Raimo Tuomela: Response to David Schweikard

Abstract

David Schweikard has written a clear, informative, and sympathetic paper on my book I will here comment on some selected parts of the paper that contain specific criticisms of my book Social Ontology (SO). I largely agree with his general criticism that asks for more realism from my theory concerning especially matters related to the reasons that groups give their members and especially to the conflicts that may arise between such group reasons and the members’ personal (or, as I say, “private”) reasons. In SO I have not gone into all the details that may be needed for a satisfactory discussion of the issues in question, but I believe that my account of group and personal reasons in various kinds of groups and of “stylized” reasoning schemas and other things I consider in the various chapters of the book, e.g. about the role of background knowledge in chapter 5 still serve to indicate how I would go about dealing with problematic cases like the kinds of normative conflicts that Schweikard considers in his paper.