Source
Katherine Ritchie (2020, online 20 September 2018), “Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups”, LIT-486, read in full in NOTE-389. Page numbers are the journal’s. The organized-group half is carried over from Ritchie (2013), LIT-479 (NOTE-390; THEORY-549).
What was actually shown
Social structure (p. 407). “A social structure is a structure that is constitutively dependent on social factors.” Constitutive dependence is a disjunction: defining S needs social factors, or they are metaphysically necessary for S, or they ground S. Merely causal dependence (lactose tolerance and dairy farming) is not enough.
Three distinctions (pp. 408–410). Overt or covert; intentionally or unintentionally created, and instantiated; internal or external relative to a realization. A structure is internal if every node is occupied by elements of the system and every element occupies a node. The American League structure is internal to the league and external to each team (p. 410).
Organized social groups (pp. 410–414). Structured wholes. Their structures are social, their node occupiers are people, social creatures or structured groups of them (p. 413), and they are often overt and intentional (p. 414). Coincident clubs with the same members are distinct (p. 412). Groups can be members of groups: Congress with the House and Senate (n. 24). People in an X shape, women and African Americans are not organized groups (p. 414).
Feature social groups (pp. 414–420). Groups whose members share a feature broadly construed. They are social kinds (p. 415) and, on the proposal, 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 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). Intersectional groups are nodes in distinct, more complex structures, not sums of single-axis ones (pp. 417–419).
Goldilocks (p. 420). No actual social structure has a node for people whose left ear is larger than their right, or for people who have visited Boise.
What could have come out otherwise. A standard account of gender could have resisted being read as a node. Three did not. The paper names one view that would: gender fixed by chromosomes alone (p. 417; NOTE-389 corrects the paper’s “could be accommodated” to “could not be”).
What this does not say
- That every feature group is a node. The paper shows the framework accommodates three views of gender. It does not argue against rivals, and its author says “more would need to be done” (p. 414) and “significantly more would need to be said” about intersectionality (p. 419).
- That structuralism keeps arbitrary collections out. The restriction to structures that “(a) intuitively exist or (b) figure in causal or other explanations” (p. 410) does that work. It is not derived from the framework, and any ontology could adopt it.
- That covert, unintended structures cause oppression. Offered as a possibility, “it might be” (p. 420).
- That “social structure” is one relation. Constitutive dependence is three relations (definitional, modal, grounding) joined by “or”.
- Anything about agency or minds. The words do not occur. What follows is the record’s application (NOTE-389, LIT-486 Standing): only organized groups are candidates for agency or consciousness, since a kind does not act. Every group agent in List’s examples (NOTE-340) is an organized group. Talk of what “women” want is about an organization formed from members (n. 25) or is not literal. Schwitzgebel’s United States, with artefacts among its parts (NOTE-381), fails condition (ii) and falls among the wider social entities of p. 411.
Connections
- Extends THEORY-549, Ritchie’s 2013 account of groups as realized structures, which it keeps for organized groups with a collective membership definition (n. 22).
- Haslanger (LIT-480, THEORY-667) supplies the feature-group case it reinterprets, quoted accurately from her pp. 38–39. Ritchie’s n. 30 says her framework, unlike Haslanger’s, can count self-identification as a marker.
- Ásta (LIT-491, unread) is the other account reinterpreted, from her 2011 and 2015 papers, not the book.
- Durkheim (LIT-484, THEORY-648) is cited for the group as more than a “mere sum of individuals”, from a later chapter than the one filed.
- The group-agency strand (LIT-391, LIT-401, THEORY-139, THEORY-043). The distinction scopes their questions to organized groups. It does not say whether any organized group is an agent.