Abstract
Social ontology gives an account of what there is in the social world, judged from the viewpoint of presumptively autonomous human beings. Three issues are salient. The individualism issue is whether social laws impose a limit on individual autonomy from above; the atomism issue is whether social interactions serve from below as part of the infrastructure of intentional autonomy; and the singularism issue whether groups can rival individuals, achieving intentional autonomy as corporate agents. The paper argues that individual autonomy is not under challenge from social laws, that the achievement of intentional autonomy does indeed presuppose interaction with others, and that groups of individuals can incorporate as autonomous agents. In other words, it defends individualism but argues against atomism and singularism.
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Notes
- 1.
In Chapter 3 of The Common Mind I describe this sort of doctrine as making the claim that social laws outflank intentional laws rather than overriding them in the manner envisaged by anti-individualists proper (Pettit 1993). The core difference between the overriding and the outflanking doctrines is that whereas adherents of the first take social laws to be inconsistent with psychological laws, adherents of the second allow that they are consistent. Both groups hold that certain social laws fail to supervene on the operation of psychological laws under various circumstances but they make that claim on very different grounds.
- 2.
Suppose that everything in my experience was consistent with having interacted, and being in a position to interact, with others in triangulating on rules. Could I be said to follow rules, even if there were no others with whom I interacted: even if I were a brain in a suitably equipped vat? I do not think that I could be said to follow rules involving properties and objects in a distal world that I share with others, although it might seem to me that I was doing so; after all, there is no such world available to me. At best I might be said to follow rules on a private basis in the proximate world of my neural stimulations.
- 3.
I consider them in the appendix to the 1996, paperback edition of The Common Mind.
- 4.
Another argument that I might have given starts from the assumption that human beings have a distinctive capacity to use words in speaking for themselves as authoritative spokespersons. Thus I can give an account of certain attitudes or action-plans—perhaps to myself, perhaps to others—treating that account as something more than a fallible report on a par with the report that another might give of me; I can treat it as authoritative in the sense of foreclosing the possibility, should I fail to act accordingly, of excusing myself on the grounds of having misread the evidence about my state of mind. It is plausible that such a capacity to invest my words with authority presupposes the presence of other people and the practice of tying myself to the avowals of attitude and the promises of action that they elicit. Might I have learned to do this by a practice of making avowals and promises to myself? Hardly, since in Thomas Hobbes’s (1994b, Ch 26) words: ‘he that can bind can release; and therefore he that is bound to himself only is not bound’.
- 5.
One factor in the demise of this movement is that many of its adherents were given to extravagant statements of its implications, as in Sir Ernest Barker’s (1950, 61) talk of ‘the pulsation of a common purpose which surges, as it were, from above, into the mind and behaviour of members of any true group’.
- 6.
Might they just agree to let past judgments logically determine the present judgment in any such case, restoring a sort of mechanical procedure? No, because then the attitudes that the group adopted would depend, absurdly, on the order in which the corresponding questions were addressed.
- 7.
I benefitted greatly from comments received on versions of this paper at conferences in the University of Oslo, 2011, the University of Copenhagen, 2012, and the Jean Nicod Institute, Paris, 2013.
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Pettit, P. (2014). Three Issues in Social Ontology. In: Zahle, J., Collin, F. (eds) Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate. Synthese Library, vol 372. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05344-8_5
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