Review of "Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents" (original) (raw)

Grounding and anchoring: on the structure of Epstein’s social ontology

Inquiry, 2017

Brian Epstein's The Ant Trap is a praiseworthy addition to literature on social ontology and the philosophy of social sciences. Its central aim is to challenge received views about the social world-views with which social scientists and philosophers have aimed to answer questions about the nature of social science and about those things that social sciences aim to model and explain, like social facts, objects and phenomena. The received views that Epstein critiques deal with these issues in an overly people-centered manner. After all, even though social facts and phenomena clearly involve individual people arranged in certain ways, we must still spell out how people are involved in social facts and phenomena. There are many metaphysical questions about social properties, relations, dependence, constitution, causation, and facts that cannot be answered (for instance) just be looking at individual people alone. In order to answer questions about (e.g.) how one social entity depends for its existence on another, we need different metaphysical tools. Epstein thus holds that social ontological explanations would greatly benefit from making use of the theoretical toolkit that contemporary analytical metaphysics has to offer. He focuses specifically on two metaphysical instruments: grounding and anchoring. This paper examines Epstein's understanding and use of these tools. I contend that Epstein is exactly right to say that contemporary metaphysics contains many theoretical instruments that can be fruitfully applied to social ontological analyses. However, I am unconvinced that Epstein's tools achieve what they set out to do. In particular, I will address two issues: (1) How is grounding for Epstein meant to work? (2) Is anchoring distinct from grounding, and a relation that we need in social ontology?

Artefacts and Collective Intentionality

Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 2005

Social reality is multifaceted and comprises at least social conventions and norms, social roles and relations, social institutions and social artefacts. John Searle’s ambitious project in his Construction of Social Reality is to show in general terms how social reality can be accommodated to physical reality (Searle 1995). This raises a host of issues including how individual mentality and sociality are to be related, and how sociality and morality are to be related. Elsewhere I have argued against Searle’s anti-individualist conception of sui generis ‘we-intentions’ (Miller 2001, ch. 2). Specifically, I have argued in favour of what I term the collective end account of joint action according to which sui generis ‘we-intentions’ are neither desirable nor necessary. I have also suggested that Searle’s constructivist collective acceptance account of social forms emasculates central moral notions such as that of right and duty. On Searle’s account, human rights and correlative moral d...

An Illuminating Exchange The Construction of Social Reality. An Exchange

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2003

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle argues for a two-level ontology along the following lines. Facts on the lower level -which he calls brute facts -can exist independently of human beings and their institutions. Facts on the upper level, which he calls institutional facts, depend on human institutions and above all on an associated 'collective intentionality'. The existence of the Planet Earth is a brute fact, the existence of Utah is an institutional fact. As Searle confesses, there is a sort of magic involved when 'we impose rights, responsibilities, obligations, duties, privileges, entitlements, penalties, authorizations, permissions ... in order to regulate relations between people'

Socially Constituted Actions and Objects

Grazer Philosophische Studien, 2012

This paper addresses the question of how it is to be explained that an action or object X counts as Y. I argue that John Searle’s notion of a constitutive rule should not be employed because it involves a confusion. Instead, I propose an explanatory framework containing the following three elements: 1) The X-action or object is involved in certain social practices. 2) These practices confer proper- ties on the X-items, in addition to their physical properties. 3) In virtue of these additional properties the X-items fall under the Y-concept. Moreover, I stress that the social practices mentioned under 1) look differently from case to case and involve various constellations of prescriptive rules and interpersonal patterns of intentions. To illustrate and corroborate these claims, I discuss several cases of socially constituted actions and objects, in particular, the case of money, where I reject Searle’s claim that something counts as money in virtue of giving its owner the right to buy something.

Searle's Collective Intentionality: A Defence

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

This paper concerns social ontology. At the heart of the discussion of social ontology are institutional facts. These are indispensable to sustain harmoniously in a society. The focal point of this paper is collective intentionality or we-intentionality that is used to create institutional facts. It is one of the building blocks in the creation of institutional facts. There is a debate within the social ontological arena whether the collective intentionality can or cannot be reduced to individual intentionality. Primarily, I will deal with this debate. John Searle has opposed such a reduction but thinkers like Raimo Tuomela and Kaarlo Miller have painted an opposed picture. This paper is restricted to these thinkers the core discussion being collective intentionality. I have put forward arguments defending John R. Searle's irreducibility account. Searle has put forward his account of collective intentionality as biologically primitive which is not merely a culmination of individual intentionality.

Language and Institutions in Searle's The Construction of Social Reality

The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social …, 2008

In Chapter 3 of his The Construction of Social Reality (CSR in the following text), John Searle endeavors to explain and justify his claim that language is essentially constitutive of institutional reality. Unlike several other components of his theory of institutions (collective intentionality, deontic power, constitutive rules), this claim of Searle's has not been made a topic of critical discussion yet. However, there are several difficulties connected with this part of Searle's theory, and most of my paper is an attempt to show what they are and how to remove them.

Introduction: Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition

In this editorial introduction, we provide some background to the discussions in social ontology and social cognition which form the context for the papers collected together in this volume. In doing so, we also briefly sketch how the individual contributions fit together within this broader context.

On Some Difficulties Concerning John Searle's Notion of an 'Institutional Fact'

Analyse und Kritik, 1999

John Searle’s conception of institutional facts figures centrally in his latest works. It is defective for several reasons: (1) Searle’s argument for philosophical realism is inconsistent. (2) Searle’s conceptions of consciousness and collective intentionality are problematic. (3) The notion of normativity is indispensable in Searle’s system, but cannot be accounted for and makes wide parts of his theory superfluous. (4) It is not clear what entities might be regarded as institutional facts. These problems have a common source: The philosophical basis of Searle’s theory, his combination of realism and physicalist monism, clashes with his thesis that both the 'first-person-ontology' and normativity are irreducible.