NOTE-389: Ritchie — Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups

Contribution

It puts two kinds of social group into one ontology without collapsing them. Teams, courts and committees (organized social groups) and races, genders and classes (feature social groups) are both defined through social structures, but the first are wholes structured from inside and the second are positions in structures that relate them to other positions. It supplies a definition of “social structure” (constitutive dependence on social factors) and three distinctions among structures, and shows how the framework can keep arbitrary collections of people from counting as groups.

Key insight

“Group” names two different things. A baseball team is a concrete whole: its members fill roles defined by relations among themselves. “Women” is not a whole of that kind; it is a place in a gender structure defined by its relations to other places (subordination to “men”), with requirements on who can occupy it. Both are social because the structures are, and the difference between them is internal versus external structure.

Assumptions

• Structures as in structuralism. Complexes of relations that make nodes available, with possibly null further requirements on occupiers (pp. 405–406, after Koslicki). Structures are treated as universals that exist only when instantiated, for convenience (n. 9).
• “Social” is not defined. It is characterised by examples (marriage, money, recessions, driving on the right, the popularity of athleisure), and a non-circular definition is said to be unlikely (p. 404, n. 5).
• Constitutive dependence, disjunctive (p. 407). S constitutively depends on social factors iff (i) defining S requires reference to social factors, or (ii) social factors are metaphysically necessary for S, or (iii) social factors ground S’s existence. Merely causal dependence (lactose tolerance and dairy farming) is not enough (p. 407).
• The Goldilocks Constraint (p. 403) is a desideratum, motivated partly by common sense (n. 3); it is not an argument against universalism about arbitrary sets or sums of people (p. 403).
• A restriction (p. 410). Only social structures that “(a) intuitively exist or (b) figure in causal or other explanations” are in scope. This, with the conditions on node occupiers, is what keeps arbitrary collections out.
• Views of gender are not argued for. Haslanger’s, MacKinnon’s and Ásta’s are used as illustrations (pp. 409, 416–417).

Key results

• Social structure (p. 407). “A social structure is a structure that is constitutively dependent on social factors.”
• Three distinctions (pp. 408–410). Overt or covert, from Griffiths: whether the dependence on the social is or could be openly acknowledged (the three branches of US government are overt, gender covert). Intentionally or unintentionally created, and intentionally or unintentionally instantiated, which can come apart (an experimenter instantiating an unplanned class structure). Internal or external relative to a realization: internal if every node is occupied by elements of the system and every element occupies a node; external if the system’s elements occupy only some nodes. The American League structure is internal to the league and external to each team (p. 410).
• Organized social groups (pp. 410–414). Structured wholes, from Ritchie 2013. Membership: some things X are the members of a group with structure S at t and w iff together X occupy the nodes of S, that is, are functionally related “or at least normatively bound” as S requires (p. 411). “Occupy the nodes” is collective, so two groups can share a structure (n. 22, an amendment to the 2013 definition). Identity: G1 = G2 only if their structures co-vary across times and worlds and the same things occupy the same nodes (p. 412), a necessary condition only; persistence is not given. Coincident clubs with the same members are distinct (p. 412). Conditions: (i) the structure is social; (ii) node occupiers are people, social creatures or structured groups of them (p. 413); and often (iii) overt and (iv) intentionally created and instantiated (p. 414). The Supreme Court meets all four; a family meets (i) and (ii) with a structure that can be covert and unintended (pp. 412–413). Excluded as organised groups: people in an X shape, the moons of Jupiter, amoebas in a dish, women, African Americans (p. 414).
• Groups within groups (n. 24). Organised groups can be members of organised groups: Congress with the House and Senate as members.
• Not every social entity is a group (p. 411). Major League Baseball has corporate entities, stadiums and bank accounts as node occupiers, and a game includes a field and a ball; these are other social entities a general structuralism would treat with other restrictions.
• Feature social groups (pp. 414–420). Groups whose members share a feature or cluster of features, broadly construed (being judged to have ancestry, self-identifying, being bound by common norms) (p. 415). They are social kinds (p. 415), and on the proposal they are nodes in social structures (p. 416). Haslanger’s and MacKinnon’s accounts of gender read as identifying women with a node related to men by dominance and subordination, with the bodily marker as a further requirement (pp. 409, 416–417); Ásta’s conferralism reads as a node whose occupation requires a conferred status (p. 417). Conditions: (i) defined at least in part by social factors; (ii) occupiers restricted to people or social creatures; (iii) multiple occupiers allowed (p. 419), which excludes single roles such as the US President.
• Intersectional groups (pp. 417–419). Not by joining a gender structure to a race structure, which would make Asian women people in one group related to people in another, but by distinct, more complex structures (class; class and race; class, race and gender), none a proper part of another.
• Covert, unintended structures and oppression (pp. 419–420). Feature groups that are nodes in covert, mainly unintended structures may be the ones involved in widespread oppression. Offered as a possibility (“it might be”).
• Goldilocks met (p. 420). There is no actual social structure with a node for people whose left ear is larger than their right, or for people who have visited Boise.
• Extensions (p. 421). Artefacts as wholes with overt intentional structures, money and property as nodes, individual roles as kind-level nodes. Gestures only.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	A theory of social groups should include the intuitive and explanatory ones and not overgenerate	desideratum	p. 403; partly common sense (n. 3)
C2	Social structures are those constitutively, not merely causally, dependent on social factors	moderate as a definition	pp. 406–407; the causal case (lactose tolerance) shows why causal dependence is too weak
C3	Organized social groups are structured wholes with internal social structures, distinct from their members	moderate	pp. 410–412; carries over Ritchie 2013’s arguments (n. 19)
C4	Organized-group structures are social and take people (or social creatures, or groups) as occupiers, and are usually overt and intentional	moderate	pp. 413–414; families are the exception for (iii)–(iv)
C5	Feature social groups are social kinds that are nodes in external social structures	weak–moderate	pp. 415–419; shown to accommodate three accounts of gender, not argued against rivals; “more would need to be done” (p. 414)
C6	The framework handles intersectional groups as nodes in more complex structures, not sums of single-axis ones	weak–moderate	pp. 417–419; a sketch, “significantly more would need to be said” (p. 419)
C7	The framework meets the Goldilocks Constraint for both kinds of group	moderate, conditional on the p. 410 restriction	pp. 413–414, 420; the anti-overgeneration work is done by the restriction to intuitive or explanatory structures
C8	Feature groups in covert, unintended structures may be those involved in widespread oppression	assertion	p. 420, hedged
C9	Structuralism extends to artefacts, money, property and roles	gesture	p. 421

Concepts

• Social structure — a structure constitutively dependent on social factors (p. 407).
• Overt / covert — whether a structure’s social dependence is or would on reflection be acknowledged (p. 408).
• Internal / external structure — relative to a realization: whether the system’s elements occupy all the nodes and only nodes, or only some nodes (pp. 409–410).
• Organized social group — a structured whole realizing an internal social structure with people or social creatures as node occupiers (pp. 410–414).
• Feature social group — a social kind that is a node in a social structure, defined partly by social factors, occupied by people or social creatures, allowing many occupiers (p. 419).
• Goldilocks Constraint — include common-sense and explanatory social groups, do not overgenerate (p. 403).

Connections

• Ritchie 2013 (LIT-479, NOTE-390). The organised-group view is carried over, with the membership definition made collective (n. 22) after discussion with Pickel, and with node occupation allowed to be normative (“normatively bound”, n. 21, after Thomasson).
• Haslanger (LIT-480, NOTE-394). The quotations at pp. 409 and 417 match Haslanger’s pp. 39 and 38. Ritchie’s n. 30 says her framework can count self-identification as a marker and so avoid Jenkins’s objection that Haslanger’s view excludes trans women; whether Haslanger’s definitions can do the same is not discussed.
• Ásta (LIT-491). Reinterpreted from “The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender” (2011) and “Social Construction” (2015), not from the book filed here.
• Durkheim (LIT-484, NOTE-391). Cited (p. 403) for the distinction between a social group and a “mere sum of individuals”, from the Halls translation p. 129, a later chapter than the one filed.
• List & Pettit (LIT-391), List (LIT-401, NOTE-340), Schwitzgebel (LIT-159, NOTE-131, NOTE-381), Kammerer (LIT-409). None is cited, and the paper never uses “agent”, “agency” or “consciousness”. Read against them:
  • every group agent in List’s examples (NOTE-340) is an organised social group in Ritchie’s sense, and feature groups, being kinds, are not candidates for agency or mind at all;
  • Schwitzgebel’s United States, a concrete entity whose parts include people and, on his best guess, artefacts and computers (NOTE-381), fails condition (ii) for organised groups and belongs with the wider social entities of p. 411;
  • groups as members of groups (n. 24) is nesting without minds. These applications are this record’s.
• Griesemer & Shavit (LIT-188), Tomasello (LIT-125). Not cited. Tomasello’s joint “we” of two collaborators would be an organised group with an internal, intentionally instantiated structure; his cultural in-group, identified with from about age 3 (NOTE-185), is closer to a feature group. The comparison is this record’s.

Bearing on the record

• THEORY-043: no change. The structures here are social roles and power relations, not causal or informational organisation, and the paper offers no criterion for agency, awareness or experience.
• For the group-agency strand: a scoping result. The distinction says which groups the agency and consciousness questions are about (organised ones), and that the entity Schwitzgebel asks about is not a group in this sense. It does not say whether any organised group is an agent or a mind.
• For the social-construction strand. It is the held bridge between Haslanger’s and Ásta’s accounts of social categories and the metaphysics of groups.
• No ML instruction. Nothing belongs in the anthology.

Limitations

• It is a framework to “motivate”, not a demonstration; the author says more work is needed to show it is the most viable model (pp. 414–415).
• The Goldilocks Constraint is met partly by the scoping restriction of p. 410, which is not derived from structuralism; any ontology could adopt it.
• Constitutive dependence is a disjunction of three different relations (definitional, modal, grounding), so “social structure” may cover structures that differ in how they depend on the social.
• Persistence of organised groups is left open (p. 412).
• Feature groups are shown to be compatible with three views of gender; the paper does not show that every feature group is a node.

Open questions

• What are the persistence conditions of organized social groups through change of structure?
• Are feature social groups properties or classes? The paper allows both (p. 420).
• Can a structure be both internal to an organised group and external to a feature group, as with an organisation of the members of a feature group, and what follows for collective action by such groups?

Corrections

• No dossier existed, so there is no seeded skim to correct.
• Date. The request cited 2020, the issue year (100(2), March 2020). The article was published online on 20 September 2018 (Crossref; the PDF carries ”© 2018”).
• A slip in the paper (p. 417). “There are, of course, views of gender or other features that are not amenable to treatment in the ontological framework under development. For instance, a view on which gender is dependent solely on chromosomes and not on any social relations could be accommodated by a structuralist framework.” The example is offered as a view the framework cannot treat, so “could be accommodated” should read “could not be”.