ADR-017: social-ontology joins the topics

Context

The owner asked how the record covers social ontology. It covered the philosophy of mind of groups, a strand built up around THEORY-043: Schwitzgebel’s conscious United States, Kammerer’s reply, List on group agents, and List & Pettit and Huebner unread. It held almost nothing on the prior question of what a group, an institution or a social fact is. Searle appeared ten times, all for the Chinese Room. Gilbert, Bratman, Tuomela, Lewis’s Convention, Guala, Epstein, Haslanger and Hacking were absent.

None of the existing words could hold the subject:

• society-and-governance is law, politics, policy and institutions as practised;
• social-science is empirical and theoretical work on people and societies;
• metaphysics, agency and mereology each hold one face of it.

The group works carried all of these at once, which is how a missing word shows. The owner asked for the literature to be filed and the topic added.

Decision

Add social-ontology to topics, in the philosophy group, after phenomenology. Its blurb: “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”.

The last clause is deliberate. Whether a group can be an agent or a mind is asked by social ontologists and philosophers of mind alike, and the record’s group-mind works belong on this page as well as on consciousness.

Retagged. No tag was removed.

• First tag: LIT-391 (List & Pettit, Group Agency), whose thesis that group agents exist over and above their members is a social-ontological claim.
• Third tag, after their subject: LIT-401 (List, “What is it like to be a group agent?”) and LIT-426 (Huebner, Macrocognition).
• Last tag: LIT-159 (Schwitzgebel, the United States), LIT-125 (Tomasello, obligation as pressure from a joint agent “we”) and LIT-188 (Griesemer & Shavit, collections, conexuses and communities).

Alternatives considered

• Widen society-and-governance. It is the record’s word for courts, doctrine and policy, read for what they did. A question about what makes a court exist at all is a different subject, and a reader browsing either would be badly served by the other.
• Widen social-science. The subject is argued by philosophers about the objects social scientists study. Economists’ institutions (North, Guala) are on the boundary, and they carry both words.
• A narrower word, collective-intentionality or group-agency. Each names one programme. Social construction and social kinds (Hacking, Haslanger, Ásta) and Epstein’s grounding framework are not about intentions or agency, and would need a third word.

Consequences

The filings that follow in the same contribution lead with the new word. THEORY-043’s anti-nesting question now has a literature to draw on: the grounding-and-anchoring distinction (Epstein), rules in equilibrium (Hindriks & Guala), and whether group agents are “over and above” their members (List & Pettit).