Social Objects without Intentions
It is often seen as a truism that social objects and facts are the product of human intentions. I argue that the role of intentions in social ontology is commonly overestimated. I introduce a distinction that is implicit in much discussion of social ontol
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Social Objects without Intentions Brian Epstein
Abstract It is often seen as a truism that social objects and facts are the product of human intentions. I argue that the role of intentions in social ontology is commonly overestimated. I introduce a distinction that is implicit in much discussion of social ontology, but is often overlooked: between a social entity’s “grounds” and its “anchors.” For both, I argue that intentions, either individual or collective, are less essential than many theorists have assumed. Instead, I propose a more worldly—and less intellectualist—approach to social ontology.
1 Introduction It is often seen as a truism that social objects (such as dollars) and social facts (such as that the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates) are the product of human intentions. As distinct from natural objects and facts, which exist or are the case independently of us, social objects and facts exist in virtue of our having attitudes toward the world, attitudes usually taken with some practical aim in mind. This postulate is a basic building-block of prevailing theories of social ontology. Lynne Baker, for instance, explains that artifacts “are objects intentionally made to serve a given purpose” (Baker 2004, p. 99). On John Searle’s view, institutional facts are created and maintained by collective attitudes: Collective intentionality assigns a new status to some phenomenon, where that status has an accompanying function that cannot be performed solely in virtue of the intrinsic physical features of the phenomenon in question. This assignment creates a new fact, an institutional fact, a new fact created by human agreement. (Searle 1995, p. 46)
B. Epstein () Department of Philosophy, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Konzelmann Ziv and H.B. Schmid (eds.), Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 2, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6934-2 4, © Springer ScienceCBusiness Media Dordrecht 2014
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B. Epstein
My aim in this paper is to argue that focusing on intentions and attitudes distorts our understanding of social ontology. In some sense, it is surely correct that social entities1 partly depend on people, society, and human intentionality—otherwise, they would not be “social” at all. However, the role of intentions and other attitudes is often overestimated, making prevailing views excessively intellectualist. And it is especially misleading to approach social ontology as if it were a subfield of collective intentionality in particular, an approach that seems to be gaining momentum nowadays. I begin by introducing a distinction that is implicit in much discussion of social ontology, but is often overlooked: the distinction between what I will call a social entity’s “grounds” and its “anchors.” Subsequently I discuss the role and limits of intentions in each of the two, respectively. I argue that many social entities have entirely non-intentional grounds. I further argue that the role of intentions in anchoring is less central t
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