Abstract
Our paper discusses Pettit’s most recent book on social ontology, “Group Agency”. It reconstructs Pettit’s non-redundant realism concerning group agents and elaborates problems regarding the foundation of this position in social ontology. We argue that Pettit faces three fundamental problems: his account (i) misperceives the relationship between social ontology and methodological individualism, (ii) lacks a convincing argument against critics of non-redundant realism and (iii) therefore is ambiguous regarding its addressee since it can only be read as an internal contribution among non-redundant realists but not as a contribution to strengthening this account against adverse positions.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The term singularism was introduced in the debates of social ontology by Margret Gilbert (1989).
- 3.
In a short remark Pettit says that it is possible to “re-describe” eliminativism “more positively as ‘singularism’ […]. Singularism asserts that there are only individual agents and that any talk of group agents is either metaphorical or wrong.” (GA, 3). So Pettit’s old term for the third debate has now become a re-description. In the following, we take singularism as an umbrella term covering both versions of eliminativism and redundant realism.
- 4.
Except in mentioning the position of Margret Gilbert (GA, 3 and 74).
- 5.
In the discussion, Pettit contended making use of a misleading term in calling his position ‘methodological’, since it indeed is an ontological position and he wants to tie his notion of individualism to the notion introduced by Karl Popper. But this commitment is not only misleading – Pettit explicitly speaks of “a methodological conviction at the heart of much of economics and the social sciences” (GA, 3) – but causes further problems. Popper’s position is not a merely ontological position but makes use of a mixture of ontological and normative statements that are intertwined and connot be easily divided. But for an adequate discussion in social philosophy, it is necessary to keep ontological and normative statements apart, cf. Taylor (1989). With commiting himself to Popper’s individualism, Pettit would confound these distinctions that he himself makes use of at other occasions, cf. CM and Pettit and Schweikard (2006). Furthermore, Popper’s normative position would belong to the individualism-debate (see JD, 287 ff.) and is not part of the project of Group Agency.
- 6.
Beyond this, we do not find a positive characterization of methodological non-individualism in Group Agency.
- 7.
In the discussion, Pettit suggested that with ‘psychology’ he refers to the concept of ‘folk psychology’. This answer stands in tension with the position in the book, where Pettit explicitly refers to “research in psychology” and does not make us of the term ‘folk psychology’ (neither in this context nor anywhere else in the book). Furthermore, this interpretation faces certain follow-up difficulties, e.g. (i) it becomes less clear, which entities count as mysterious, since he would have to accept all kinds of explanations which are accepted by ordinary people, even though they vary over time and may include instances of “organicist metaphors” (GA, 9) that Pettit would want to discard – at least as long it is contended that the organicist explanations supervene on individual attitudes but are not readily reducible to them. Additionally, (ii) the concept of ‘folk psychology’ might get in tension with Pettit’s anti-reductionist account on different fields of philosophy.
- 8.
An intentional attitude is always an instantiation of an intentional state (GA, 21), therefore we can treat them as similar for the purposes of this essay.
- 9.
Maybe Pettit takes the straw vote procedure in chapter 3.1 to show that his approach provides this feature, but to us it seems that this aims at showing that groups can exhibit reasoning as opposed to mere rationality (cf. GA, 63 ff.). Chapter 3.2. and 3.3 treat the relationship of group members and group agents and therefore presuppose the possibility of group agents.
- 10.
The first group covers, for the main part, works Pettit published alone (Pettit 2001b, 2004, 2009). In this texts, he seems to vote for option (i). The second group covers works which Pettit published together with Christian List (List and Pettit 2002, 2004, 2011). Here he seems to vote for option (ii).
- 11.
In the discussion, Pettit explicitly agreed that this is the adequate characterization of his position. But this yields the consequences lined out in the following, namely that Pettit’s book is in no way an argument against singularists but only an internal offer for non-redundant realists. Furthermore, this commitment stands in tension with Pettit’s contrary suggestion that “the lack of an easy translation of group-level attitudes into individual-level ones requires us to recognize the existence of group agents in making an inventory of the social world.” (GA, 5, our italics).
- 12.
This refers back to our problem in identifying what makes up an ontological assumption as opposed to non-ontological assumptions in Pettit.
References
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Düber, D., Mooren, N., Rojek, T. (2016). What Is the Foundation of Pettit’s Non-redundant Realism About Group Agents?. In: Derpmann, S., Schweikard, D. (eds) Philip Pettit: Five Themes from his Work. Münster Lectures in Philosophy, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26103-4_9
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