Abstract
In the past 30 years, collective intentionality, group agency and social institutions have established themselves as central topics within analytic philosophy. The many wide-ranging and penetrating papers and books that Raimo Tuomela has published on these topics have made a significant contribution to this development. His new book Social Ontology. Collective Intentionality and Group Agents (Oxford University Press) is a welcome addition. Tuomela formulates his ideas in a more accessible way than before, which makes the book attractive also to philosophers and social scientists that are new to his work.
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Notes
- 1.
Tuomela is regarded as one of the Big Four proponents of collective intentionality (Chant, Hindriks, and Preyer 2014). His contributions to the field are not restricted to his publications. Tuomela has also formed an international network of researchers that has recently constituted itself as a formal society, the International Social Ontology Society (ISOS). Participants in the network have recently established the Journal of Social Ontology.
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- 3.
- 4.
In addition to collective commitment and group reasons, the we-mode encompasses the collectivity condition according to which a group goal is satisfied for a particular member only if it is satisfied for each member (40). The members of a movie club, for instance, go to the movie together as a group only if its members do indeed go to the movie.
- 5.
As it presupposes intrinsic intentionality, group agents cannot have phenomenal consciousness (52, 260).
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- 7.
We-mode collective acceptance may well contribute to the functioning of some institutions. I do not see, however, why this would always be the case. Institutions sanctioned by authorities that are collectively accepted in the we-mode need not themselves be supported by such acceptance. Furthermore, some institutions involve little conflict of interests and function fine without collective commitment.
- 8.
Tuomela uses the term ‘constitutive norm’ interchangeably with ‘constitutive rule’.
- 9.
One might say instead that they are constitutive because the practices would not be norm-governed if it were not for the rules. Although true, this claim is trivial. ‘Constitutive’ merely indicates necessity here: necessarily, the social practice would not be governed by these rules if it were not for these rules. This claim would also be true if the relevant norms were regulative rules – as in the rules of etiquette.
- 10.
Tuomela allows for institutions to involve both constitutive and regulative norms (227). It would be interesting to know more about what this means. Elsewhere I propose that constitutive rules are best seen as combinations of constitutive rules that determine the referents of institutional terms and status rules that specify their meaning in terms of the normative powers that come with the relevant statuses (Hindriks 2009). As status rules are, on my view, a kind of regulative rule, this proposal embodies a precise idea of how constitutive rules and regulative rules could be combined.
- 11.
There are other ways of developing the same idea. Perhaps certain values can be realized only by means of particular rules. The idea would be that “a good” such as friendship is internal to practices governed by those rules, and accessible only to those who participate in them (see Raz 1986; Reaume 1988).
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Acknowledgments
I thank Francesco Guala for helpful comments. This paper grew out of a book review (to be) published in Economics and Philosophy.
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Hindriks, F. (2017). Group Agents and Social Institutions: Beyond Tuomela’s Social Ontology . In: Preyer, G., Peter, G. (eds) Social Ontology and Collective Intentionality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33236-9_15
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