiments) amplify it and can turn “I-mode” into “We-mode” collective emotion. A conceptual synthesis with no data, built bottom-up by methodological choice. |
| LIT-697 v2 | The feeling of being a group: Corporate emotions and collective consciousness | Schmid (2014), in von Scheve & Salmela (eds.), Collective Emotions (OUP), pp. 3–16. Unread. By summaries of its abstract: against the view that groups cannot have emotions because they lack consciousness, it argues that a group with proper intentional attitudes has consciousness, as plural pre-reflective self-awareness, and so meets a precondition for emotion. Groups probably cannot have “fast” emotions but can have “slow” ones such as confidence, happiness or grief. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The chapter is paywalled at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall finds no open copy, and the University of Vienna’s research portal refused the request; the author’s preprint is posted only on ResearchGate and academia.edu, which this record does not use. What is said of it comes from summaries of its abstract returned by a search service, labelled unverified. A person could supply the chapter from the OUP volume or ask the author; a reading would move this to Active and should test whether its “corporate emotions” are corporate attitudes in List’s sense. |
| LIT-698 v2 | Collective Guilt | Isaacs (2011), ch. 3 of Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts (OUP), pp. 71–94. Unread. By a summary of its abstract, it takes collective guilt to be blameworthy collective moral responsibility, a feature of collective agents that does not distribute to members; separates being guilty, believing oneself guilty and feeling guilty, and personal, membership and collective guilt; and, engaging Gilbert, concludes that collectives may be guilty without having guilt feelings. The review in NDPR confirms the non-distribution claim (pp. 81–83). | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The work the owner means is chapter 3, “Collective Guilt”, of Isaacs’s Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts (OUP, 2011); no Monist paper of that title exists. The book is paywalled, and none of Isaacs’s shorter papers on collective responsibility (Midwest Studies 2014, New Criminal Law Review 2013) has an open copy. What is said here comes from Matt King’s review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (read in full) and from a search-service summary of the chapter abstract (unverified). A person with the book could supply the chapter; a reading would move this to Active. |
| LIT-700 | Three kinds of collective attitudes | List (2014), Erkenntnis 79(S9):1601–1622. Collective attitudes come in three kinds. Aggregate attitudes summarise members’ attitudes by a rule or a market, supervene proposition-wise and need not be rational. Common attitudes are held by all members with common awareness, matter for coordination, and inherit consistency from their unanimity. Corporate attitudes belong to a group agent, guide its action, supervene holistically on members’ contributions and must be rational. The kinds are almost logically independent, and fears and hopes divide the same way as beliefs and desires. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-554); worth reading as the disambiguation the collective-attitudes literature needs: aggregate attitudes (summaries, supervening proposition by proposition), common attitudes (unanimous and commonly known, supervening on a slightly enriched base) and corporate attitudes (a group agent’s, supervening holistically and not straightforwardly reducible). The three are almost logically independent. A review by its own description, with no new theorem; its value for this record is that it names fears and hopes among the attitudes the split applies to, which gives the collective-emotion debate a vocabulary. |
| LIT-701 v3 | Collective Guilt and Collective Guilt Feelings | Gilbert (2002), The Journal of Ethics 6(2):115–143. Unread. As read sources report it: it distinguishes personal, membership and collective guilt feelings, and defines collective guilt feelings by joint commitment, so that for us collectively to feel guilt over our action is for us to be jointly committed to feel guilt as a body. A plural subject can thus be in a collective emotion, and since emotions are separable from feelings, such emotions need no phenomenology of their own. Reprinted in Gilbert’s Joint Commitment (2013), ch. 11. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. Springer and the OUP reprint are paywalled, Unpaywall finds no open copy, and the PhilArchive record (GILCGA) and SSRN abstract 1071254 both answered automated requests with a bot challenge or a block, which I did not try to get past. What the record says of it comes from Huebner’s read paper, which quotes it with page references, and is labelled second-hand. A person with PhilArchive or library access could supply the text; a reading would move this to Active and should test Huebner’s charge that a plural subject’s emotion reduces to individual commitments. Free copy: philarchive.org/rec/GILCGA (PhilArchive). |
| LIT-702 | Genuinely collective emotions | Huebner (2010), European Journal for Philosophy of Science 1(1):89–118. Against the received view that only individuals have emotions, it argues that some groups have the computational complexity and informational integration that emotion requires. Emotions are integrated, action- oriented representations built from subpersonal routines; a distributed system can integrate routines the same way. It answers the objection from consciousness (some individual emotions are non-conscious, so collective ones need not be felt) and from homology (emotion kinds are functional, “like vodka”, not “like bourbon”). A navy crew turns out to detect danger without fear; a failing election campaign is offered instead. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-553); worth reading as the distributed, computational case for collective emotion, and the clearest statement of what it would take. An emotion is an integrated representation with indicative content and imperative force, built from subpersonal routines; a group whose routines are integrated the same way can be in one, without feeling it. The test case fails on the author’s own terms (the USS Palau crew detects danger without fear) and the replacement (a 2008 presidential campaign) is offered as intuitively plausible pending anthropology, so the paper establishes a possibility and a research programme, not an instance. |
| LIT-705 | Group Agency and Supervenience | List & Pettit (2006), Southern Journal of Philosophy 44(S1):85–105. A group agent’s rationality must supervene on its members’ contributions, but not proposition by proposition. Three impossibility results show that robust group rationality (complete, consistent, deductively closed group judgments for every profile of rational member judgments) is inconsistent with majoritarian, uniform proposition-wise and proposition-wise supervenience. Premise-based and distributed premise-based procedures show it is consistent with set-wise supervenience, with group judgments that can be discontinuous with the members’ judgments on the same proposition. Emergent agency without any member’s conception of the group is set aside as unintelligible. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-550); worth reading as the short, formal core of List and Pettit’s group agency: a group can be a robustly rational judge only if its judgment on a proposition is not, in general, a function of its members’ judgments on that proposition. Group judgments supervene on members’ judgments set-wise, not proposition-wise, so a group agent is individualistically unmysterious and still “not directly continuous” with its members. Read here as the lawful substitute for the unread book LIT-391, whose chapter 3 takes up the same supervenience question; the impossibility results are cited from other papers, not proved here. |
| LIT-718 | The Conversable, Responsible Corporation | Pettit (2017), in Orts & Smith (eds), The Moral Responsibility of Firms, OUP, pp. 15–35. Corporations are agents and, through authorised spokespersons, conversable ones that avow attitudes and make promises. Because majority voting on connected judgments can be inconsistent, a conversable corporation must correct its aggregate and so forms a mind of its own. Conversable agents are fit to be held responsible, so corporations are. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-569): in full, from the manuscript Pettit circulated for a master class at the European University Institute. Worth reading as the short statement of his case that corporations are fit to be held responsible. A corporation is a conversable agent: it speaks for itself through authorised spokespersons and commits itself, rather than reporting its members’ attitudes. It must correct for the inconsistency any mechanical aggregation produces, so it has a mind of its own. Conversable agents meet the three conditions of fitness to be held responsible. The chapter stands in for the unread 2007 paper LIT-742. |
| LIT-727 | The Corporation as a Moral Person | French (1979), American Philosophical Quarterly 16(3):207–215. A moral person is a non-eliminable subject of accountability, which requires intentional agency. A corporation’s Internal Decision (CID) Structure, its organizational chart plus recognition rules in corporate policy, licenses redescribing members’ acts as corporate acts done for corporate reasons. So corporations, unlike mobs, can be full-fledged moral persons. That agency suffices for moral personhood is asserted, not argued here. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-568): in full, from a scanned JSTOR copy in a Brooklyn College instructor’s readings folder. Worth reading as the founding statement of the claim that corporations are moral persons. French rests it on the Corporate Internal Decision (CID) Structure: an organizational chart plus recognition rules embedded in corporate policy. It licenses redescribing members’ acts as corporate intentional acts. Limits: he asserts, and says he cannot here argue, that intentional agency suffices for moral personhood, and the paper offers no test of corporate intentionality beyond the redescription itself. |
| LIT-730 | Episteme Symposium on Group Agency: Replies to Gaus, Cariani, Sylvan, and Briggs | List & Pettit (2012), Episteme 9(3):293–309. Replies to a symposium on Group Agency. Ecological rationality is classical rationality relative to an environment; robust group rationality can be relaxed by context, yet proposition-wise aggregation stays very limited. Group attitudes are real and non-redundant: role-based member acceptance does not reduce them. Group agents are fit to be held responsible in their own right but should have restricted rights, on normative individualism. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-582): in full, from the authors’ copy on List’s LSE pages. Worth reading as the authors’ own short commentary on Group Agency (LIT-391, unread), which it quotes with page references. It says the premise-based procedure was only ever illustrative, that robust group rationality may be relaxed case by case without rescuing proposition-wise supervenience, that no accessible individualistic recipe makes group attitudes redundant, and that group agents are fit to be held responsible in their own right but should have restricted rights. Limits: replies to commentaries not in the record; the book’s claims are seen only as quoted. |
| LIT-736 | Shaping the Institutional Mind | Tollefsen (2025), Philosophies 10(5):112. Advocates and critics of group minds share the “standard view” that ascribing attitudes tracks pre-existing causes. On McGeer’s regulative view, ascription shapes its target. Ascribing knowledge to institutions, as in the collective knowledge doctrine, and issuing institutional narratives shape institutions to be more agent-like. The view stays agnostic about whether institutions really have minds. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-570): in full, from the publisher’s open-access PDF (CC BY 4.0). Worth reading for a different answer to why we ascribe beliefs and knowledge to institutions: not because the ascriptions describe pre-existing states, but because, on the regulative view of folk psychology, they shape institutions to be more agent-like. Its main case is the collective knowledge doctrine in corporate criminal law, after which banks built systems to detect reporting violations. Limits: the regulative view is assumed, not argued; the causal story about banks is asserted without evidence; and the paper is agnostic about whether institutions have minds. It does not stand in for her book Groups as Agents (LIT-483), which stays unread. |
| LIT-742 v2 | Responsibility Incorporated | Pettit (2007), Ethics 117:171–201. Incorporated groups face significant choices, can recognise the relative value of their options, and can choose in sensitivity to those values, so they meet the conditions for being fit to be held responsible. Unread: the argument is read in his 2017 chapter LIT-718. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached (SSRN’s download is blocked to this client, and the journal is closed). Its argument is read first-hand in Pettit’s later chapter “The Conversable, Responsible Corporation” (LIT-718), which restates the three conditions of fitness to be held responsible and argues that corporations meet them. Filed because the owner’s essay needs an account of corporate responsibility, and this is the paper usually cited for it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-848 | Large AI models are cultural and social technologies | Farrell, Gopnik, Shalizi & Evans (2025), Science 387(6739):1153–1156, Policy Forum. Large models are best understood not as intelligent agents but as a new cultural and social technology: like writing, print and search they give access to what other people have produced, and like markets, bureaucracies and elections they make lossy, uninvertible summaries of it that can be operated on at scale. The questions that follow are the old ones about such technologies: homogenization or diversity, who gains and who loses, and which countervailing institutions emerge. Argued by historical analogy, without data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-09 (NOTE-649) from the authors’ accepted version (Science galley of 25 February 2025, posted on Farrell’s site); worth reading as the compact statement of the view that large models are not agents but a new cultural and social technology, of a kind with writing, print, markets, bureaucracies and elections: lossy summaries of what other humans have produced that let people reorganize it at scale. It is a four-page Policy Forum argued by analogy, with no data. Its one mechanism with consequences is that models fit their training distribution on average, so are least accurate where the data are rare, which may homogenize culture; it sets this against the possibility of “society-like” ecologies of models that keep diversity. |
| LIT-897 v2 | AI as Agency without Intelligence: On Artificial Intelligence as a New Form of Artificial Agency and the Multiple Realisability of Agency Thesis | Floridi (2025), DOI-10.1007/s13347-025-00858-9. An Editor Letter that “grew so long”. AI is better understood by widening agency to forms without cognition, intelligence or mental states than by widening intelligence to machines. Agency comes in kinds (natural, biological, animal social, artefactual, human individual and social, artificial, social artificial). All of them share interactivity, and the richer ones add graded autonomy and adaptability. AI is computational, data-adaptive agency serving goals set by humans, with no intelligence. The thesis is assumed, and the paper characterises the kind rather than arguing for it. The criteria do not separate AI from other artefacts, and no level of abstraction is stated. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-702); worth reading for the fullest statement of Floridi’s position that AI is “agency without intelligence”: the Multiple Realisability of Agency thesis set against the Artificial Realisability of Intelligence, Floridi & Sanders’ three criteria restated as graded, and a taxonomy that places AI as “a computational, goal-driven form of agency defined by human purposes” with Agentic AI as its collective form. Read it as a taxonomy, not an argument. The case for MRA over ARI is announced and not made, since the paper assumes AI is an agent and asks what kind. AI’s lack of intelligence is asserted. No level of abstraction is ever specified. Interactivity alone makes a river a natural agent, so the permissiveness objection is accepted rather than answered. |
| LIT-898 v2 | On the Morality of Artificial Agents | Floridi & Sanders (2004), DOI-10.1023/B:MIND.0000035461.63578.9d. Whether something is an agent is fixed only relative to a level of abstraction (LoA), a chosen set of observables. At a suitable LoA a system is an agent if it is interactive, autonomous (changes state without stimulus) and adaptable (its interactions change its transition rules); humans, learning software and organisations all qualify. An agent is a moral agent if it can cause moral good or evil. Such an agent is accountable for what it causes, but responsibility (praise and blame) needs intentional states as well, so artificial agents can be moral agents that are accountable and not responsible, and are censured by modification, disconnection or deletion. The argument is by cases and by rebutting four objections. The paper’s own MENACE example shows agenthood appearing and vanishing as the LoA changes. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-701); worth reading as the founding statement of Floridi’s line on artificial agency: agenthood as interactivity, autonomy and adaptability at a stated level of abstraction, and moral agency as the capacity to cause moral good or evil, with accountability split from responsibility. Read §2.5, §2.6.2 (MENACE) and §3.2 for the position. It argues by cases and by rebutting four objections; nothing in it is derived, the permissiveness of its criteria is answered by assertion (p. 26), and the distributed morality it says the approach is for is promised, not worked out. |
| LIT-901 v2 | Distributed Morality in an Information Society | Floridi (2013), DOI-10.1007/s11948-012-9413-4. Distributed morality is the case where morally loaded actions of a human, artificial or hybrid multiagent system result from interactions among its members that are each morally neutral or negligible, modelled on distributed knowledge (A knows P∨Q, B knows ¬P, only the “supra-agent” AB knows Q). Two moral thresholds make environments fault-tolerant to small evils and inert to small goods, so managing distributed morality means aggregating possible goods and fragmenting possible evils. ICTs make it common. “Infraethics” is the first-order framework of moral enablers (trust, privacy, transparency …) that is not good in itself. The analogy is looser than it looks: every example sums like contributions past a threshold whose value is left open. Responsibility for distributed morality is not addressed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-698); worth reading as the line’s only worked statement of distributed morality (morally loaded actions of a multiagent system arising from interactions each below a moral threshold) and as the source of “infraethics”, the first-order framework of moral enablers that is not morally good in itself. Read pp. 729–734 for the threshold model and pp. 738–740 for infraethics. It argues by a model and four examples and proves nothing. Its analogy with distributed knowledge is not exact: every example sums like contributions past a threshold whose value is left unspecified. No criterion of agency is applied to its “supra-agents”, and responsibility for distributed morality, which Floridi & Sanders 2004 promised, is still not given. |
| LIT-1010 v2 | Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self | Mackenzie and Stoljar, eds. (2000). The collection that gave “relational autonomy” its name: an umbrella for views on which persons are socially embedded, and their identities and capacities for self-government are formed by social relations. The essays take up the feminist charge that standard conceptions of autonomy are individualistic, and ask whether oppressive socialisation undermines autonomy. They divide over whether an account should be procedural or must make substantive normative demands. Held here for what it is standardly cited for; not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 from its Crossref record, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex lists only the publisher location and reports the work closed; Unpaywall reports no open copy. Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/book/49675, reached through the DOI) returned a bot check (403). Macquarie University’s research portal holds a record of the editors’ introduction, “Introduction: Autonomy Refigured” (pp. 3–31), with no file attached. PhilPapers returned 403. Searches found no author-posted introduction or chapter; the only full copy found is a Scribd upload, which is not authorised and was not opened. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1043 | Intention and Convention in Speech Acts | Strawson (1964), The Philosophical Review 73(4):439–460. Against Austin, many illocutions are not conventional: a warning to a skater, an entreaty, an objection. Their force is a wholly overt, audience-directed intention, analysed by Grice’s speaker meaning plus a fourth intention, and uptake is the audience’s recognition of it. Acts like a verdict or an umpire’s call are essentially conventional, and the scheme cannot hold them. What all illocutions share is an overt intention meant to be understood. | Active — read 2026-10-13 (NOTE-736) in full; worth reading as the step from Grice’s speaker meaning to illocutionary force: an illocution not essentially conventional is an act of communication whose force is a wholly overt, audience-directed intention, while acts like a verdict or an umpire’s call exist only within rule-governed procedures. Read it knowing that its own scheme strains on orders and fails on institutional acts, and that it individuates request from entreaty by a recognised attitude of the speaker. The second of the four works that CLAIM-221 and QUESTION-073 name as missing. |
| LIT-1060 | Cognition in the Wild | Hutchins (1995), MIT Press. A study of navigation aboard a ship, arguing that cognitive processes are distributed across people, artifacts and their organization, and that the unit of analysis is the functional system. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-15, not read. Registered from the exchange of 2026-10-14 on prompting, epistemic memory and retrieval (the workbench entry of 2026-10-15). No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for a lawful full text on 2026-10-15 and found none. Unpaywall and OpenAlex report it open access (green) on the strength of a single repository record at the University of Ljubljana (repozitorij.uni-lj.si/IzpisGradiva.php?id=44611, no PDF URL given); that record returns HTTP 410 with “Gradivo ne obstaja” (the item does not exist), and the Internet Archive has no capture of it, so the OA flag is stale. OpenAlex marks the MIT Press location itself as not open access, Crossref carries no licence for the DOI, and Semantic Scholar reports it closed. MIT Press Direct (direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4604/Cognition-in-the-Wild, reached through the DOI) and the MIT Press catalogue page both returned 403 behind a Cloudflare challenge, the Internet Archive holds no capture of either, and a web search found only paid editions and library records and no sign that MIT Press has made the title open access. Hutchins’s own UCSD site (pages.ucsd.edu/~ehutchins/citw.html) posts the book’s Introduction in full (about 3,000 words: how the study began, the critique of an ideational, inside-the-head view of culture and cognition, and a chapter-by-chapter outline), but nothing else from the book. hci.ucsd.edu/hutchins/ is a JavaScript shell with no documents. No shadow library, Internet Archive lending copy or third-party upload was used. The Introduction states the move the record cites it for. It does not argue for it. It says Hutchins will “move the boundaries of the cognitive unit of analysis out beyond the skin of the individual person and treat the navigation team as a cognitive and computational system”, that “local functional systems composed of a person in interaction with a tool have cognitive properties that are radically different from the cognitive properties of the person alone” (chapter 3), and that “Depending on their organization, groups must have cognitive properties that are not predictable from a knowledge of the properties of the individuals in the group” (chapter 4 takes the team as a whole). Hutchins’s “How a cockpit remembers its speeds” (Cognitive Science 19(3), 1995, pp. 265–288, DOI 10.1207/s15516709cog1903_1) has lawful copies: the author posts the typeset article (pages.ucsd.edu/~ehutchins/documents/CockpitSpeeds.pdf, 24 pp., fetched 2026-10-15), and Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list Wiley’s free publisher PDF (bronze; onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1207/s15516709cog1903_1, which returned 403 to this environment). It is not registered, and it is the reading available now for QUESTION-101. |
| LIT-1066 | How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds | Hutchins (1995), Cognitive Science 19(3), 265–288. A task analysis of how a two-pilot airliner cockpit “remembers” approach speeds: computed early from a speed-card booklet indexed by gross weight, passed across speech to bugs on the airspeed indicators, and used minutes later as a judgement of spatial adjacency. The memory is a property of the functional system, “not made primarily of pilot memory”, though pilot memory is involved. Stylized and unmeasured, for an anticipated, invariant task. | Active — read in full 2026-10-15 from the author’s posted copy, a scan of the published article (Cognitive Science 19(3), pp. 265–288) at pages.ucsd.edu/~ehutchins/documents/CockpitSpeeds.pdf. Worth reading as the compact statement of distributed cognition’s method, a cockpit treated as a cognitive system whose representations can be observed, and as the source of the speed-bug argument: setting the day’s speeds as bugs on the airspeed indicator does not improve any pilot’s memory but turns recall and scale-reading into a judgment of spatial proximity, so the memory “has now become a property of a larger system”. For QUESTION-101 and CLAIM-296 it shows, by task analysis and not by measurement, a change of arrangement alone changing what the system can do; the retrieval cue (displayed gross weight, the needle nearing a bug) supplied by the environment; and the work of retrieval moved to a quiet phase 25 to 30 minutes ahead of use, which the record’s deadline does not yet represent. It narrows them: its task is anticipated, mandated and invariant, it analyses only success, and it says nothing about search for one item among many under a deadline, which is CASE-085’s situation. |
| LIT-1122 v2 | Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems | Flack (2012). In one captive group of pigtailed macaques, peaceful subordination signals reverse about two orders of magnitude more rarely than fight outcomes, so the signalling network, and the power distribution computed from it, are slow, predictive coarse-grained variables. That individuals read and use them, and that this founds a new level of organization, is argued from earlier studies and stated as what the data suggest. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1351) in full, from the publisher’s version in PubMed Central (PMC3367696, CC BY) as Europe PMC full-text XML; worth reading as the short statement of the slow-variable idea on one primate group: subordination signals that change about two orders of magnitude more slowly than fight outcomes, and power read from them. Read it knowing that the animals’ use of these variables is what “the data suggest”, argued from earlier studies and not tested here, that the timescale of power is not measured, and that its stated 165-fold ratio does not follow from the counts it gives (about 128 to 150). |
| LIT-1124 v2 | Reconceptualizing Organizational Routines as a Source of Flexibility and Change | Feldman & Pentland (2003), ASQ 48(1):94–118. A routine has an ostensive aspect, the pattern as participants understand, invoke and account for it, and a performative aspect, its particular enactments; the ostensive guides, accounts for and names performances, and performances create, maintain and modify the ostensive, so variation and selective retention inside a routine make it a source of endogenous change as well as of stability. Theory, illustrated with academic hiring. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1386) in full, from UC Irvine’s eScholarship deposit of the published pages, by OCR; worth reading as the paper that splits a routine into an ostensive aspect, the pattern as participants understand and refer to it, and a performative aspect, its enactments, each making the other, so that a routine can change endogenously by variation and selective retention within it. Read it knowing that it is theory with one illustrative example and no data, that its analysis stays inside one routine in one organization, and that it does not separate a particular organization’s continuity from reproduction of a kind, which was A6’s question for it; it only doubts that routines carry unchanging genealogical information between organizations. |
| LIT-1131 v2 | ’Who can represent the city?’ Football fandom, derby rivalry and civic identity in Shanghai | Qi (2026). From 30 interviews and online observation, rival Shanghai fan groups claim local authenticity and cosmopolitan identity against each other, and together produce the city’s derby culture. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-16, not read; set Unfetched 2026-10-29. A lawful free copy exists: the article is published open access under CC BY-NC at doi.org/10.1177/10126902261441016 (journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10126902261441016), per Unpaywall. On 2026-10-29 SAGE answered with HTTP 403 (a bot check); a web search found only an index record (metatoc.com). A human reader can likely open the SAGE copy. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until it is read, not on merit. |
| LIT-1147 v2 | Enemies with benefits: the dual role of rivalry in shaping sports fans’ identity | Berendt (2016). A survey of 571 supporters at eight Bundesliga clubs: rivalry lowers public collective self-esteem relative to the rival’s fans but raises it relative to others, and raises perceived ingroup distinctiveness and cohesion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1303) from the authors’ accepted manuscript in the Hochschule Hannover repository (CC BY-NC-ND); worth reading as the structural model showing rivalry’s two faces for fans, less regard from the rival’s fans and more in-group distinctiveness, cohesion and regard from others, with the gains carried by perceived reciprocity of the rivalry rather than disidentification. One cross-sectional sample, N = 571, with fans who named no rival excluded. Source of THEORY-1113. |
| LIT-1150 v2 | Supporters, Followers, Fans, and Flaneurs: A Taxonomy of Spectator Identities in Football | Giulianotti (2002). Four ideal types of football spectator, supporters, followers, fans and flâneurs, set on hot–cool and traditional–consumer axes. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1244) from the Author’s Original Text deposited in Loughborough’s repository (Figshare 9625841, CC BY-NC-ND), the pre-review version; worth reading as the standard four-type taxonomy of football spectators (supporters, followers, fans, flâneurs) on two axes, hot–cool and traditional–consumer, with a claimed historical drift towards the flâneur. Conceptual, with no data. Source of THEORY-1111. |
| LIT-1383 v2 | A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation | Sewell (1992). Revises Giddens’s duality of structure: structures are mutually sustaining cultural schemas (virtual) and sets of resources (actual), and because structures are multiple and intersect, schemas are transposable, and resources are polysemic and accumulate unpredictably, the same structures that enable action also make their own transformation possible. Agency is the capacity to transpose schemas and remobilize resources. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1078) from a JSTOR copy of the published article posted on a University of Athens course page; worth reading as the standard repair of Giddens’s duality of structure: structures are virtual schemas and actual resources that sustain each other, and change arises from within because structures are multiple and intersect, schemas transpose, and resources are polysemic and accumulate unpredictably. Agency is the capacity to transpose and remobilize. Conceptual, with a conjecture (durability follows depth more than power) illustrated, not tested; its critique of habitus is aimed at Bourdieu’s 1977 Outline. |
| LIT-1423 | The perpetuation of an arbitrary tradition through several generations of a laboratory microculture | Jacobs and Campbell (1961). In Sherif’s autokinetic task, confederates gave exaggerated estimates of a stationary light’s movement, and group members were then replaced one at a time by naive participants. As standardly reported, the exaggerated norm outlasted the confederates for several generations and decayed gradually toward the level of control groups. Unread: the summary is the study’s standard description and has not been checked against the paper. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-23; failed on access. The article is in copyright and closed (Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar: closed, no open location). APA PsycNET returned 403. Europe PMC and PubMed index it (PMID 14450695) without full text. Internet Archive full-text search found it only in two lending-library copies of Hare, Borgatta and Bales’s reader Small Groups (1965, 1966; access-restricted, needing a borrowing account). ResearchGate and Northwestern University’s archive record of the manuscript returned 403. Web searches found secondary accounts only. Registered from the owner’s exchange “Framework Overview Request” of 2026-10-23. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1425 | Sales Practices Investigation Report | Independent Directors of the Board of Wells Fargo & Company (2017), with Shearman & Sterling. The root cause of the Community Bank’s sales practice failures was “the distortion of the Community Bank’s sales culture and performance management system”, combined with aggressive sales management. A decentralized structure gave Community Bank leaders autonomy, control functions deferred to them, and the board learned only from the September 2016 settlements that about 5,300 employees had been fired for sales practice violations. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1095): in full, all 110 numbered pages and the front matter, from a copy of the bank’s own PDF. Worth reading as the board’s own account of where the harm in the Wells Fargo sales-practices episode came from. It locates the root cause in the Community Bank’s sales model, performance management and pressure, in a decentralized structure that deferred to the business line, and in control functions that saw cases one at a time. It names and sanctions individual leaders too. It is the company’s report on itself, commissioned by its independent directors. |
| LIT-1426 v2 | Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals | Collins (2019), OUP. A “Tripartite Model” of group duties. Combinations (no shared goals or decision procedures) and coalitions (shared goals, no decision procedures) cannot bear duties; their supposed duties are members’ duties to “I-reason” or “we-reason”. Collectives, which have “group-level procedures for making decisions”, can bear duties, and their duties imply duties for members “to use their role in the collective with a view to the collective doing its duty”. Unread: filed from the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, not read: Oxford Academic is paywalled and OpenAlex finds no open copy or repository text. Filed for its account of what a group’s duties imply for its members, the side of corporate responsibility the record’s French and Pettit readings leave open. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1429 | Why Corporations Are Not Morally Responsible for Anything They Do | Velasquez (1983), Business and Professional Ethics Journal 2(3):1–18. The classic denial that a corporation, as an entity distinct from its members, is morally responsible for anything it does; the members who originate its acts are. Unread: no lawful copy reached. The later restatement is Velasquez (2003), also unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The publisher (Philosophy Documentation Center) sells the article; Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy; the PhilArchive record (dc2.philarchive.org/rec/VELWCA), and philarchive.org and philpapers.org with it, refused this client behind a Cloudflare check, so whether PhilArchive holds a copy is unknown; web searches for an author-posted or course-page copy found none. Filed because the owner is filing the thesis that a corporation is a psychopathic entity, and this is the classic objection to the corporate responsibility that thesis presupposes and that French (LIT-727) and Pettit (LIT-718) defend. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1430 v2 | The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power | Bakan (2004), Free Press. Per its publisher, it “contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality whose destructive behavior, if left unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin”. Per the Publishers Weekly review, the corporation is legally mandated to pursue its own self-interest, and so, in Bakan’s words, “can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others”. The remedy it proposes is regulation and the democratic control of corporations. Unread: filed from the two descriptions only. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, not read: no lawful full text was reached. The author’s faculty repository at UBC (Allard Research Commons, commons.allard.ubc.ca/books/4) holds a record with the publisher’s description but no file, and the book is in print. It is the source of the thesis that the corporation is an “institutional psychopath”, which the record files as a question (QUESTION on corporate psychopathy, 2026-10-23) and does not take from this book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1432 v2 | Debunking Corporate Moral Responsibility | Velasquez (2003), Business Ethics Quarterly 13(4):531–562. The core argument that a corporation is a separate moral agent rests on the fallacy of division; members are always causally responsible for any corporate act, and intentions ascribed to corporations are only “as if”. Unread beyond the publisher’s abstract: no lawful copy reached. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Cambridge Core, the journal’s host, offers it behind “Get access”; Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy (OpenAlex’s RePEc and DigitalGeorgetown entries are catalogue records, not texts); ResearchGate lists no full text; PhilPapers and PhilArchive refused this client behind a Cloudflare check; an academia.edu page under the title refused automated requests, and its uploader could not be seen, so it was not treated as an author copy. Only the publisher’s abstract was read. Filed with the 1983 paper (LIT-1429) as the developed form of the classic objection to corporate moral responsibility, for the owner’s corporate-psychopathy question. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1631 v2 | Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences | Bowker & Star (1999). Classification systems are infrastructure: once routine they become invisible, and what they make visible, actionable and countable, and what they leave residual, has material and moral consequences for the people and things classified; cases include the ICD, nursing classifications and racial classification under apartheid. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book is closed on Unpaywall (MIT Press), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1650 v2 | The looping effects of human kinds | Hacking (1995). Human kinds differ from natural kinds in that classifying people changes them: those classified, aware of the classification, change how they behave and see themselves, and the kind’s description must then change, a looping effect between a classification and what it classifies. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the chapter is closed on Unpaywall (Oxford Academic), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1673 v2 | Naturalized, Fundamental, and Feminist Metaphysics All at Once: The Case of Barad’s Agential Realism | Jaksland (2024), DOI-10.1017/hyp.2023.114, Hypatia 39. Barad holds agential realism to be naturalized metaphysics justified by quantum mechanics and applied once, to the one reality, and rejects reading it as analogy or as a template other domains instantiate. Its extension to the lifeworld then needs ontological features that admit no approximation (the subject–object and word–world dualisms, representationalism). Whether any exist is left open; individualism is the plausibly approximable case, and the independence of social theorizing from fundamental metaphysics is at least contingent, on the size of Planck’s constant. | Active — read in full 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1230); worth reading as the only statement of the argument Barad’s unrestricted scope needs, that some ontological features admit no approximation, and as the clearest account of the conception of agential realism Barad holds (naturalized, applied once) against the two she rejects (analogy, template). Its own answer to its question is that it is open, with individualism the plausibly approximable case and the dualisms the hard one. |
| LIT-1686 | Being one of us. Group identification, joint actions, and collective intentionality | Salice & Miyazono (2019/2020). Group identification, as the shared-agency literature uses it, conflates adopting the group’s perspective (team reasoning) with self-transformation (understanding oneself as a member). The two dissociate: the discursive dilemma shows perspective without identification, and toddlers’ joint action shows identification before perspective-taking appears. Self-transformation is a Pushmi-Pullyu representation, describing and motivating at once (“you are a member of us; act as such”), and is not under direct rational control. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1266) from the authors’ accepted manuscript in University College Cork’s repository (CORA); worth reading as the distinction between adopting a group’s perspective and the self-transformation of identifying as a member, the second cast as a Pushmi-Pullyu representation that motivates directly, and for its team reasoner versus team benefactor, which sharpens the owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491). Conceptual. |
| LIT-1698 | Team Reasoning and Intentional Cooperation for Mutual Benefit | Sugden (2015). Social preferences cannot represent trust: on Rabin-style intention-based preferences, the common-knowledge practice of trust in the Trust Game is not an equilibrium. Team reasoning can, but not Bacharach’s version, which maximizes a team utility, trades members’ interests off against each other and needs no assurance that others reason as a team. Sugden’s Schema of Cooperative Team Reasoning aims at each member’s benefit over a maximin benchmark, follows existing practices and binds only given reciprocal reason to believe the others endorse it. So a market exchange that serves each party’s interest can still be intended as mutual benefit, neither self-interest nor sacrifice. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1288) from the published version, open under CC BY-NC-ND at the Journal of Social Ontology; worth reading as Sugden’s own later statement of team reasoning, read in place of his 2003 paper (LIT-1782, Unavailable), and for its claim that team reasoning cannot be reduced to self-interest or to social preferences by redefining payoffs, which bears on the owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491). |
| LIT-1721 | Being one of us: we-identities and self-categorization theory | León (2023). A we-identity is one a subject has as a group member, is at times aware of, endorses, and cares about. Self-categorization theory explains we-identities by depersonalization, and phenomenologists (Zahavi, Salice) have adopted it as an account of the “we” in general. But the we-identities of close relationships arise by mutual individualization: partners grasp each other as non-substitutable and complementary. León proposes a socially extended account, drawing on Husserl and integrationist extended-mind criteria. | Active — read in full 2026-10-28 (NOTE-1309) from the open-access published article; worth reading as a philosopher’s limit on self-categorization theory: the we-identities of close relationships (long friendships, romantic partnerships) rest on mutual individualization and non-substitutability, the opposite of depersonalization, so the theory cannot be the general account of the “we” that phenomenologists have taken it to be. It proposes a socially extended account of such identities. An argument from cases and from relationship research, with no data of its own. Source of THEORY-1115. |
| LIT-1723 | Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory | Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher and Wetherell (1987), Blackwell. The founding statement of self-categorization theory: personal and social identity are levels of self-categorization, a category becomes salient by meta-contrast and fit, and group behaviour follows from depersonalization, self-perception as an interchangeable exemplar of the ingroup prototype, rather than from attraction or interdependence among members. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-28; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. The Internet Archive holds the 1987 Blackwell printing (rediscoveringsoc0000turn, 266 images) only as a controlled-lending item (access-restricted), which this client cannot borrow. The book has no DOI and no open edition was found. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied: a lawful copy exists, as a lending item (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Turner et al. 1994 (LIT-1794), Skorich’s critique (LIT-1765), which quotes chapter 3 with page numbers, León (LIT-1721), Hornsey 2008 (LIT-1742) and Reimer et al. (LIT-1790). |
| LIT-1744 | A Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Phenomena | Reicher, Spears & Postmes (1995). The SIDE model: anonymity in a group does not remove identity, it shifts it from the personal to the social level, so people become more responsive to the salient group norm, prosocial or antisocial; strategic effects depend on visibility to the in-group and out-group. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. OpenAlex lists no open copy and an exact-title web search found none posted by an author or publisher; Groningen’s Pure and UvA-DARE have records without files. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Spears and Postmes 2015 (LIT-1705). |
| LIT-1758 | Second-Person Engagement, Self-Alienation, and Group-Identification | Zahavi (2016/2019) reconstructs and defends Husserl’s empathy-based account of the “we” against Heidegger and Hans Bernhard Schmid. Truly social acts need a second-person relation: an I–Thou relation of reciprocal, communicative address, in which I am aware of the other and of myself as addressed by them. Taking over the other’s perspective on oneself, a self-apprehension Husserl calls “self-alienation”, lets the difference between self and other stay present but be “somewhat downplayed”, and that is a formal condition of coming to see oneself as “one of us”. A we is “not an enlarged I”: it preserves plurality and is not fusion. Zahavi likens the condition to self-categorization theory’s self-stereotyping, while noting that Husserl attends far more to the interpersonal encounter beneath it. Against Schmid he argues that the sense of “us” can be analysed, that not every social relation is a we, and that children’s self-awareness precedes their in-group bias. He concedes that an account built on the dyadic face-to-face “we” does not cover anonymous, institutional “we”s. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1289) from the peer-reviewed accepted manuscript in the University of Copenhagen’s repository (curis.ku.dk); worth reading as the phenomenologist’s case that coming to see oneself as one of us is a change in how one apprehends oneself, through another’s eyes, and that the resulting “we” is a plurality, not an enlarged I. |
| LIT-1765 | Reconceptualizing Individuals, Categories, and the Social Group: Self-Categorization Theory 2.0 | Skorich (2025, v2 2026), preprint. Five critiques of self-categorization theory as stated in Turner et al. 1987: categorization into equivalence classes is neither sufficient nor necessary for perceiving a group as an entity; “self-categorization” is underspecified and should mean categorization of intentional agents; the person level is underexamined; meta-contrast is computationally intractable as a basis for entity formation and rests on prototype semantics; and comparative relations are overemphasized. Proposes SCT2.0 (self-conceptualization theory): groups are perceived from cues to collective intentionality, and represented as atomic concepts with object files in a language of thought. | Active — read in full 2026-10-28 (NOTE-1295) from the PsyArXiv preprint, v2; worth reading as a sympathetic insider’s critique of self-categorization theory that quotes the 1987 book’s chapter 3 assumptions and hypotheses verbatim with page numbers, so it stands in for the unread book’s core statement. It argues that categorization yields interchangeability, not a group entity; that meta-contrast is computationally intractable as a basis for entity formation; and that groups are perceived from cues to collective intentionality. Unreviewed; its key experiments are under review. Source of THEORY-1112. |
| LIT-1782 | The Logic of Team Reasoning | Sugden (2003). A logic of team reasoning, in which agents ask “what should we do?” and act on their part of the best joint plan, conditional on assurance that others reason likewise; it explains coordination (the Hi-Lo game) that individual best-reply reasoning cannot. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. OpenAlex lists no open copy and an exact-title web search found none posted by an author or publisher; PhilArchive has a record (SUGTLO) that answered HTTP 403, so whether it holds a file is unknown; UEA’s repository and RePEc for the 2005 reprint in Teamwork offer no download. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Sugden 2015 (LIT-1698). |
| LIT-1874 | Corporate Agency and Possible Futures | Mulgan (2018), Journal of Business Ethics 154(4). Unread; from the abstract only. It asks for an account of corporate agency that is “temporally robust”, helping future people in broken or digital futures to resist domination by corporate groups with no regard for human beings, and argues that the only such account is “moralised extreme collectivism”: full moral personhood for those corporate groups, and only those, that are reliably disposed to respond appropriately to moral reasons. Expected to report Velasquez’s denial of corporate agency, which the record holds unread. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-30, not read. The publisher’s open-access copy (CC BY 4.0) is at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1.pdf. On 2026-10-30 that address, and the article page link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1, answered HTTP 200 with a 3 kB “Client Challenge” page that needs JavaScript, not the PDF, on two tries. The St Andrews repository copy that OpenAlex lists (hdl.handle.net/10023/13302, resolving to research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/13302) timed out twice with no bytes received, and a Wayback capture of the Springer PDF was refused (connection reset). No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Free copy: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1.pdf. |
| LIT-1875 | Collective Intentions and Collective Intentionality | Zaibert (2003), American Journal of Economics and Sociology 62(1). Searle’s social ontology needs we-intentions, but “Collective Intentions and Actions” (1990) gives none: of its four analyses of the hollandaise case, the two that are collective Searle rejects, the individualist one he rejects only because it allows no collective intentionality, and the one he favours is a complex individual by-means-of intention, which is “complex”, not “collective”. Searle there concedes he has “not demonstrated” that a reduction to individual intentions must fail. Since intentions, unlike desires, have only actions as their conditions of satisfaction, Zaibert holds that groups cannot have irreducible we-intentions, and suggests collective desires instead. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1431) in full, from the published PDF on the author’s faculty page at Union College (https://minerva.union.edu/zaibertl/zaibert%20on%20searle%20and%20collective%20intentions.pdf); worth reading as a secondary report of Searle’s unread “Collective Intentions and Actions” (LIT-490), which it quotes page by page (CIA 401–412), and as the argument that the paper gives no analysis of we-intentions: its favoured form is a complex individual by-means-of intention, and Searle concedes he has not shown that reduction to individual intentions fails. Read it knowing that it is a critic’s report, not the paper, and that its own positive suggestion, collective desires in place of collective intentions, is one paragraph. |
| LIT-1900 | L’individuation psychique et collective: À la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité | Simondon (1989), the psychic and collective half of the 1958 thesis on individuation. As read here at second hand (LIT-1911, LIT-1901): information is the meaning that arises when an individuation resolves a disparity between two domains; affectivity and emotion mark a subject’s encounter with the pre-individual charge it has not exhausted, which it resolves by joining a collective, the transindividual. Unread. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-31, not read. The book is in copyright and sold by its publisher, and no lawful free copy is known. Open Library lists the 1989 and 2007 Aubier printings with no e-book. An Internet Archive search for creator Simondon found only other works (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, and a school text). OpenAlex was out of its daily budget for this client. Its second half is quoted at length, in translation, by Iliadis (LIT-1911) and by Bencherki (LIT-1901). The whole thesis is translated in LIT-1648, also Unavailable. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1901 | A pre-individual perspective to organizational action | Bencherki (2017), ephemera 17(4). After Simondon, action is pre-individual: logically prior to the people and organizations that appear to be its authors, it contributes to the individuation of both at once. Affect (“affectivo-emotivity”) is how a person discovers a pre-individual load that can only be resolved by continuing into a collective individuation; when that is refused, the result is felt as disindividuation. An action’s signification is its participation in an individuation, so one action can have several. Illustrated by a documentary on Canadian military spouses, read as co-individuation, channeling and usurpation of their action by the army. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1482), from the journal’s open-access PDF (ephemera, CC BY-NC-ND). Worth reading as the direct ancestor of Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy’s “agency without agents” (LIT-1902): pre-individual action, affect, disindividuation, the continuation of personal into collective individuation, and coexisting significations are all here, seven years earlier. It is a conceptual proposal illustrated by excerpts from one documentary, not a test. |
| LIT-1902 | Agency Without Agents: Affective Forces, Communicative Events, and Organizational Becomings | Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (2024). A strong process theory of agency for organization studies. Agency is not an agent’s capacity to act but “the affective force, expressed as a communicative event, that governs the transition from one process of individuation to another”. It arises when one individuation process takes up another’s “excess action”, which may augment the ability to act of both and start a collective transindividuation. Failure is disindividuation. Communication is transduction, the continuity of action through processes, and meaning is retrospective. The illustration is a reanalysis of a meeting from Cooren’s ethnography of Médecins Sans Frontières. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1484), from the version of record the owner supplied. The publisher’s copy is open access (CC BY-NC 4.0) and a copy is deposited in R-libre (TÉLUQ). This client could not fetch either: SAGE and CORE served a bot check, and the repository reset every connection. Worth reading as the clearest statement in organization studies of agency without agents, built on Simondon’s individuation and Massumi’s affect. It is a conceptual proposal whose empirical illustration is a reanalysis, not a test. |
| LIT-1906 | Process as the Becoming of Temporal Trajectory | Hernes (2016), a six-page handbook chapter. Process is the becoming of temporal trajectory: events connect with other events as they occur and so define a trajectory that orients what follows. Unread: registered from metadata. Its claims here are as the parent paper reports them. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex reports it closed. SAGE Knowledge serves it to subscribers. The CBS Research Portal record holds no file. The Internet Archive holds no copy, and a web search for an author’s or course copy found none. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1912 | Dislocation and stabilization: How to scale up from interactions to organization | Cooren & Fairhurst (2009), in Putnam & Nicotera (eds), Building Theories of Organization, pp. 117–152. The Montréal School’s answer to how organization is constituted from interactions, framed as “scaling up” through dislocation and stabilization. Unread: registered from metadata. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref and Taylor & Francis, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The chapter has no DOI of its own in Crossref; the volume (DOI 10.4324/9780203891025) has no open licence and Semantic Scholar marks it closed. The Taylor & Francis chapter page served a bot check, which was not passed. Internet Archive’s copy of the volume (isbn_9780805847109) is lending-only (printdisabled). Papyrus (Université de Montréal) holds nothing by Cooren or Fairhurst; a web search found no author or course copy. Not a judgement on merit; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1913 | On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change | Tsoukas & Chia (2002). Change should be treated as the normal condition of organizations, not an exception to stability. After Bergson and James, change is ontologically prior to organization. It is “the reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits of action to accommodate new experiences obtained through interactions”, driven by the radial structure of categories and by human reflexivity. Organization is a secondary accomplishment in two senses: an attempt to order the flux of action, and a pattern that emerges from it. The paper is agent-centred: its becoming is carried by human actors. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1489), from the version of record (a scan with OCR) posted on the first author’s own site, htsoukas.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/tsoukas-chia-2002.pdf. Worth reading as the standard statement of “organizational becoming” in organization studies: change is ontologically prior to organization, and organization is a secondary accomplishment of it. A conceptual paper; its evidence is other people’s ethnographies, reread. |
| LIT-1914 | Acting for, with, and through: A relational perspective on agency in MSF’s organizing | Cooren (2018), in Brummans (ed.), The Agency of Organizing, pp. 142–169. A relational account of agency, in which any action is done for, with and through others, illustrated by interaction analysis of Médecins Sans Frontières meetings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The source of the excerpt Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy reanalyse. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The chapter is in a Routledge volume with no open licence in Crossref, and Semantic Scholar marks it closed. The Taylor & Francis chapter page served a bot check (403), which was not passed. Papyrus (Université de Montréal, umontreal.scholaris.ca) holds no item authored by Cooren; HAL holds other Cooren papers but not this one; a web search found no author or course copy. The excerpt the parent paper reanalyses therefore could not be compared with Cooren’s published transcript. Not a judgement on merit; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1916 | A Process Theory of Organization | Hernes (2014), Oxford University Press. A process theory of organization for “a world on the move”, after Whitehead, pragmatism and phenomenology. Organizing is made of events connected through time and given meaning by articulation. Agency belongs to events, not to actors set in advance. Unread: registered from metadata and the table of contents. Its claims here are as the parent paper reports them. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref and OUP’s metadata, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex reports it closed. Oxford Academic serves it to subscribers. The CBS Research Portal record holds no file. The Internet Archive holds no copy. A PhilPapers record (HERAPT-4) served a Cloudflare check, which was not passed, and nothing shows that it holds more than metadata. A library’s table-of-contents scan (toc.uni.li/FLMF043296.pdf) was read for the chapter structure. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1917 | Having to be: The possessive constitution of organization | Bencherki & Cooren (2011), Human Relations 64:1579–1607. Organizations act by being attributed actions: through the imbrication of mandates and programs of action, in a logic of appropriation and attribution, the organization acts while always relying on others to act for it, which reconciles “the organization acts itself” with “agents act on its behalf”. Grounded in meetings of a community organization, with Greimas’s narratology. Unread: registered from the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Crossref gives the SAGE version of record no open licence and Semantic Scholar marks it closed; SAGE’s PDF served a bot check (403), which was not passed. HAL holds a metadata-only notice (hal-00652927, under the variant title “To have or not to be”). Papyrus (Université de Montréal, now umontreal.scholaris.ca) holds Bencherki’s 2011 thesis, Avoir ou ne pas être, in French, which develops the same argument and cites the article as forthcoming, but not the article. R-libre (TÉLUQ) lists Bencherki’s later works, not this one. Not a judgement on merit; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1921 | From Modern to Postmodern Organizational Analysis | Chia (1995). What divides postmodern from modern organizational analysis is a style of thinking, not an epoch or a paradigm. Modernist thought rests on a “strong” ontology of being, of discrete states, static attributes and sequential events. Postmodern thought rests on a “weak” ontology of becoming, so it studies “local assemblages of ‘organizings’” rather than organizations, individuals and structures. Read from the abstract only. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref, not read beyond its abstract: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex reports it closed. SAGE serves it to subscribers. The University of Glasgow’s Enlighten record (eprints.gla.ac.uk/162488) says “Full text not currently available” and gives the abstract, which was read. The Internet Archive holds no copy, and a web search for an author’s or course copy found none. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1922 | The Constitution of Organization as Informational Individuation | Bencherki & Iliadis (2019; print 2021), Communication Theory. Proposes Simondon’s informational individuation as the theory of communication that the communicative-constitution-of-organization (CCO) tradition lacks. Information is a differential in action potential between differently ordered domains; communication is its propagation “from kin to kin” (transduction), which organizes each domain it passes through; an action’s signification is the reordering it brings about; entities at different levels coexist rather than scale up. Four propositions, illustrated by one meeting excerpt. Agency is not theorized. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1483) from the authors’ manuscript in R-libre, TÉLUQ’s repository: 43 pp., Word-generated, headed “A more recent version of this paper is published in Communication Theory”. The version of record (Oxford, subscription) was not read, so its pagination (pp. 442–462) could not be checked against the text. Worth reading as the bridge between Iliadis’s exegesis of Simondon (LIT-1911) and the communicative constitution of organization; it is a theoretical proposal with one illustrative excerpt. |