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Social Ontology and Collective Intentionality pp 211–217Cite as

Raimo Tuomela: Response to Frank Hindriks

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Part of the book series: Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality ((SIPS,volume 8))

Abstract

Hindriks’s paper discusses many central questions in social ontology dealt with in my book and makes interesting remarks about the topic of group agents and social institutions. However, compared with what I have said in my book, his paper unfortunately contains many mistakes and inaccuracies of understanding concerning my theory. Some of these mistakes may be due to a hasty reading of the book (below SO, for brevity).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As to the notion of acting as a group member, see my account in chapter 1 of Tuomela (2007) and the relevant remarks in SO.

  2. 2.

    In the (2016) paperback edition of SO some minor changes concerning what I say of fictitious features of group agents are made in Chap. 3.

  3. 3.

    Some remarks in Hindriks’s text indicate that he takes my view to be that groups can have we-mode states. But in my account we-mode states can be had only by individual group members. The source of such we-mode, though, lies in the group’s mental states attributed to it – through the group’s collectively accepted decision procedure – by the members to the group. E.g. the group members may decide to build a house and to form the required beliefs as group members for the group. Here we have attribution that results in the group’s extrinsically intentional mental states that in turn serve to generate correspondingly extrinsically intentional states in the members. Yet, those intentional member-level states might be fully internalized by the members so as to become approximately intrinsic intentional states.

References

  • Hindriks, F. (2015). Group agents and social institutions. Beyond Tuomela’s Social Ontology, the present anthology.

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  • Searle, J. (2015). Status function and institutional facts; Reply to Hindriks and Guala. Journal Institutional Economics, 11(03), 507–514.

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  • Tuomela, R. (2013). Social ontology: Collective norms and group agents. New York: Oxford University Press (SO in the present response).

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Acknowledgments 

I wish to thank Dr. Maj Tuomela for comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

    Frank Hindriks

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  1. Frank Hindriks
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Correspondence to Frank Hindriks .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany

    Gerhard Preyer

  2. Editorial Staff ProtoSociology, Offenbach, Hessen, Germany

    Georg Peter

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Hindriks, F. (2017). Raimo Tuomela: Response to Frank Hindriks. 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_16

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