nucleation

THEORY-1247: Griesemer and Shavit propose, as a first and rough sketch, that a collective becomes a new level of individuality only when collaboration toward a shared goal, rather than coordination or cooperation, organizes it, some core interactions have become generatively entrenched, and it has organizational closure, and that such a community can be reproduced only by exporting an organized sample of its roles and interactions, not of its members alone

2 min read

Properties5
StatusActive
Tagsphilosophy-of-biology, individuation, social-ontology
SourceLIT-188 — Scaffolding individuality: coordination, cooperation, collaboration and community
Cited as “extends” byTHEORY-418 — A collective becomes a new level of individuality, on this sketch, only when collaboration toward a shared goal, rather than coordination or cooperation, organizes it and some core interactions have become generatively entrenched and, as the paper asserts without deriving it from entrenchment, it has organizational closure; such a community can then be reproduced only by exporting an organized sample of its roles and interactions, not of its members alone
Cited as “grounds” byCLAIM-529 — An organization can be individuated without presupposing it as a declared candidate whose verdict can come out false: criteria stated on the candidate's interactions (whether benefit can be booked per member, which interactions the others depend on, what removing an interaction type does, whether its order survives release from an outside scaffold) apply to a grouping not yet assumed to be a unit, while criteria stated as members' attitudes toward the group (a goal about it, belonging, identity) make it partly constituted by being taken as one, a different individuation, unavailable where members have no such attitudes, CLAIM-531 — Generative entrenchment does not by itself give organizational closure: an entrenched core, which later interactions depend on so that perturbing it is catastrophic and perturbing them tolerable, can sit at the root of an acyclic dependency order, and where interactions turn over such an order persists only while something outside supplies its core; an organization that is both entrenched and closed has a core containing a cycle of mutual maintenance, each interaction on which is itself core unless its share of the maintenance is redundant

Graph View

Source

Griesemer & Shavit (2023), LIT-188 (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 378, 20210398), read in full in NOTE-173 from the Europe PMC XML, with Table 1 fetched as an image. Section numbers stand in for pages.

The proposal

Three grades of interaction, each with its own grade of group (§1, Table 1). Coordination orders co-located members of a collection. Cooperation makes a conexus, a web of binary interactions with no shared goal required, whose benefit can still be booked per member. Collaboration makes a community: heterogeneous multi-way interactions for a shared goal, whose benefit “cannot even be recognized as group benefits without reference to the special interactions engendered by the group”. Table 1 draws “Transition to a new level-of-individuality perspective” between the second and third stages only.

Generative entrenchment drives the step from conexus to community: core interactions come to be ones “later-evolved interactions will depend on for their existence and character, so that perturbations of it will tend to be catastrophic” (§2). Community needs organizational closure, taken from Moreno and Mossio, and “Hence, community constitutes a new level of individuality” (§3). Following Caporael, a community “must be exported as an organized generative package larger than a single individual member” (§3).

What this does not say

  • That the proposal is right. The authors call it “not a fully-fledged model but only a first and rough sketch”. It gives no criteria by which a real group could fail to be a community, and “No data were reported”. That is THEORY-418’s promote_when.
  • That real transitions follow the sequence. It is “one possible pathway”, and reverse paths are allowed.
  • The abstract-only claims. It does not say that transitions are described without circularity, or that individuality is a special case of collectivity (NOTE-173, corrections).
  • That the Neolithic case shows anything. It is conditional: a migrant group “might require” one of each occupation.

Backlinks