Abstract
This paper is a contribution to the development of an ontology of conflict. In particular, we single out and study a peculiar notion of group conflict, that we suggestively label “social contradiction.” In order to do so, we shall introduce and discuss the methodology of social choice theory, since it allows for defining the notion of collective attitude that may emerge from a number of possibly divergent individual attitudes. We shall see how collective attitudes lead to define a specific notion of group and therefore a specific notion of group conflict. As a conclusion, we shall present our abstract analysis of group conflicts and we shall position social contradiction with respect to other types of conflicts.
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Notes
- 1.
These conditions are to be taken in a normative way. They are not of course descriptively adequate, as several results in behavioral game theory show. However, the point of this approach is to show that even when individuals are fully rational, i.e. they conform to the rationality criteria that we have just introduced, the aggregation of their preferences is problematic.
- 2.
Of course this may be a descriptively inadequate assumption. However, on the one hand, these requirements are to be understood in a normative way, e.g. we exclude that a representative would vote for a proposal A and a proposal ¬A at the same time. Moreover, the agenda may contain very simple logical propositions: as we shall see, it is sufficient to assume very minimal reasoning capacity to get the paradoxical outcomes.
- 3.
For a discussion on the status of instrumental rationality, see Nozick (1993).
- 4.
We are assuming that the social agentive group is a distinct object with respect to the group as a set of individuals. The reason is that we want to attribute to the social agentive group properties of a different kind with respect to those that we can attribute to the group. In this sense, the social agentive group is a qua object.
- 5.
Here we present the definitions in a semi-formal fashion. Our analysis can be incorporated in the ontological treatment of DOLCE (Masolo et al. 2003). Note that, although the definition seems to be in second order logic, it is possible to flatten the hierarchy of concepts by typing them. This is the so-called reification strategy of dolce. We leave a precise presentation of dolce for future work.
- 6.
For a precise ontological treatment of the agency of groups, we refer to Porello et al. (2014).
- 7.
For example, we may discuss whether a social agentive group remains the same by adding or removing members of the set of individuals or by reforming the aggregation procedure. For this reason, we did not put the unicity constraint on N and f in Definition (2.1). Moreover, by viewing social agentive group with respect to time, the acknowledgment relation has to be parametrized wrt times as well. One application of a time-dependent acknowledgment relation is that, in order to reform the aggregation procedure at a certain moment, a new acknowledgment may be required. However, at a time slice, the group and the procedure are supposed to be unique. This is motivated by the simple observation that if we were to allow for two different aggregation procedures at a given time, with possibly divergent outcomes, the attitudes of the social agentive group would always be indeterminate.
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Acknowledgements
D. Porello and R. Ferrario are supported by the VisCoSo project, financed by the Autonomous Province of Trento, “Team 2011” funding programme. E. Bottazzi is supported by the STACCO project, financed by the Autonomous Province of Trento, “Postdoc 2011” funding programme.
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Porello, D., Bottazzi, E., Ferrario, R. (2015). Group Conflict as Social Contradiction. In: D'Errico, F., Poggi, I., Vinciarelli, A., Vincze, L. (eds) Conflict and Multimodal Communication. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14081-0_2
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