Abstract
It is often seen as a truism that social objects and facts are the product of human intentions. I argue that the role of intentions in social ontology is commonly overestimated. I introduce a distinction that is implicit in much discussion of social ontology, but is often overlooked: between a social entity’s “grounds” and its “anchors.” For both, I argue that intentions, either individual or collective, are less essential than many theorists have assumed. Instead, I propose a more worldly—and less intellectualist—approach to social ontology.
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Notes
- 1.
I will use “entity” to avoid the tedious repetition of “facts or objects,” where it is sufficiently unambiguous.
- 2.
Searle gives slightly more detailed X-conditions in Searle (1995, pp. 45–56). But this is the explicit constitutive rule he gives, and it is fine for our purposes. In the next sections of this paper, I point out that none of Searle’s proposals give plausible X-conditions for dollars, but for the moment I am concerned with clarifying the form of constitutive rules. I use the term ‘ground’, following Fine (2001), Correia (2005), and others. Grounding is usually understood as holding between sets of facts. But we can also speak of objects, as well as facts, having grounds. A natural way to understand this is to take the grounds of an object, such as the Federal Reserve, to be the grounds of the fact The Federal Reserve exists.
- 3.
- 4.
Part of the problem may be that Thomasson wants a general formula to account for the generation of both abstract and concrete objects. Here I only consider concreta.
- 5.
I have left out the “context” parameter as well. If it is appropriate for some sort of object, a contextual restriction can always be included among the generation conditions. But I see no reason to assume that, for a community, a constitutive rule must only apply to objects in the context of the community in question. I discuss this below (in connection with “cowrie money”). This also differs from Hindriks’ formalization (Hindriks 2008, p. 134n143).
- 6.
Voluntary manslaughter is either killing with malice aforethought but with mitigating circumstances, or else killing with a different intention—to cause bodily harm but not to kill.
- 7.
- 8.
One way of addressing the dependence of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing on intention may be, as Searle does, to introduce iterated constitutive rules. But the other cases I’ve mentioned, such as the intentional requirements for issuance, or for murder, are not treatable in this way.
- 9.
In Searle (2010), he changes his terminology from “collective acceptance” to “collective recognition.” His notion of collective recognition seems to be close to Tuomela’s notion of collective acceptance, inasmuch as it does not entail belief. I discuss collective acceptance below.
- 10.
They do not, of course, use the term ‘anchor’.
- 11.
Plato ascribes this view to Hermogenes in Cratylus 384d, and Aristotle advances a similar view in De Interp. 16b19. Pufendorf (1673), Book I, ch. 10, distinguishes tacit from explicit agreement about conventions.
- 12.
Searle also discusses this in Smith and Searle (2003, p. 208).
- 13.
It is always an option for the convention-theorist to weaken the conditions on what counts as a convention. Millikan, for instance, proposes a rather weak set of conditions, where attitudes are not required at all for a convention to be in place. If hers is the correct analysis of convention, and if constitutive rules are conventions in this sense, then intentions are even more unnecessary for grounding constitutive rules than I am arguing here. I have criticized aspects of her theory in Epstein (2006).
- 14.
It is not clear which of the various measures economists use for the quantity of money should be identified as the number of dollars outstanding—economists are likely to use “M1”, which consists of notes and coins, bank reserves, traveler’s checks, demand deposits, and other checkable deposits. Or they may use the “monetary base” or “total currency,” which consists only of notes, coins, and bank reserves. For none of these does electronic money have anything to do with it: these measures were in place long before electronic money, and it would be easy to have a dollar-based economy with only checks—no notes, coins, or electronics.
- 15.
It is also troubling that Searle feels the need to extend this new account to institutional entities like corporations. It seems likely that if this is necessary, then other institutional entities, such as restaurants, universities, churches, nations, and so on, will be subject to the same considerations.
- 16.
Moreover, plenty of commonplaces about the functions of money are false. For instance, it is widely held that for an instrument to be money, it must be legal tender for future payments. There are many forms of money, however, for which this is not true (e.g. money issued by individual banks in Brazil). And even for dollars, however, there is a spate of exceptions to bills (especially large ones) being legal tender, both in law and in practice.
- 17.
- 18.
If we take it as an ordinary counterfactual, of course, it is a statement about grounds as opposed to anchors, and is straightforwardly false. But if we are to be all charitable, it should be taken to be a counterfactual claim about anchoring.
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Epstein, B. (2014). Social Objects without Intentions. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Schmid, H. (eds) Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6934-2_4
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