Katherine Ritchie (2020), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100(2):402–424 (online 20 September 2018) — DOI-10.1111/phpr.12555
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as one of the works filling out the record’s coverage of social ontology under the topic ADR-017 added.
NOTE-389 is the close reading of 2026-10-02, and it placed the work: Active. Its value to this record is the distinction it draws between two kinds of social group, which the record’s two social-ontology strands have so far taken one at a time. The group-agency and group-mind works (List & Pettit LIT-391, List LIT-401, Schwitzgebel LIT-159, Kammerer LIT-409, Huebner LIT-426, and Tollefsen LIT-483 filed beside this) are about organised groups. The social-construction works (Haslanger, Ásta) are about categories like women and races. Ritchie’s framework puts both in one ontology and says what separates them: an organised group is a concrete structured whole whose members occupy roles in its own (internal) structure; a feature group is a kind, a position in a structure that relates it to other positions (external).
What the distinction implies for the group-agency and group-mind works. Ritchie never discusses agency or minds; “agent”, “agency” and “consciousness” do not occur in the paper’s text. What follows is this record’s application, from the paper’s definitions.
- Only organised groups are candidates. On Ritchie’s view a feature group is a kind, “(clusters of) properties” or a class-like entity (p. 420), not a concrete whole. A kind does not act and is not a subject. So the question List (LIT-401) and List & Pettit (LIT-391) ask, whether a group can be an agent, and the one Schwitzgebel (LIT-159) asks, whether one can be conscious, apply to organised groups only. List’s own examples (a firm, the FBI, a university, a board; NOTE-340) and the “companies, churches, and states” of List & Pettit’s publisher description are organised social groups in Ritchie’s sense. Talk of what “women” or “the working class” wants is then either about an organisation formed from its members (Ritchie’s n. 25: a Black Lives Matter chapter, not African Americans) or not literal.
- Schwitzgebel’s United States is not an organised social group in her sense. NOTE-381 records his definition: “a spatially distributed, concrete entity with people as some or all of its parts”, which his best guess extends to artefacts and computers. Ritchie requires every node of an organised group to be occupied by people, social creatures or structured groups of them (condition (ii), p. 413), and treats a whole with stadiums and bank accounts among its occupants as a different social entity (p. 411). So the entity Schwitzgebel asks about falls outside her group category, in the wider class of structured social entities she gestures at; the US government and Congress fall inside it.
- Nesting. Ritchie lets organised groups have organised groups as members (Congress with the House and Senate as members; n. 24). That is nesting of groups in groups, with no claim about minds, so it bears on THEORY-043’s anti-nesting question only as a reminder that group composition already nests.
- THEORY-043 does not move. Ritchie’s structures are networks of social roles and power relations, not causal or informational architecture, and she offers no criterion for agency, awareness or experience.
Other connections. Durkheim (LIT-484) is cited for the group as more than a “mere sum of individuals”, from a later chapter than the one filed here. Haslanger (LIT-480) is quoted accurately (her pp. 38–39) and reinterpreted as identifying women with a node. Ásta’s conferralism is reinterpreted from her 2011 and 2015 papers, not from her book (LIT-491). The 2013 paper (LIT-479) is the source of the organised-group view, here amended (n. 22).
Topic. social-ontology is primary. metaphysics holds the structuralism
and the constitutive-dependence account of the social; mereology holds
organised groups as structured wholes with groups as possible members;
individuation holds the identity condition and coincidence.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here points to the Anthology of the SOTA.