Margaret Gilbert (1989), Routledge, London and New York (x + 521 pp.; ISBN 0-415-02444-7); reissued by Princeton University Press, 1992 (paperback ISBN 9780691020808) — DOI-10.1515/9780691214627 (the Princeton edition)
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, under the topic
social-ontology that ADR-017 added, as Gilbert’s founding book.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read
and no NOTE is filed. What follows is only what the publishers and the
chapter metadata say.
What the publisher says. Princeton’s catalogue page frames the book around the question whether social groups are real independently of individuals’ thoughts and beliefs. It says Gilbert analyses shared action, social convention, group belief and the concept of a group, and proposes that core social phenomena are “plural subject” phenomena. It names Durkheim, Simmel, Weber and David Lewis among the thinkers discussed.
Contents (chapter titles and pages from Crossref, Princeton edition):
- I Introduction: everyday concepts and social reality (1–21)
- II ‘Social action’ and the subject matter of social science (22–57)
- III Action, meaning, and the social (58–145)
- IV Social groups: a Simmelian view (146–236)
- V After Durkheim: concerning collective belief (237–314)
- VI Social convention (315–407)
- VII On social facts (408–445)
Chapter V, on collective belief, is why epistemology is tagged.
Chapter VI is Gilbert’s treatment of convention, which takes up David
Lewis; Lewis’s Convention is being filed in the record the same day
(LIT-473). Chapter II’s question, what social science is about, is
why social-science is tagged.
Neighbours. The short version of the plural-subject account is “Walking Together” (LIT-477). The record’s only reading of Gilbert so far is second-hand, through Tomasello’s commentaries (LIT-125, NOTE-185).
No instruction for machine-learning practice is visible in what was seen, so nothing here points to the Anthology of the SOTA.
What a reading should check.
- Whether the book already uses “joint commitment”, or only “plural subject”, and how the two are related here.
- The argument of chapter VI against Lewis’s account of convention as a regularity sustained by preferences and expectations.
- What chapter V says a group’s belief is, and whether a group can believe what no member believes.