A formal approach to the ontology of social beliefs
Gianfranco Basti & Raffaela Giovagnoli
Our contribution aims at providing an account of the
ontology of social beliefs in formal terms. We move from the fact that social
beliefs are beliefs we can share; the problem is to demonstrate how we can
share the intentional content of individual beliefs.
We’ll show the limits of the traditional theory of
equivalence classes, which implies an extensional interpretation of the
identity of the content of beliefs expressed in predicates. The substitution of
two predicates P and Q in Natural Language (NL) could determine a unique class
of equivalence but it does not fully satisfy the intentional content.
We’ll emphasize the necessity of understanding the
intentional contents of social beliefs in terms of a particular model of the
intensional logic KD45 structure. Namely, the formal ontology of “conceptual naturalism” that provides the
basis from which we can grasp the intentional content of social beliefs in
terms of shared attention (i.e., dynamic logic equivalence by shared
reference), embodied in the mirror neuron system, recently experimentally
registered at level of single neuron activity (and not only of brain imaging)
also in the human sensory (and not only motor) cortex.
How sophisticated our interaction can get
Emanuele Bottazzi & Roberta Ferrario
One of the still ill covered topics in collective
intentionality is the distinction between a spontaneous, quasi-automatic social
interaction (as, for example, walking together while talking), and a more sophisticated one, based on
explicit agreements and shared constructions (e.g., voting). It is very
intuitive to say that they have something in common, but at the same time they
are quite different. In this paper we want, at least partially, to explain this
by showing the importance of critical situations in the passage from
spontaneous social interaction to sophisticated social ones.
With “critical situation” we refer to those situations of
impasse, when agents are stuck and do not know how to proceed. For example,
each agent may be not completely aware of his/her own capabilities, an agent
may be mistaken about the mental attitudes of the other agents, one or all the
agents may be mistaken about the environmental situation, there may be
misunderstandings about the role each agent should play in the interaction...
If we assume that humans are naturally inclined to
cooperate, we should deduce that spontaneous interaction is what they engage
into by default, on the basis of a sort of “principle of parsimony”. But when
things get complicated, like when agents are spatially distant one another, or
need to act at different times, or do not know each other, they are forced to
create conceptual and linguistic coordination structures.
This means that the social reality we live in is a product
of a continuous trial-and-error process: when the situation is too complex, the
spontaneously interacting agents are very likely to incur in an impasse and it
is exactly in order to avoid or overcome an impasse (actual or just
threatened), that the interaction is moved to a higher, more sophisticated,
level.
Communicative intentions and mutual responsibilities
Antonella Carassa & Marco Colombetti
In his recent book, Origins of human communication (p. 214),
Michael Tomasello argues that “One important function of the Gricean
communicative intention … is that it essentially makes everything public ….
This means that the norms apply and cannot be avoided.” While we agree that
there is a deep connection between communicative intentions and normativity,
the quoted statement misses an important point: in general, norms apply whether
or not an action is performed with an overt communicative intention; on the
contrary, we submit, communicative intentions are necessary to create
normativity. People create normativity (in the form of directed obligations,
rights, etc.) in everyday communicative interactions, for example by performing
requests, proposals, promises, and agreements. In previous works we have
modelled such normativity in terms of joint commitments, which, following
Gilbert, we have taken as a primitive concept. To clarify how the creation of
normativity is related to communicative intentions, however, we found it
crucial to scrutinise the internal structure of joint commitments.
We argue that joint commitments can be analysed in terms of
mutual responsibility, defined as a distribution of responsibilities among
parties with the features of: reciprocity, in the sense that every party is
responsible to all other parties, as long as these recognise themselves as
similarly responsible and live up to their responsibilities; and
complementarity, in the sense that every party is responsible for their part of
an interaction. Next we tackle the issue of how mutual responsibilities can
arise, and argue that an action performed by an agent with a communicative
intention creates an affordance for the addressee to set up certain mutual
responsibilities with the first agent. Finally we put forward some speculations
on the ontogeny of mutual responsibilities. Non-normative forms of reciprocity
and complementarity respectively appear from the 2nd‒3rd and the 18th‒24th
month of age. It is therefore plausible to assume that when children, in their
later development, start to form a concept of personal responsibility, they are
already endowed with the basic cognitive abilities that are required to
participate in mutual responsibilities
Sources and boundaries of institutional and linguistic
normativity. Towards a critical social ontology
Francesca Di Lorenzo Ajello
Since Hegel until speech acts theory and contemporary social
ontology it came to full development the idea that most of reasons, duties,
rights, entitlements, have to do, against Kant, with our participation to a
lifeform rather than with our dealing with “substantive moral principles”. But if we accept that most of our individual rational
determinations of the will are justified as a part of our Sittlichkheit; that
commitments, rights and entitlements are specific to every speech act or rise from joint commitments and
collective imposition of status functions, then the following question arises: If human reason is necessarily embedded in particular
lifeforms, how can we be rationally entitled to not accepting what appears to
us as unacceptable despite its institutional justifiability?
I will argue that collective recognition makes by itself
room for the view that every institutional act, like every speech act, is
legitimized only if it is collectively recognized, and is therefore
criticizable whereas this legitimacy condition is not satisfied. I propose a deflationary reinterpretation of Kant’s
categorical imperative, following Hare and Searle, whereas every reason for
action would be constrained by a logical requirement of generalization, which
would lead us to be rationally bound to no act against the interests of others. With this rational bound we can articulate a “discourse
ethics” including a normative criterion of “justness” among the validity
conditions of every action, linguistic or not. Following Rawls, Hare and Austin I argue for the overriding
character of this criterion with respect to other normative criteria (such as
success, coherence, conformity to status functions and constitutive rules). I conclude with the hypothesis that justness and collective
recognition allow to criticize the institutional, deontic power whereas it is
not legitimized with respect to these criteria.
Prospects for a (cognitive) science of the we-mode
Mattia Gallotti
Over the last twenty years, the theory of collective
intentionality has turned out to be an invaluable tool for exploring a wide
range of issues arising from the ontology of social reality. On one way of
looking at it, the development of collective intentionality theory has been
characterized by discussions concerning what is it that must be ‘shared’ for
intentional behavior to be collective. In this paper I shall advocate one
‘classic’ argument in the literature, which identifies the mark of collective
mental states in the psychological mode of individual-level representations.
For a goal to be shared people have neither to entertain representations with
identical (similar) intentional content, nor to access meta-representations of
some sort. They just need to represent the relevant goal in the same,
intrinsically collective, mode.
In spite of its commonsensical appeal, this view has often
been discarded as somewhat mysterious, given the difficulty of its proponents
to capture it beyond intuition. To counter these objections, I propose to shift
the debate on another level of characterization. Instead of providing a novel
conceptual argument which explores the logical conditions for mental states to
be held in the we-mode, I address the fundamental problem as one of
experimental philosophy. While some philosophers are acquainted with the effort
of developmental and comparative scientists to direct scientific attention to
the ultimate bases of shared intentionality, few of them are aware of the
latest advances made by brain scientists on the proximal bases of the capacity
for sharing mental representations. Social cognitive neuroscientists have very
recently provided us with pioneering studies which address the problem of the
we-mode explicitly, and in a philosophically sensitive manner, while relying on
experimental methods to draw conclusions about the alleged causal relations
between collective and individual intentionality.
Social frames
Aldo Gangemi
Frames (broadly assumed as conceptual units that underlie human ability to model the world) are widespread in different disciplines (e.g. conceptual frames in linguistics, cognitive schemata in psychology, knowledge patterns in AI, etc.). Rich repositories have been built e.g. in linguistics (FrameNet, VerbNet), but many more are being discovered from the web, specially in knowledge-intensive resources such as Wikipedia.
Based on the working definition of frames as contextual, interactionist (task-oriented) models of human behavioral competence, I will defend the position that frames are a natural component for studying social ontologies, and that the growing availability of open data in uniform formats constitutes an unprecedented opportunity to study them empirically, possibly leading to empirically-driven social ontology research, which I deem now overdue.
I will present some solutions to frame representation within "Constructive Descriptions and Situations" (cDnS), a formal ontology that covers situations, frames, semiotic objects, and collective agents. Examples of how some existing frame repositories have been represented within cDnS will be provided.
I will then present some results (and ideas for future work) of empirical frame discovery from open data. This will be exemplified with respect to WIkipedia page link information (about 115 million links), from which a set of 184 novel frames has been discovered through logical and statistical techniques, and validated with a user study. This experiment fits well the research direction I'm pointing at, since Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced repository of knowledge, with only weak design rules: we have then the possibility of watching "frame emergence", at least in the context of encyclopedic knowledge evolution.
Group goals, game theoretic reasoning and spontaneous
collective intentions
Natalie Gold
Cooperation is puzzling for orthodox game theory. Theories
of team agency seek to solve such puzzles by extending game theory to allow
teams of individuals to count as agents. Then team reasoning, a distinctive
mode of reasoning that is used by members of teams, may result in cooperative
actions. Natalie Gold and Robert Sugden have argued that the intentions that
result from team reasoning are collective intentions. But Raimo Tuomela claims
that team reasoning is not applicable to all cooperative contexts because its
conception of a goal is not applicable and because the game-theoretic framework
is too restrictive. By comparing the concept of a group goal in Bacharach and
Sugdenʼs theories of team
reasoning, I show that Tuomelaʼs
worry about the type of goal that theories of team agency allow is misplaced.
Most theories of team agency are not framed in terms of game theory. But by
addressing Tuomelaʼs claims
about the restrictiveness of the game theoretic framework - explaining how thin
the commitments of game theory actually are - I address a further issue: what
the theory of team reasoning can say about ʻspontaneousʼ collective intentions. I identify
the key features of the account, which are necessary for the production of
collective intentions, as the existence of a group goal and a group agent.
Fuzzy groups
Rico Hauswald
Different approaches to social groups differ in how they
address the possible fuzziness of groups. While it is a central feature of
social network theories to conceive of membership as a matter of degree, social
ontological group analyses (e.g., intentionalism) rarely consider the
possibility of a group having blurred boundaries. However, I suppose that a great
many groups may exhibit some kind of vagueness. Imagine, for example, a couple
walking together, while a third person starts to accompany them for a short
while. Here, it is not perfectly determinate whether there is now a group of
three people, or rather a group of two and, in addition, a third person not
belonging to the group.
In my talk, I shall characterize different phenomena of
vagueness in social collectives and provide an ontological interpretation of
them. Concerning vagueness in general, there is a fundamental distinction
between semantic and ontic vagueness. Whereas I subscribe to the currently
dominant view, according to which indeterminacy in particulars is (almost
always) linguistic in nature, I shall defend the thesis that social groups, although
they are particulars as well, are special insofar as the vagueness they may
exhibit is ontic vagueness. If groups are, as Simmel famously put it,
"objective units", which come into being just by some people's
"consciousness of constituting with the others a unity", then there
may be cases where this "consciousness" is already indeterminate,
where the person himself is not completely sure whether (or to what extent) he
belongs to a group. In such cases, the membership actually is, to this extent,
indeterminate. So, in the case of groups, vagueness may not only enter into our
linguistic descriptions of the group, but already into its constitution.
Unintended collective action and collective
responsibility
Frank Hindriks
Almost all existing accounts of collective action –
including those of Bratman, Gilbert, Searle, and Tuomela – concern intended
collective action. There is ample reason to believe, however, that some
collective actions are unintended. Just as an individual, a group of people
can, for instance, end up doing something else when it fails to execute its
intention as planned. I start by criticizing Sara Chant’s (2006) account of
collective action, which concerns both intended and unintended collective
action. She argues against the idea that all collective actions follow from
intended collective actions. I defend (a version of) this idea, and go on to
develop an account of unintended collective actions that is consistent with it.
I argue that, in addition to collective unintentional actions, there are
unintended collective actions that are performed intentionally. Making these
distinctions is interesting as such, but it is also important for the
attribution of collective responsibility.
Collective acceptance and two directions of fit
Arto Laitinen
This paper argues that the kind of collective acceptance
that is necessary for the existence of institutional reality, is not something
that has both directions of fit. The paper will not cast doubt on the idea that institutional
reality has a peculiar ontology in depending on collective acceptance: squirrel
pelt is indeed money iff it is collectively accepted as money. Collective acceptance in this sense
resembles declarations, and God’s powers to create light by merely representing
it as existing (Searle). For the purposes of this paper, they are all fine
ideas (except God’s creation of light perhaps), but they should not be cashed
out in terms of a bad idea (which the paper claims that the idea of anything
having two directions of fit is).
Smith (1987) showed that on the dispositional understanding,
nothing can have both directions of fit, concerning the same propositional
content. This has been accepted in the debates on moral motivation with two
qualifications: that perhaps a normative understanding is to be preferred, and
that a state can have both directions of fit as long as these concern different
contents.
In the theories of institutional reality, the idea that the
constitutive attitudes of “collective acceptance” have both directions of fit
concerning the same propositional content is alive and kicking. This paper
argues that Smith’s argument holds here as well: on a dispositional
understanding nothing can have both directions of fit (concerning the same
content). Importantly, the paper shows that on a normative understanding the
idea is peculiarly catastrophic. The paper also briefly examines whether some
third way of understanding the distinction could work and shows that it is very
unlikely. Thus the idea that collective acceptance, or anything else, would
have both directions of fit, should simply be dropped.
Social beliefs, social viability, substitutable
activities and collective intentionality
Pierre Livet & Frederic Nef
Are common beliefs sufficient for a social entity to come
into existence (Searle)? No. Money, for example, implies in addition several
possible substitutions between practices:
substitution to direct exchanges of a complex of exchanges with past
partners in order to use the result for profitable exchanges with another
possible present and future partners; definition of the ratio of the first
exchanges to the second ones; substitution of various inscriptions of these
ratios to direct contacts, etc.
A new social entity 1) has to be grafted on the network of
previous social practices without undermining the viability of the social
network (2) It can be substituted in some cases for another previous activity,
necessary to the network 3) The network of beliefs about these new social
entities that ensures collective intentionality presents this structure of
substitutability (conditions 1 and 2). In the network of individual beliefs about the new entities,
when one shifts from an individual perspective to another one, individual
beliefs can be substituted to other ones in a way compatible with the
functioning of the new substituted practice. Individual perspectives include
anonymous ones, provided individuals have the shared belief that when included,
the social functioning is kept on or a new coordination can be triggered.
Ontologically, the viability domain of the social network
consists in a network of possible worlds, all linked by conditionally necessary
relations: conditional to the required substitutions of activities. This set of “viable” worlds gives also
possible access to other worlds, with other substitutive activities and new
social networks- and so on and so forth. Social beliefs have to share common contents concerning the
viability domain and imply possible second order beliefs about the possibility
of substituting other relations and perspectives, on the condition that these
substitutions are still related to the previous network.
A game-theoretic analysis of social commitment
Emiliano Lorini & Mario Verdicchio
The aim of this work is to provide a theory of social commitment which can
be formalized with the tools of interactive epistemology, i.e. the domain of
game theory initiated by the economist Robert Aumann, whose aim is the study of
strategic situations in which agents decide what do according to some general
principle of rationality while being uncertain about several aspects of the
interaction such other agents’ choices, other agents’ preferences, etc.
We conceive social commitment as a three-party social relationship between
a debtor and a creditor in front of a set of witnesses. Our definition of
social commitment employs four basic concepts of action, belief, reason, and
common ground. Common ground is the concept widely studied in linguistic as the
mass of information and facts which are public for a given set of agents. We
here follow the approach of Stalnaker, Clark and others who define common
ground as a form of mutual belief: a given proposition p is in the common
ground of a set of agents C if and only if, the agents in C mutually believe
that p is true. The notion of belief we assume is the standard one à la Hintikka
interpreted through a possible-world semantics: a given agent believes that
a certain proposition p is true if and only if, p is true in all worlds that
the agent considers possible. The concept of reason deserves some comments. We say
that the belief that p gives agent i a reason to perform the action A if and
only if:
- the
agent i believes that p is true;
- the agent i intends to perform the action A;
- if
the agent i did not believe that p, then he would not have intended to perform
action A.
In other words, the belief that p is reason for the agent i to perform the
action A, if it “motivates” the agent i to perform the action A.
We say that the agent i is committed to the agent j to perform the
action A in front of the set of witnesses C - where C necessarily includes i
and j - if and only if it is in the common ground of the agents in C that:
- i
created in j the belief that i will perform the action A;
- i’s
belief that j will perform action A gives j a reason to perform a given action
B;
- if
i does not perform the action A while j performs the action B, then j will
suffer a significant loss that j could have avoided if he had done something
different from B.
Human infants' representations of social dominance: evidence for an early developing naïve sociology?
Olivier Mascaro &
Gergely
Csibra
This research uncovers part of the content and
representational format of human infants’ intuitive notion of social dominance.
We defined dominance as the capacity to prevail when agents have conflicting
goals, and tested infants with violation-of-expectation paradigms. During
familiarisation trials, infants observed a “dominant” agent succeeding when its
goals conflicted with those of another agent. During test trials, we recorded
infants’ looking time when the dominant agent either succeeded again or
deferred in a new conflict situation.
Twelve-month-olds (but not 9-month-olds) expect the hierarchical
relationship between two individuals to remain stable from one conflict
(competition for a ball), to another, similar type of conflict (competition for
a cube). Fifteen-month-olds (but not 12-month-olds), extend their expectations
across completely different conflict situations (from a competition to occupy a
place to a competition for a cube). Subsequently, part of the content of
infants’ representation of dominance relationships is that they are stable, and
that dominant individuals prevail when their goals conflict with those of their
subordinates.
Twelve- and fifteen-month-olds do not extend their expectations of
dominance to unobserved relationships. Moreover, after observing ‘A’ being
dominant over ‘B’, and ‘B’ being dominant over ‘C’, 15-month-olds expect these
two relationships to remain stable. But they do not infer that ‘A’ is dominant
over ‘C’, hence do not expect dominance relationships to be always transitive,
contrary to what would happen if infants represented dominance as an individual
property organised on an ordered scale. Thus infants represent dominance as a
social relationship between agents.
The conceptual nature, the content, and the representational format of
human infants’ representations of social dominance suggest that they are part
of an early developing naive sociology that may be underpinned by dedicated
cognitive mechanisms.
Perspective-taking
precedes an understanding of perspectives as perspectives
Henrike Moll
Evidence is converging that
infants and young children skillfully take the perspectives of other people in
various contexts and domains. For example, by the age of 18 months, infants can
determine the goal of another person’s action even when the person’s activity
is misguided by a false belief (Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009).
In the domain of perception, young preschoolers can determine the referent of
another’s request for, e.g., a ‘green’ object, even though the children
themselves see the object in a different color (Moll & Meltzoff, 2011).
This shows that perspectival differences between self and other are
successfully bridged—allowing for smooth interactions and mutual understanding
within simple cooperative activities. However, if a discursive scenario is
constructed in which the child is ‘forced’ to declaratively judge in which
location a misinformed agent takes an object to be or in which color a person
sees a given thing (when it differs from the color in which the child sees it),
children younger than 4 to 5 years mostly err. In my paper, I therefore argue
that children come to take others’ perspectives before they acknowledge
perspectival differences and thus understand perspectives as perspectives.
Because most kinds of social interaction, including joint action and
cooperation, require only perspective-taking in young childhood, it may often
go unnoticed in everyday life that an understanding of perspectives as perspectives
is not yet in place.
Harmless Disagreement: How To Do Without Collective Representations
Olivier Morin
Whenever two individuals possess slightly different representations, they may try to use this representation to coordinate or communicate, and fail. Words carrying different meanings for different communicators may occasion misunderstandings. Agents acting upon discrepant interpretations of a rule may fail to behave as they are expected to. This seems naturally to suggest that efficient coordination and communication require individuals to participate in a single coherent collective intention, identical in everyone. That collective intention would also need to create objective social facts (like the rights of persons or the meaning of words) that do not depend on the interpretation of any individual’s own interpretation.
Yet we often fall short of these requirements, with no dire consequence. This paper will argue that most mismatches between individual representations do little harm to coordination and communication. Analytic philosophers are familiar with the notion that an infinity of potentially contradictory mental models of a rule are compatible with one single way of behaving. Examples of this fact need not be outlandish; they show how easily coordination and communication can dodge the potentially harmful effects of a lack of consensus. For some speakers of English, the word ‘instep’ refers to the middle section of the foot; for others it refers to the top of that section; others see it as the arch between ankle and toes. In most (but not all) conversations involving that word, this difference makes no difference (Enfield, 2007). That is harmless disagreement.
Two ways of reducing disagreement will be discussed. We may defer to a single authority and give it a monopoly to solve misunderstandings; but, unless the authority descends into the detail of every particular case where a rule is applied or a word is employed, it is bound to left some margin for (mostly harmless) potential disagreement. We may also rely on the test of a multitude of different situations to disclose, as time goes by, even the slightest mismatch between individual representations.
These two solutions have two flaws. First, they rely on everyone sincerely to seek the greatest possible agreement with others on matters of coordination. Yet individuals have all sorts of reasons to preserve or promote disagreement and the opportunities for anipulation it affords. Second, these solutions would work if we had time and cognitive resources in infinite supply. Since we are not as omniscient or as benevolent as angels, we are lucky that our conventions tolerate a great deal of disagreement. This is what allows us to solve unplanned problems in spite of our divergent representations and interests.
The costs of any reduction of disagreement have to be weighed against the marginal benefits of doing so. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's Relevance theory of communication argues that communicators should spend just enough energy as to narrow down their interlocutor's meaning to the point where no further benefit can be expected, even if that means leaving many aspects of her message in the haze. In the same spirit, Friedrich Hayek claimed that the great merit of the price system lies in the fact that it allows individuals starkly to disagree on the values of goods and services. Economic agents may still coordinate with others without waiting for a consensus that might never be reached. Robustness to disagreement is a precious property of conventions.
Sintelnet: European Network for Social Intelligence
David Pearce
I
will give a short presentation of SINTELNET, the European Network for
Social Intelligence, an FP7 Coordination Action that started
recently. The network is open to new members and actively seeks
cooperation with other national and international projects and
initiatives. The motivation for this project is that traditional
distinctions between the natural, the social and the artificial are
becoming more and more blurred as radically new forms of Information Technology-enabled social environments are formed. These changes create a need to re-explore basic concepts of Philosophy, Humanities and Social Sciences in light of future IT. The aim of the European Network for Social Intelligence is twofold:
- To look into those IT-enabled domains as a means for the critical examination of basic concepts from philosophy and social science and,
- To propose new approaches to understand and develop future IT-enabled social situations, by adapting and applying traditional concepts.
Practice and human form
Nikos Psarros
All variants of Pragmatism share a
fundamental problem, namely the fact that their common concept of practice
relies on the local and culturally bound value of a given context of actions and
not on its universal goodness. However, the very fact of a locally established action
context that is of a certain value for its participants cannot justify its
universal goodness. This cannot be achieved even if one succeeds in enlarging
the group of participants by voluntary joining in such a manner that it
factually may encompass the totality of the existing human population, since
even a worldwide participation in a context of actions is not immune against
the possibility of doing something that is essentially lacking a universal
goodness despite the fact that it has a world spanning value.
Additionally, Pragmatism cannot explain nor justify why the
results of reflection have universally normative validity. This is so because
Pragmatism subordinates Thinking to Acting and regards knowledge as the result
of the subsequent reflection upon the perception of the results of actions. The
attempt to circumnavigate this obstacle by declaring language as part of every
practice establishing thus a relationship of immediateness between language and
world and deriving thinking from speaking only shifts the problem to the
explanation of the universal validity of linguistic expressions.
There are two reasons for the inability of Pragmatism to
overcome these aporias:
- Pragmatism as well as the totality of the 20th century Philosophy of
Science accepts unconditionally the dogma of the immediate reference of
language to the world as it has been proposed explicitly in Wittgenstein’s work.
- Pragmatism cannot provide a criterion that is independent from the
concept of action for the distinction between such action contexts that
constitute a practice and such ones that don’t. The desired criterion of
demarcation, however, has to qualify something as a practice (or as a
non-practice) independently of the factual success of actions.
My thesis is that this criterion can be obtained only by a
form-theoretically founded theory of Goodness, which treats forms as real and not as merely noematically constituted
universals and grounds Goodness on the immediate knowledge of the Human Form.
Further consequences of such a realist form-theoretical foundation of Goodness
are the abandoning of the dogma of the immediate reference of language to the
world and of the dogma that Acting is prior to Thinking.
Kinds of institutional
concepts
Corrado Roversi
In his recent Making the
Social World, of 2010, J. R. Searle distinguishes among three different
mechanisms for the creation of institutional phenomena: (a) the imposition of
status functions on a single individual, (b) the imposition of status functions
on classes of individuals through constitutive rules conceived as “standing”
status functions declarations, and (c) the creation of entities with status
functions through a declaration made possible by constitutive rules. Hence,
despite his new insistence on the concept of status function declaration as
inclusive of that of constitutive rules, Searle still maintains (as in The
Construction of Social Reality) the idea that the most part of institutional
phenomena (at least those traceable to cases (b) and (c)) can be explained by
appealing to the collective acceptance of constitutive rules—a conception which
we could call the “rule-following view of institutions.” In this paper, I will
try to show that even in the traditional example of chess, which is the
paradigmatic example of a rule-constituted institutional activity, this
rule-following view is partial and must be integrated. The main thesis of this
paper is that rule-constituted concepts and phenomena are only one among the
several kinds of concepts and phenomena that are linked with an institution.
More in particular, I will argue that an explanation of institutions cannot but
include, along with rule-constituted institutional concepts, a set of
meta-institutional concepts (the expression is taken from D. Miller and here
extended). To demonstrate this point, I will take into separate considerations
five concepts that are relevant for the game of chess—the concept of
“castling”, the concept of “victory,” the concept of “attack,” the concept of
“cheating,” the concept of “first-move advantage”—and I will discuss the
respective relations that these concepts hold with the system of constitutive
rules of chess. This will result in a tentative classification of five kinds of
institutional concepts: intra-institutional concepts (which refer to objects,
events, facts, roles, acts, or properties and are rule-constituted),
goal-oriented meta-institutional concepts (which refer to the objectives or
typical results of the institution), mode-oriented meta-institutional concepts
(which refer to specific modes of employment of the elements of a given
institution in the light of the above-mentioned objective), value-oriented
meta-institutional concepts (which refer to fundamental values underlying the
institution), and finally para-institutional concepts (which are descriptive of
phenomena and regularities peculiar of a given institution). As a final outcome
of this discussion, I will show how this classifications between institutional
concepts entails that institutions conceived as systems of constitutive rules
are better represented not simply as standalone structures of rules but rather
as structures nested within the context of a broader social practice.
The rational
appropriateness of collective emotions
Mikko Salmela
Recent research has
suggested that collective emotions have several functions in social groups.
This indicates that collective emotions can be evaluated for their adaptiveness
in relation to these functions. However, it is less clear how we should evaluate
the rational appropriateness of collective emotions. Intuitively, a collective
emotion is rationally appropriate if the actual object of emotion corresponds
with the formal object of the emotion type from the group’s point of view. For
instance, collective anger is appropriate if the object of emotion is offensive
from the group’s point of view. The problem is how to flesh out “the group’s
point of view”. Empirically, mere
sharing with mutual awareness gives the shared emotion an aura of objectivity,
but this experience is hardly sufficient neither necessary for the rational
appropriateness of emotion. A better proposal suggests that a collective
emotion is rationally appropriate if it is felt for a group reason that is
grounded in an internally coherent group ethos –certain constitutive concerns,
goals, values, beliefs, or norms of the group. However, this criterion is only
necessary but not sufficient, because an ethos or its aspects may have been
adopted or maintained irrationally. Therefore, we must also require that the
group ethos is not adopted or maintained by ignoring counterevidence that is
available to the group members. The rub of this proposal is how to interpret
“available evidence”. It is impossible to give an exact definition of “available
evidence”, but I consider a few kinds of limitations –historical, cultural,
social, psychological, and normative– that may keep evidence unavailable to
groups. I also suggest that the evidence available to a group is the totality
of evidence that is available to individual group members. In conclusion, I
observe that many actual collective emotions fail to qualify as rationally
appropriate on the proposed standards.
Mode as representational:
from we-mode to role-mode
Michael Schmitz
In the contribution the
traditional view of intentional attitudes, which equates their representational
content with their so-called propositional content, is rejected in favor of an
account that treats both subject-mode (e.g. I-mode vs. we-mode) and
attitude-mode (e.g. intention vs. belief) as representational. On this account,
subjects do not represent states of affairs from nowhere, as it where, but
always also represent, though usually in a backgrounded fashion, their
individual or collective position with regard to these states of affairs. It is
shown that this view can best account for the peculiar representational failure
that occurs when an individual has an illusory we-intention and for several
other puzzles about we-mode intentionality. For example, we can reconcile the
fact that there exists a relation between individual members of a collective in
cases of successful we-mode representation with the fact that the existence of
this relation is entirely dependent on the representational contents in the
heads of these individuals. The account also takes the sting out of the notion
that there is a group as a logical subject. Once we have got conceptually
irreducible we-mode representation, it is argued, there is a sense in which the
group is ontologically free, because just like an ‘I’ is no more than a being
that is capable of representing itself in a certain way, so a ‘we’ is also no
more than an entity – a group – that is capable of representing itself in a
certain way. Moreover, the representationalist account of mode also helps us
understand collective deductive reasoning. The account of we-mode
intentionality and reasoning is then extended to understand role-mode as
another form of subject-mode – the mode(s) representing certain positions of
groups or individuals within institutions such as being a committee or a
policeman. It is shown that role-mode can be understood as representational in
essentially the same fashion as we-mode. The contribution concludes with some
reflections on the relation between we-mode and role-mode and different layers
of collective intentionality and different representational formats on these
layers.
Defining collective omissions
David Schweikard
With a few exceptions,
philosophers of collective action have paid relatively little attention to
phenomena of collective inaction or omission. Even the literature on collective
responsibility features negative acts at best marginally, where the contributions
by Virginia Held, Larry May, David Copp, Seumas Miller and Björn Petersson
stand out. However, there is pressure on philosophers of collective action to
account for cases of collective failure to render assistance, of intentional
collective omissions and joint inaction, since they are accorded considerable
weight in assessing the normative dimension of collective action.
I first turn to individual
omission. As I conceive it, the task here is to say exactly what constitutes a
situation in which an agent could but does not provide assistance to an
accident victim. This involves clarifying the concepts of a possibility of
action, an opportunity for action, the agent’s knowledge of this opportunity
and his decision. The point of my account is that we should count as omissions
not only those cases in which an agent decides not to perform a certain action,
but also cases in which an agent could but does not know that he is in a
position to perform a certain action.
In a second step, I deploy
variations of a case in which four hikers could but do not help an accident
victim buried by a number of heavy rocks that can only be moved with an effort
by all four. Assuming that there is an opportunity for joint action, its
realization would require (i) that the hikers have appropriate individual and
common knowledge, (ii) that they coordinate to act jointly, and (iii) that they
decide to act jointly. A collective omission can then consist in not
establishing appropriate common knowledge, in not coordinating accordingly, or
in deciding against the joint action for which there is an opportunity.
Emergence of
we-intentionality: commitment or belonging?
Guido Seddone
We-intentionality is
often claimed to be a type of individual intentionality that develop sociality.
For Searle (Searle 2010) it is an extended faculty for producing and
recognising social objects. This approach is
convincing but also limited, because it does not explain the origins of
we-intentionality without making recourse
to language and creating also a regressum ad
infinitum, because languagetoo is learned in a
social dimension.
From a psychological
perspective, joint attention is an elementary form of cognition and cooperation in
children, from which language arises as symbolisation of practices (Tomasello
1999 and 2009). Hence
from a philosophical perspective, the issue should concern the emergence of we-intentionality
beyond the theory of SFD. We-intentionality
emerges as a result of complex events of integration in social practices by
which human beings come to
understand the connection between linguistic symbols and intentional states of other individuals
(Tomasello 2009). The theory of “Documentality” (Ferraris 2009) is an attempt to trace back we-intentionality
to an original fixation by symbols and documents. This theory clarifies partially
the phenomenon of belonging, but unfortunately it does not explain the nexus between documents
and the cognitive capacity to understand them as shared objects. The theories on commitment
(Tuomela 2005) have the merit of clarifying the development of a we-authority
by individual
commitment and parcelling the tasks between members, but they produce also a burdensome circular
question about the credibility of each member in the accomplishment of their tasks and
commitments (Schmid 2005).
For these reasons I
will propose to treat we-intentionality as the outcome of an irreducible belonging to a group
and I will discuss the different approaches to social ontology in order to elucidate the event of integration from which social
behaviours arise.
Doing to, doing with and the semantics of ‘ought’
Thomas H. Smith
The Meinong-Chisholm thesis
(MCT) states that these are equivalent:
(A) a ought
to φ.
(B) It ought to be the case that a φs.
Harman’s argument against (MCT) is that the normative claim that, say, I ought to turn the trolley (thereby killing one and saving five) is distinct from the evaluative claim that it ought to be the case that I turn it. One could disbelieve the former thought (on the grounds that killing is always wrong) and believe the latter (on grounds of utility).
This argument
is too quick. Granted, (A) is normative in that it entails that:
(R) There is reason for a’s φ-ing.
But (B) is plausibly read as having the same entailment. Perhaps (B) also has an evaluative reading, on which it means, roughly it would be good were a to φ, or would that a φ-ed. But this is not the reading that defenders of (MCT) should have had in mind.
Now, it might
be held that (A), unlike (B) entails, not only (R), but also:
(R+) a has
reason to φ.
But it is unclear whether (R+)
adds anything to (R), i.e. that there is anything more to the having of a reason to φ than there being reason
for one’s φ-ing.
Geach has a different argument. Premise 1 is that these are inequivalent:
(i)
Tom ought to be beaten
up by John
(ii)
John ought to beat up Tom
Premise 2 is that these are equivalent
(iii)
It ought to be the case that Tom is beaten up by John
(iv)
It ought to be the case that John beats up Tom.
It follows contra (MCT) that either (i) and (iii) are inequivalent, or
(ii) and (iv) are.
Against
premise 1: it is doubtful that (i) and (ii) are inequivalent, except on readings
which equivocate. For example, one can conceive of circumstances where (i) is
true, in that justice is a pro tanto
reason for Tom’s punishment, and where (ii) is false, in that humanity
is a pro tanto reason against it. What cannot
be conceived are circumstances where (i) and (ii) differ in truth-value relative
to the same considerations.
Against premise 2: it is doubtful that (iii)
and (iv) are equivalent, for the embedded that-clauses report exemplifications
of distinct (converse) act-types. Even if these
exemplifications obtain in all and only the same worlds, they are plausibly distinct.
Geach’s mistake was to consider a case of doing to, not one of doing with.
Suppose that it will take both Tom and John to support a collapsing ledge holding a baby – no one of them can support it, and no-one else is in the vicinity. Now consider:
(v)
Tom ought to support the ledge with John.
(vi)
John ought to support the ledge with Tom.
These
are inequivalent, for
doing with, unlike doing to, entails that several agents act.
Here’s why: one can conceive of circumstances in which (v) is true, but (vi) false, given that, by “ought entails can” a ought to φ only if a can φ. For suppose both men have the ability to cooperate with the other, if the other is open to doing so, but Tom stubbornly refuses to exercise this ability. Then, Tom could support the ledge with John, but John cannot support it with Tom. So on plausible moral assumptions, (v) but not-(vi).
Now consider:
(vii) It
ought to be the case that Tom supports the ledge with John.
(viii) It
ought to be the case that John supports the ledge with Tom.
These
are equivalent, for
doing with, unlike doing to, is
symmetrical.
The embedded that-clauses report exemplifications
of the same act-type
(by the same agents). Hence there is no reason to think that these
exemplifications are distinct.
Supersizing the (social)
mind. The extended and group mind thesis
Thomas Szanto
Where does the mind of
individuals stop and where do the minds of groups begin? And what are the
conditions of individuation of individual and collective mental states,
attitudes and beliefs? The paper aims at providing an integrated anti-individualistic
account of how to respond to these questions in a way that the answers mutually
support one another.
Questions concerning the
boundaries of the mental have been at the forefront in recent philosophy of
mind and cognition as well as in debates in social ontology and collective
intentionality. Two main currents have emerged in the last decades that both
attack the traditional Cartesian geography of the mental as being solely
confined to the internal make-up of individuals: On the one hand, we have those
philosophers and cognitive scientists who defend the Extended Mind Thesis (EMT)
(i.e. the thesis that some cognitive and mental processes extend beyond the
skull/skin of individuals, incorporating artefacts and other individuals, thus
constituting ‘coupled’ or ‘integrated’ cognitive systems). On the other hand,
there is an increasing number of philosophers and economists who claim that
there are (in some sense or another) groups and agents with minds, intentions
and beliefs of their own. Yet, surprisingly, with little exception there has
been hardly any attention paid to whether and how these anti-individualistic
approaches methodologically and substantially relate and reinforce each other.
In my paper, I shall try to
fill that research gap. In particular, I will put forward a novel
collectivistic reading of the ‘parity principle’ known from the standard EMT
according to which a mental state is a state of a (singular) group mind, iff
the epistemological content of that state is determined by and supervenient on
a set of attitudes (SA), such that without knowing SA one cannot know the
epistemological content of the state in question.
The ontology of revolutions: the Libyan case and the
foundation of social reality
Daniela Tagliafico
In Making the Social World Searle defines a government as a system of status
functions, which thus rests on collective acceptance (2010:163). This
definition, however, seems to be highly problematic. Take the case of the
Libyan revolution, during which several citizens no more accept the regime,
while others still do: if the existence of a government is based on collective
acceptance, then, one could wonder whether the Libyan State still exists or
not. How many people must revolt against a regime before it stops existing? One?
All? The 50% plus one? The risk is that of falling into the sorites paradox,
ending up with social entities which are affected by a problem of ontological
vagueness.
I will claim that a satisfying
solution to this problem can be given only by recognizing two different notions
of ‘collective acceptance’. On the one hand, collective acceptance can be
understood as a natural fact, that is:
as a collective behavior of acceptance towards a government (this is the notion employed by Searle, but it
can be already found in Kelsen’s principle of efficacy). On the other hand, we
can also understand collective acceptance as a social fact, whose existence is simply stated by the law
system itself (what is called a fictio
iuris).
By relying on this distinction I will claim that, even if
collective acceptance understood as a natural fact is a precondition for the existence of a government (if there is
no significant degree of acceptance, a government cannot be set up nor
maintained), what founds the existence of a government is only collective
acceptance understood as a fictio juris.
Inferentialism, commitment, and infraindividual and
supraindividual ontologies
Jesús Zamora-Bonilla
Pragmatic inferentialism (e.g., Brandom (1994)) attempts to
provide an alternative schema for the explanation of human actions and social
facts, in a middleground between hermeneutic and rational choice models. Its
basic explanatory element is the notion of commitment: actions are
conceptualised as embedded within a normative framework that specifies what
actions the agents are committed or allowed to perform. The most relevant
aspect of those ‘normative frameworks’ consists in their being inferentially
articulated, i.e., the agents are submitted to a system of inferential norms
that specify what further commitments an agent is bound to, given what previous
commitments she was bound to (and any other relevant ‘external’ circumstances).
In this paper, this basic schema is to two problems in
social ontology: the ontological status of supraindividual entities and events
(e.g., collective intentions, agents...), and that of the infraindividual
processes and qualities that serve to explain the actions of individuals
(beliefs, preferences, decisions...). In the first case, the existence of
collective items is accounted through the possibility that some commitments are
attributed to collective entities. Being an ‘agent’ is, for inferentialism, not
something like a ‘physical’ or a ‘psychological’ property, but a normative
status, and hence, nothing precludes the existence non-individual agents, as
far as the systems of commitments that constitute them are robust enough.
Regarding the second question, though Brandom has tried to
eliminate psychological notions from the landscape of the theory of action, replacing
them for normative notions like ‘commitment’ or ‘entitlement’, we think that
the latter cannot be integrated in a wholeheartedly naturalist view without
some connection with psychological states. We suggest that the classical
‘BDI-ontology’ can be replaced by a ‘Norms-Commitment-Inference-ontology’,
though resource to some more ‘primitive’ psychological and non-rational notions
is necessary.