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CollapseWEEK 6 - PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION

 Preliminary Examination

CollapseWEEK 7 - SOCIAL ONTOLOGY

 Preliminary Activity for Week 7

 Lesson Proper for Week 7

 Analysis, Application, and Exploration for Week 7

 Generalization for Week 7

 Evaluation for Week 7

 Assignment for Week 7

CollapseWEEK 8 - ONTOLOGICAL ISSUES: INDIVIDUALS OR POPULATIONS?

CollapseWEEK 13 - USING FORMAL MODELS: CHOICE MODELS

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CollapseTOPIC 17 [ENTER MODULE TITLE HERE]

Collapse18 FINAL EXAMINATION

1. Home

2. My courses

3. 223 - GEE2

4. WEEK 7 - SOCIAL ONTOLOGY

5. Lesson Proper for Week 7

Lesson Proper for Week 7

1. SOCIAL ONTOLOGY

Questions regarding the nature of social reality and how one ought to go about explaining social
facts, relations, and processes are the main subject of social ontology. Because the social sciences
often appeal to social groups, social processes, and social relations, and because social scientists
often attribute causal powers and properties to social groups, social ontology and the philosophical
debates within social ontology are of great importance to the social sciences.

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

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.

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.

2. Ancient and Early Modern Debates on the Sources of Social Entities

Ancient inquiries into the nature of social phenomena introduced questions that remain active today:
Which features of the world are products of humans or society, and which are products of nature?
What does it mean to say that something is a social creation? A central concern of Sophism, a
school of Greek philosophy in the fifth century BCE, was the contrast between nature (phusis) and
custom, law, habit, or convention (nomos). In particular, they debated the sources of justice, law,
and language: are these rooted in phusis or in nomos?

Ancient philosophers explored the mix between natural and human contributions in the construction
of familiar features of the world. They did not, however, theorize much about exactly what people do
in order to create the social world. Instead, they wrote of agreements, compacts, conventions,
habits, laws, customs, and so on, without paying particular notice to separating these from one
another. In the early modern period, theories of these sources broadened considerably, as did the
variety of social phenomena being investigated. Approaches developed in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries include:

Social entities as products of covenants: Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), argues that a stable
commonwealth is generated by covenants among all the people in a society. Hobbes’s analysis is
reflexive: the people who institute the commonwealth are those who are members of the
commonwealth. Hobbes analyzes covenants in terms of agreements, and also provides an analysis
of agreement, a crucial part of which is to explain what makes agreements binding.

Social entities as products of convention: As an alternative to ‘compact’ or ‘agreement,’ the legal

theorist Samuel Pufendorf, in De Officio Hominis et Civis (1673), uses the term ‘convention’ as the
basis for law and language. He argues that conventions do not need to be explicitly formed or
agreed to. Instead, we can have tacit conventions—i.e., conventions that we may not even be aware
we have. Hume greatly advances the analysis of convention and of social phenomena in terms of it
(Hume 1740). He expands the scope of convention to include a wide variety of social entities—not
only law, property, and language, but also money, government, justice, and promises.

Social entities as products of God and Nature: Other early modern philosophers root the social world
in the natural—both in divine commandment and in human nature. Robert Filmer, a seventeenth
century monarchist, argues in Patriarcha (1680) that the state is a family. This implies, according to
Filmer, that state authority is no different from the authority of a father over his family. Locke’s Two
Treatises on Government (1689) sharply criticize Filmer and provide a competing analysis, though
Locke, too, sees God and nature as the sources of the state and of property. Locke rejects Filmer’s
comparison of the state with a family, arguing instead that political authority has its source in the
natural rights of each individual created equally.

Social entities as products of the individual mind: Locke’s theory of “nominal essence” is important
for a number of contemporary approaches to social ontology, even though Locke does not himself
associate nominal essences with the social world in particular. A nominal essence is a definition of a
species or sort of thing, which people assemble in their minds out of ideas. Individuals generate
these definitions when they observe things in the world and classify them according to their apparent
similarities. Nominal essences, in Locke’s approach, are generated mentalistically: they are formed
from the association of ideas in the mind. Moreover, they are generated individualistically: a nominal
essence defined by any given person is fully defined by that person’s own mental states.

In Locke’s work, we also see the foundations for a new inquiry that blossomed in the eighteenth
century—not into the sources of social phenomena, but into their constituents or building blocks.

We can distinguish between an ontological and a methodological version of both collectivism and
individualism. ‘Ontological collectivism’ is the view that there are social entities that exist, and these
entities are on par with individual human beings. ‘Ontological individualism’ is the view that there are
no non-reducible social entities—only individuals exist.

Methodological individualism is the view that individual actions and individual intentional states are
the basis of all explanations of social phenomena. ‘Methodological collectivism’ is the view that
social phenomena cannot be explained solely in terms of individuals and their intentional states. One
must appeal to other social facts. The methodological collectivist will often appeal to certain
structural or functional characteristics to explain social phenomena.

The ontological and methodological versions of individualism may be related in various ways
depending on how one defines these positions. According to the definitions given, ontological
individualism and methodological individualism might plausibly go hand in hand. If only individuals
exist then one might insist that they must be the basis of explanation of any social phenomena.
Further, it seems likely that, if one is an ontological collectivist, they will also be methodological
collectivists. If there are social wholes that cannot be reduced to a mere aggregate of persons then
structural or functional features of groups are likely to play a role in social scientific explanation.

There is a third position one might adopt here that represents a sort of methodological compromise.
One might argue that individuals are onto-logically prior and that groups are nothing ‘over and
above’ the individuals that comprise them (and so adhere to an ontological individualism) but also
argue that the relations between individuals give rise to certain properties and events that wouldn’t
otherwise exist apart from these relations. ‘Interrelationism’ is the idea that social groups, processes,
and relations are to be explained by reference to individual human agents and the relations between
them. To the extent that interrelationism advocates a methodology that utilizes explanations that go
beyond the individual human agent, it avoids strict methodological individualism.

One last point, the word ‘holism’ has sometimes been confused with what I am here calling
‘collectivism’. ‘Holism’ is the view that human agents depend non-causally on their social relations
with one another for the possession of distinctive human capacities. They only have these capacities
(for instance, the capacity to think) as social beings. ‘Atomism’ defends the opposite view. According
to atomism, it is possible for human beings to develop all the capacities characteristic of human
beings in complete isolation from other humans. There is no incoherence, according to the atomist,
in the possibility of a solitary thinker or a language that is private. Holism and atomism are theories
about the capacities of individual human beings. Collectivism and individualism (of both the
ontological and methodological form) are theories about social groups and the relationship between
social groups and the individual

3. Types of Groups and the Reality of Social Groups

Consider the many different types of groups we might find the subject of social scientific research:
cultural and ethnic groups, families, organizations, clans, governments, committees and teams,
among others. Is there anything that unites these groups such that we can call them all ‘social’? At a
minimum a social group involves more than one individual. But consider the group of all red-haired
men. This is clearly a group of more than one person but is it a social group? Social groups appear
to be more than simply classes of individuals that share the same physical trait. What makes a
cultural or ethnic group a social group, for instance, goes beyond the fact that they share a common
biological origin or geographical location. Cultural and ethnic groups are col-lections of people that
interact with one another and share beliefs, customs, and goals.

 We might define a social group, then, as a collection of people that interact with one another
on the basis of shared attitudes.
 Some social groups might be fleeting and relatively short-lived—a jury that meets to
deliberate about a case and never meets again, or two people that unite to perform an action
(e.g. moving a table) and then quickly disperse
 Others might have a relatively stable structure that persists despite a change of membership
— sports teams and corporations, for instance.
 The eliminativist argues that social groups do not exist and talk of social groups and their
properties refers only to individuals and their properties.
 A social group is a certain functional structure and individuals play a role in helping to
instantiate that structure.

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