Traditionally, social entities (i.e., social properties, facts, kinds, groups, institutions, and structures) have not fallen within the purview of mainstream metaphysics. In this chapter, we consider whether the exclusion of social entities from mainstream metaphysics is philosophically warranted or if it instead rests on historical accident or bias. We examine three ways one might attempt to justify excluding social metaphysics from the domain of metaphysical inquiry and argue that each fails. Thus, we conclude that social entities are not justifiably excluded (...) from metaphysical inquiry. Finally, we ask how focusing on social entities could change the character of metaphysical inquiry. We suggest that starting from examples of social entities might lead metaphysicians to rethink the assumption that describing reality in terms of intrinsic, independent, and individualistic features is preferable to describing it in terms of relational, dependent, and non-individualistic features. (shrink)

I'd like to begin by thanking Katherine Hawley, Daniel Korman and Stephen Schiffer for their extremely interesting and insightful comments, which very much enrich the discussion. I am both honored and grateful that such fine philosophers would spend their time and careful attention on my work. Since there doesn't seem to be significant overlap across their concerns, I will simply respond to each in turn.

In this paper, we investigate the effect described in the literature as the Group Knobe Effect, which is an asymmetry in ascription of intentionality of negative and positive side-effects of an action performed by a group agent. We successfully replicate two studies originally conducted by Michael and Szigeti, who observed this effect and provide empirical evidence of the existence of two related effects—Group Epistemic and Doxastic Knobe Effects—which show analogous asymmetry with respect to knowledge and belief ascriptions. We explain how (...) the existence of the Group Knobe Effect and its epistemic and doxastic counterparts affects the philosophical debate on collective agency and intentionality and supports the intuitiveness of realism about collective agency among laypeople. We also critically assess the reasoning presented by Michael and Szigeti in favor of the realist-collectivist interpretation of their results. We argue that a thorough analysis of both their data and our new findings shows a rather wide range of differing intuitions among laypeople regarding the status of groups as agents. These results show that while some laypeople may have realist-collectivist intuitions, the contrary realist-distrubutivist intuitions are also widespread and the claim that the majority of laypeople hold collectivist intuitions regarding group agency is unjustified. (shrink)

Two theories dominate the current debate on group agency: functionalism, as endorsed by Bryce Huebner and Brian Epstein, and interpretivism, as defended by Deborah Tollefsen, and Christian List and Philip Pettit. In this paper, I will give a new argument to favour functionalism over interpretivism. I discuss a class of cases which the former, but not the latter, can accommodate. Two features characterise this class: First, distinct groups coincide, that is numerically distinct groups share all their members at all time. (...) Second, we have access to the inner mechanisms of the groups agents, because members know what they have decided on. I construct a counterexample with these features allowing me to reject interpretivism about group agency in favour of functionalism. (shrink)

The ontology of social objects and facts remains a field of continued controversy. This situation complicates the life of social scientists who seek to make predictive models of social phenomena. For the purposes of modelling a social phenomenon, we would like to avoid having to make any controversial ontological commitments. The overwhelming majority of models in the social sciences, including statistical models, are built upon ontological assumptions that can be questioned. Recently, however, artificial neural networks have made their way into (...) the social sciences, raising the question whether they can avoid controversial ontological assumptions. ANNs are largely distinguished from other statistical and machine learning techniques by being a representation-learning technique. That is, researchers can let the neural networks select which features of the data to use for internal representation instead of imposing their preconceptions. On this basis, I argue that neural networks can avoid ontological assumptions to a greater degree than common statistical models in the social sciences. I then go on, however, to establish that ANNs are not ontologically innocent either. The use of ANNs in the social sciences introduces ontological assumptions typically in at least two ways, via the input and via the architecture. (shrink)

Despite having faced severe criticism in the past, mereological approaches to group ontology, which argue that groups are wholes and that groups members are parts, have recently managed a comeback. Authors such as Katherine Ritchie and Paul Sheehy have applied neo-Aristotelian mereology to groups, and Katherine Hawley has defended mereological approaches against the standard objections in the literature. The present paper develops the mereological approaches to group ontology further and proposes an analysis of group membership as parthood plus further restrictions. (...) While all mereological accounts agree that group members are parts of the group, it has become clear that this analysis is insufficient. I discuss three proposals to develop the mereological analysis of group membership and then put forward a combined solution to the puzzle. According to my proposal, the members of a reading group are agents who are part of the group and have been designated to contribute to the group. (shrink)

Lookism refers to discrimination based on physical attractiveness or the lack thereof. A whole host of empirical research suggests that lookism is a pervasive and systematic form of social discrimination. Yet, apart from some attention in ethics and political philosophy, lookism has been almost wholly overlooked in philosophy in general and epistemology in particular. This is particularly salient when compared to other forms of discrimination based on race or gender which have been at the forefront of epistemic injustice as a (...) topic of research. This paper argues that lookism is associated with various forms of epistemic injustice. In the specific case of lookism, hermeneutic injustice takes the shape of the taboo of acknowledging that unattractive people are unattractive. This, on the one hand, results in a hampered understanding of one’s own situation insofar as one is deterred from seeing one’s looks as one major factor for one’s social position. On the other hand, this hermeneutic injustice serves as the backdrop of instances of a special kind testimonial injustice in which the ugly person’s burgeoning realization that their looks influence their social standing detrimentally is discounted due to the pejorative nature of ascribing someone the property of being unattractive or ugly. (shrink)

Social groups—like teams, committees, gender groups, and racial groups—play a central role in our lives and in philosophical inquiry. Here I develop and motivate a structuralist ontology of social groups centered on social structures (i.e., networks of relations that are constitutively dependent on social factors). The view delivers a picture that encompasses a diverse range of social groups, while maintaining important metaphysical and normative distinctions between groups of different kinds. It also meets the constraint that not every arbitrary collection of (...) people is a social group. In addition, the framework provides resources for developing a broader structuralist view in social ontology. (shrink)

It is natural to think that social groups are concrete material particulars, but this view faces an important objection. Suppose the chess club and nature club have the same members. Intuitively, these are different clubs even though they have a common material basis. Some philosophers take these intuitions to show that the materialist view must be abandoned. I propose an alternative explanation. Social groups are concrete material particulars, but there is a psychological explanation of nonidentity intuitions. Social groups appear coincident (...) but nonidentical because they are perceived to be governed by conflicting social norms. (shrink)

An increasing number of philosophers argue that indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) in the sense that indeterminacy has its source in the world itself (rather than how the world is represented or known). The standard arguments for metaphysical indeterminacy are centered around the sorites paradox. In this essay, I present a novel argument for metaphysical indeterminacy. I argue that metaphysical indeterminacy follows from the existence of constitutive social construction; there is indeterminacy in the social world because there is indeterminacy in (...) how the social world is constructed. (shrink)

There is a widespread sentiment that social objects such as nation-states, borders, and pieces of money are just figments of our collective imagination and not really ‘out there’ in the world. Call this the ‘antirealist intuition’. Eliminativist, reductive materialist, and immaterialist views of social objects can all make sense of the antirealist intuition, in one way or another. But these views face serious difficulties. A promising alternative view is nonreductive materialism. Yet it is unclear whether and how nonreductive materialists can (...) make sense of the antirealist intuition. I develop a version of nonreductive materialism that is able to meet this explanatory demand. The central idea is that social objects are materially constituted, response-dependent objects. I go on to offer an independent argument in favor of this response-dependent view of social objects. I then suggest that a proponent of this view can appeal to the response-dependent nature of social objects to explain, or explain away, the antirealist intuition. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider the relative significance of concrete and abstract features for the identity and persistence of a group. The theoretical background for our analysis is the position according to which groups are realizations of structures. Our main argument is that the relative significance of the abstract features with respect to the significance of concrete features can vary across different types of groups. The argumentation will be backed by introducing the examples in which we show that this difference (...) in significance can affect the identity and persistence of the group. (shrink)

All too often, social kinds function as sites of oppression. To be a woman, to be Black, to be trans – each, in its own way, situates someone at the lower end of a social hierarchy. Membership in such groups thus constitutes a liability: notwithstanding the goods people draw from sharing in these identities, they also stand at perpetual risk of those same identities exposing them to significant harm. What, if anything, can members of oppressed groups do to counter that (...) oppression? In this article I explore one possible strategy: people can – and do – strategically invoke their membership in what I call ‘anti-oppressive kinds’, in order to contest the oppression they face qua members of oppressed groups. Focusing on one particularly salient anti-oppressive kind, the human, I first offer an explanation as to how and why its invocation might be politically effective, before considering some hazards with its use. (shrink)

Moral equality—the idea that ‘we’ all have equal moral worth, our interests ought to count for the same, and we possess the same bundle of basic rights—is one of the most central principles of liberal thought, being regularly drawn on as a presupposition of moral and political inquiry. Perhaps because it is so often relied on as a presupposition, however, moral equality is more often assumed than argued for. When moral equality is argued for, the most common tactic is to (...) appeal to some inherent property. As is well established, however, such property-based defenses of moral equality face two significant challenges: the problem of exclusion and the problem of inequality. In light of these challenges, in this article I put forward a new, revisionist account of moral equality. Taking inspiration from recent work in the social metaphysics of human kinds, I argue that moral equality ought to be seen as a component of a status that we confer on one another, rather than (grounded in) a property inherent in certain individuals. Conceiving of moral equality this way, I argue, side-steps both the problem of exclusion and the problem of natural equality. (shrink)

In her recent article “The Ontology of Social Groups”, Thomasson (Synthese 196:4829–4845, 2019) argues that social groups can be characterized in terms of the norms that surround them. We show that according to Thomasson’s normativity-based criterion, the dead constitute a social group, since there are widespread and well-defined social norms as to how to treat the dead, such as the norm expressed in the title (“Speak no ill of the dead”). We argue that the example of the dead must not (...) be interpreted as a counterexample to this criterion, and that, rather, there are good reasons to think of the dead as a genuine social group. Furthermore, the dead as a social group exist, regardless of whether or not the dead (i.e. the members of this social group) exist as persons. This view is clearly incompatible with the idea that social groups can be explained by citing features of their members, which is why we take the case of the dead to pose a challenge for the thesis of individualism. We consider the ontological implications of this example and suggest that social groups ought to be seen as reifications of social norms. Another implication of taking the dead to be a social group is that the presence of external norms is sufficient for the existence of a social group, and therefore internal norms are not necessary. We defend this implication against some potential theoretical and moral problems. (shrink)

Recent work in metaphysics has focused on the nature of artefacts, most accounts of which assume that artefacts depend on the intentions of their individual makers. Artefacts are thus importantly different from institutional kinds, which involve collective intentions. However, recent work in social ontology has yielded renewed focus on the social dimensions of various kinds, including artefacts. As a result, some philosophers have suggested that artefacts have a distinctly social dimension that goes beyond their makers' individual intentions but which stops (...) short of the collective intentionality of institutional kinds. I aim to combine these insights into an account of artefacts that involves disjunctive conditions of mind-dependence: Artefacts can either depend on the singular intentions of their makers or they can depend on the collective acceptance of particular social groups. Whether the first or second disjunct is satisfied depends on the artefact's context of creation. I'll argue that this applies not to artefact kinds but to individual artefacts. I then consider two objections to my view based on Robinson Crusoe cases and show how my account allows us to fit artefacts into a taxonomy of social kinds. (shrink)

We say that each social group is identical to its members. The group just is them; they just are the group. This view of groups as pluralities has tended to be swiftly rejected by social metaphysicians, if considered at all, mainly on the basis of two objections. First, it is argued that groups can change in membership, while pluralities cannot. Second, it is argued that different groups can have exactly the same members, while different pluralities cannot. We rebut these objections, (...) and argue that our plural view is superior to alternative reductive proposals which would identify social groups with the sets or fusions of their members. Finally we deal with some further potential challenges for the view of groups as pluralities. Thus we aim to establish it as a serious contender in the metaphysics of groups. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to rescue the holist position on corporate agency (CA) from indignities heaped upon it by friends and enemies alike. Two general criticisms strike at the core of the position: the charge of ‘material failures’ (that the corporate agent lacks a proper material presence) and the charge of illusion (that the intentionality of the corporate agent consists in the intentionality of the members). Both attack the holist position on metaphysical grounds, logically prior to any claims (...) of agency; if these charges cannot be answered then much of the CA literature collapses.The article begins by outlining the criticisms and a holist account of corporate agents that incorporates and transcends earlier offerings on corporate agency from French, List and Pettit, and others. It then addresses the charge of material failures, demonstrating that the holist corporate agent is a material entity (nothing ‘ghostly,’) and arguing that neither its scattered nature nor its dependency on voluntary participation undermines that status. It closes by addressing the charge of illusion, demonstrating that the common charge of double-counting member intentionality is false. Both charges arise from the same misreading of the holist position, which ignores the metaphysics of the corporate agent. (shrink)

The paper shows how to use the Husserlian phenomenological method in contemporary philosophical approaches to mathematical practice and mathematical ontology. First, the paper develops the phenomenological approach based on Husserl's writings to obtain a method for understanding mathematical practice. Then, to put forward a full-fledged ontology of mathematics, the phenomenological approach is complemented with social ontological considerations. The proposed ontological account sees mathematical objects as social constructions in the sense that they are products of culturally shared and historically developed practices. (...) At the same time the view endorses the sense that mathematical reality is given to mathematicians with a sense of independence. As mathematical social constructions are products of highly constrained, intersubjective practices and accord with the phenomenologically clarified experience of mathematicians, positing them is phenomenologically justified. The social ontological approach offers a way to build mathematical ontology out of the practice with no metaphysical magic. (shrink)

The folk conception of money as an object is not a promising starting point to develop general, explanatory metaphysical accounts of the social world. A theory of institutions as rules in equilibrium is more consistent with scientific theories of money, is able to shed light on the folk view, and side-steps some unnecessary puzzles.

A prominent way of explaining how race is socially constructed appeals to social positions and social structures. On this view, the construction of a person’s race is understood in terms of the person occupying a certain social position in a social structure. The aim of this paper is to give a metaphysically perspicuous account of this form of race construction. Analogous to functionalism about mental states, I develop an account of a ‘race structure’ in which various races (Black, White, Asian, (...) etc.) are functionally defined social positions. Individual persons occupy these social positions by ‘playing the role’ characteristic of those positions. The properties by which a person plays a race role, are the realizers for one’s race. I characterize the social construction of a person’s race in terms of a realization relation that satisfies a ‘subset’ condition on the social powers of raced persons. Races, on this view, are functionally defined, multiply realizable social kinds. The final section of the paper outlines some explanatory benefits of the account. (shrink)

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that aims to give a theoretical account of what there is and what it is like. Social justice movements seek to bring about justice in a society by changing policy, law, practice, and culture. Evidently, these activities are very different from one another. The goal of this article is to identify some positive connections between recent work in metaphysics and social justice movements. I outline three ways in which metaphysical work on social reality can (...) make a contribution to movements seeking social justice, viz., (1) by providing basic categories and concepts useful for clarifying and defending claims made by social justice movements; (2) by offering accounts of the natures of social categories, structures, and institutions that these movements seek to change; and (3) by contributing to “unmasking” or “debunking” projects that reveal putatively natural arrange- ments to be social in nature and hence subject to moral critique, alteration, and possibly eradication. (shrink)

Group creativity is vital in overcoming the numerous challenges that the world faces. Yet group creativity is deeply puzzling. It seems plausible that only agents can be creative, so group creativity requires group agency. But how could groups possess the mental states required to be agents, let alone the rich range of them required to be creative? It appears more reasonable to hold that group creativity is not a real phenomenon, but is merely the summed creativity of the individuals forming (...) the group. There is also much empirical evidence that groups are no more creative than their members. In this paper I examine the conceptual and empirical challenges to group creativity, defend its existence, and offer an explanation of how it is possible. (shrink)

How do groups of people persist through time? Groups can change their members, locations, and structure. In this paper, I present puzzles of persistence applied to social groups. I first argue that four-dimensional theories better explain the context sensitivity of how groups persist. I then exploit two unique features of the social to argue for the stage theory of group persistence in particular. First, fusion and fission cases actually happen to social groups, and so cannot be marginalized as “pathological.” Second, (...) it is implausible that groups spatially coincide pre-fission. This means that theories that depend on pre-fission spatial coincidence, such as some endurance theories and the worm theory, cannot explain fission cases. All things considered, the stage theory offers the best explanation of how groups persist. (shrink)

This paper presents a systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of social groups. I argue against prominent views that attempt to unify all social groups or to divide them into simple typologies. Instead I argue that social groups are enormously diverse, but show how we can investigate their natures nonetheless. I analyze social groups from a bottom-up perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. We can characterize any given kind of social group with (...) four complementary profiles: its “construction” profile, its “extra essentials” profile, its “anchor” profile, and its “accident” profile. Together these provide a framework for understanding the nature of groups, help classify and categorize groups, and shed light on group agency. (shrink)

Most social policies cannot be defended without making inductive inferences. For example, consider certain arguments for racial profiling and affirmative action, respectively. They begin with statistics about crime or socioeconomic indicators. Next, there is an inductive step in which the statistic is projected from the past to the future. Finally, there is a normative step in which a policy is proposed as a response in the service of some goal—for example, to reduce crime or to correct socioeconomic imbalances. In comparison (...) to the normative step, the inductive step of a policy defense may seem trivial. We argue that this is not so. Satisfying the demands of the inductive step is difficult, and doing so has important but underappreciated implications for the normative step. In this paper, we provide an account of induction in social contexts and explore its implications for policy. Our account helps to explain which normative principles we ought to accept, and as a result it can explain why it is acceptable to make inferences involving race in some contexts (e.g., in defense of affirmative action) but not in others (e.g., in defense of racial profiling). (shrink)

Excessive boredom and the inevitability of experiencing a very bad event are two commonly cited objections to the desirability of individual immortality. It isn’t clear, however, that these objections hold weight in the context of group lives—like the lives of reading groups or labor unions. I argue that this intuition is correct: neither of the objections to an immortal individual life apply to the life of an immortal group. In the end, we may not be able to wish immortality for (...) ourselves, but we can and often should desire that good group lives go on forever, both for the sake of the group and the individuals that constitute them. Indeed, participation in immortal (or very long-lasting) groups is one way to add meaning to life. (shrink)

Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction. -/- A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups. Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they, and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is (...) it different? What sorts of properties do social groups have? Can they have beliefs or intentions? Can they perform actions? And if so, what does it take for a group to believe, intend, or act? -/- Other entities investigated in social ontology include money, corporations, institutions, property, social classes, races, genders, artifacts, artworks, language, and law. It is difficult to delineate a precise scope for the field (see section 2.1). In general, though, the entities explored in social ontology largely overlap with those that social scientists work on. A good deal of the work in social ontology takes place within the social sciences (see sections 5.1–5.8). -/- Social ontology also addresses more basic questions about the nature of the social world. One set of questions pertains to the constituents, or building blocks, of social things in general. For instance, some theories argue that social entities are built out of the psychological states of individual people, while others argue that they are built out of actions, and yet others that they are built out of practices. Still other theories deny that a distinction can even be made between the social and the non-social. -/- A different set of questions pertains to how social categories are constructed or set up. Are social categories and kinds produced by our attitudes? By our language? Are they produced by causal patterns? And is there just one way social categories are set up, or are there many varieties of social construction? -/- The term ‘social ontology’ has only come into wide currency in recent years, but the nature of the social has been a topic of inquiry since ancient Greece. As a whole, the field can be understood as a branch of metaphysics, the general inquiry into the nature of entities. (shrink)

This paper is an investigation into the metaphysics of social objects such as political borders, states, and organizations. I articulate a metaphysical puzzle concerning such objects and then propose a novel account of social objects that provides a solution to the puzzle. The basic idea behind the puzzle is that under appropriate circumstances, seemingly concrete social objects can apparently be created by acts of agreement, decree, declaration, or the like. Yet there is reason to believe that no concrete object can (...) be created in this way. The central idea of my positive account is that social objects have a normative component to them, and seemingly concrete social objects have both normative and material components. I develop this idea more rigorously using resources from the Aristotelian hylomorphic tradition. The resulting normative hylomorphic account, I argue, solves the puzzle by providing a satisfying explanation of creation-by-agreement and the like, while also avoiding the difficulties facing extant accounts of social objects. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a theory of social kinds. A general theory of social kinds has to set out at least three conditions: existence conditions, persistence conditions, and identity conditions. For the sake of expediency, I focus on the existence and persistence conditions. The paper is organized just as life: first with existence, then persistence. I argue that anti-realism is more attractive than realism as an account of the existence conditions, despite the fact that realism has been under-appreciated. Then (...) I argue for a particular theory of the persistence conditions, which I call the basic overlapping traits theory (BOTT), based on an analogy to an approach to personal identity. The upshot of the argument is that from an anti-realist metaphysics we have the capacity to discuss a wider diversity of social phenomena. (shrink)