Abstract
One particularly influential strand of the contemporary philosophical literature on the metaphysics of social institutions has been the collective acceptance approach, most prominently advocated by John Searle and Raimo Tuomela. The continuing influence of the collective acceptance approach has resulted in alternative accounts that either preserve a role for collective acceptance, or replace it with some other kind of mental state. I argue that this emphasis on the mental in the metaphysics of social institutions is a mistake. First, I raise problems for the collective acceptance approach itself, then for pluralist approaches that preserve a role for collective acceptance, and finally for approaches that replace collective acceptance with individual mental states such as beliefs and intentions. Lest my arguments undermining these approaches to the metaphysics of social institutions seem to also undermine our ability to give such a metaphysics at all, I end by sketching an alternative approach: focusing only on observable behavior, with no role for mental states.
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Notes
In keeping with this way of framing the question, I will use the term ‘metaphysical determination’ only for non-causal metaphysical relations.
Ludwig (2017, p. 132) argues for another collective acceptance approach to institutions, but his definition of collective acceptance (in terms of intentions or conditional intentions) is so different from Searle’s and Tuomela’s that his view is not subject to the criticisms of this section. However, the criticisms in Sect. 4 do ultimately apply to Ludwig’s view (see note 19, below).
I created this sample Declaration by inserting values into the schema Searle (2009, p. 99) provides, but it is worth noting that doing this is not entirely straightforward. Searle himself does not provide examples of filled in versions of his schemata for Declarations, and in particular he does not address the question of what kinds of things are of the right sort to serve as contexts for these Declarations. There are also difficulties in knowing how Searle intends us to prize apart the status that has been imposed and the resulting function that the object can perform.
There is an unfortunate clash between Searle’s terminology and mine: Searle (2009, p. 57) sometimes uses the term ‘collective acceptance’ for collective recognition, rather than for full-blown cooperation. I have chosen to use the term ‘collective acceptance’ in the main text to refer to what Searle calls ‘full-blown cooperation’ because I think it is apt, and also because it facilitates discussion of what Searle’s and Tuomela’s accounts have in common.
Searle (1995, p. 126) discusses this kind of example in relation to an earlier version of his view, saying that “[m]oney gradually evolves in ways that we are not aware of” (cf. Tuomela, 2002, pp. 108–111). But he makes it clear that he thinks this evolution still involves implicit or unconscious collective intentionality (Searle, 1995, pp. 47, 126), whereas Viskovatoff’s discussion of the case shows that collective intentionality is not needed in any form, conscious or otherwise.
For a contrasting contemporary view of race, see Spencer’s (2019) biological view.
Tuomela (2002, p. 122) himself sometimes sounds a bit like a pluralist. But he makes it clear that he always requires collective acceptance for the kind of “standard” institutions that are the focus of this paper, so he does not endorse the kind of pluralism about all institutions that Epstein favors (Tuomela, 2002, p. 170; 2013, p. 227).
Epstein (2016, p. 167) makes it clear that he is open to “heterogeneous anchors” of the sort discussed in this and the preceding paragraph.
The two modal strategies for the weak pluralist were suggested by anonymous referees.
On dialetheism for vague predicates, see, e.g., Hyde (1997, p. 645), who mentions the examples of something being both a seedling and not a seedling for a period of time while growing into a tree, and a person being both bearded and not bearded for a period of time while growing a beard.
This shift to talking about types may actually risk smuggling in an implicit two-level view, which would permit inconsistency again. If so, that would be a third problem for the strategy of shifting to individual mental states, in addition to the two I will discuss below.
This paragraph parallels Searle’s (2009, pp. 90–91) description of how surrounded we are by institutional reality, though with a shift to emphasizing its physicality.
One might wonder what implications Clark and Chalmers’s (1998) extended mind thesis has for this argument. On that view, not all aspects of mental states are located inside people’s heads. If an electronic transponder could be seen as itself part of someone’s mental state, such as perhaps an intention to let me into a certain parking lot, then that aspect of that intention would be in the right location to be a metaphysical determinant of an institution. But unlike, for instance, a “to do” list, an electronic transponder does not fulfil the functional role of an intention. A “to do” list fulfils the function of an intention by making the haver of an intention likelier to do certain actions in the future. A transponder does no such thing for the person who issues it; instead, it makes further action on their part unnecessary.
Bennett goes on to present a subtler picture of the relationship between causation and other building relations, as she calls them, but she does seem to retain the basic idea that causation is horizontal (2017, p. 69).
Schaffer (2016, p. 95) also notes that this idea of inherited reality marks an important difference between causation and grounding.
Both of these objections were inspired by comments from anonymous referees.
As noted previously (note 3), Ludwig proposes a collective acceptance approach to social institutions, with collective acceptance defined in terms of intentions or conditional intentions. Whether the intentions to which he appeals are ultimately individual in the sense of the individual mental state views we’ve discussed in this section is not a simple interpretive question, but it is certainly clear that Ludwig’s account is still an account in terms of mental states (2017, pp. 21–35, 132). Due to that fact alone, both the location problem and the epistemic privacy problem apply to Ludwig’s view as well.
This proposal is somewhat similar to the “patterns or regularities in practice” item that Epstein includes in his list of possible kinds of anchors for institutional facts, since that item contrasts with the others in his list by making no explicit mention of mental phenomena. A major difference is, of course, that I favor a unitary rather than pluralist account.
Epstein (2015, p. 163) would likely dispute the characterization of ant colonies as social, but my hope is that the discussion that follows will convincingly display the fruitfulness of bringing ant colonies and human institutions under the same conceptual umbrella.
I should note that I use ‘group’ to mean just a collection of individuals. It should not be taken to mean something like a genuine social group in the sense of, e.g., Epstein (2015, Part 2).
This emphasis on the importance of the result at which behavior aims is inspired by Miller’s (2001, p. 181) notion of a collective end and its role in social institutions.
Ludwig (2017, p. 5), too, gives roles a central place in his understanding of social institutions. But Ludwig’s understanding of roles is very different from what I am suggesting here (most notably in being intention-dependent) (pp. 138–139).
For instance, see Skinner 1953, p. 35, for claims about behavior and explanation that sound similar to some of mine.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful feedback on past versions of this article, I am grateful to Graham Hubbs, Stefan Sciaraffa, several anonymous referees, and audiences at Vassar College, the University of Idaho, McMaster University, and the Social Ontology 2018 conference. For research assistance, I am grateful to Alex Bryant, Michaela Murphy, Siddharth Raman, and Gary Spero. I am also grateful to the students in my Fall 2018 and Fall 2022 graduate seminars at McMaster University, as well as Brent Odland, for helpful discussion on topics related to this article. This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Stotts, M.H. Moving from the mental to the behavioral in the metaphysics of social institutions. Synthese 203, 123 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04532-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04532-z