On the Relation between Institutional Statuses and Technical Artifacts: A Proposed Taxonomy of Social Kinds

Rust, Joshua

doi:10.1080/09672559.2017.1381139

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The first one concerns people who have statuses without powers. Rust (2017) imagines that the presidency be stripped of its powers. This implies that the president plays a merely ceremonial role (as in Germany).…”

Section: Social Rolesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

How Social Objects (Fail to) Function

Hindriks

2020

Journal of Social Philosophy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Driver's licenses and traffic lights make driving safer. And dollar bills and credit cards make exchanges more efficient as compared to bartering. Social objects can be useful in such ways because they have certain powers. Dollar bills have purchasing power. And driver's licenses restrict access to the public road to people that have them. But what purpose do social objects serve more generally? To answer this question, I explore the role they play in social practices and institutions. Such social forms are patterns of behavior. Their function is to generate collective benefits. Social objects and the powers they have typically play an important role in this process. According to the dual function theory that I propose here, social objects have two functions, a contributory function and a signaling function. Their contributory function is to facilitate or enable social forms to generate collective benefits. In order for them to contribute to this process, agents must exercise their social powers. But how do objects acquire such powers? Due to certain salient characteristics. Such signals enable agents to converge on the same kind of object for similar purposes. Thus, the signaling function of social objects is to indicate mutually beneficial opportunities for interaction that involve those powers. In this sense, traffic lights signal when to stop and when to go. After presenting this dual function theory, I use it to solve a puzzle that Seumas Miller (2001) and Barry Smith (2003) introduced almost two decades ago. Intuitively, the status of an object and its powers go together. For instance, in order for a piece of paper to be a dollar bill, it must be possible to use it as a means of exchange. However, a dollar bill can be so damaged that no one accepts it anymore. It appears that such "failing originals" have a status but not its concomitant powers (Almäng 2016). The reverse seems possible as well. A counterfeit dollar bill can look so real that one can use it to buy things with. This has been taken to mean that what I call "passing forgeries" have certain powers but not the associated status. Cases such as these give rise to what I call "the mismatch problem," which is the challenge of saving the intuition that statuses and powers stand or fall together. 1 Barry Smith (2003) and Jan Almäng (2016) have argued that the intuition cannot be saved. Against this, I argue that their examples present only apparent mismatches. Thus, the intuition that statuses come with powers can be preserved. In Section 1, I present the dual function theory of social objects. I use it to solve

show abstract

Section: Social Rolesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, someone who occupies a role has a certain status. Joshua Rust () imagines the presidency being stripped of its powers. If this were to happen, the claim is, someone would have the status of a president without having the relevant powers.…”

Section: The Mismatch Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Social Objects (Fail to) Function

Hindriks

2020

Journal of Social Philosophy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Legal Offices and Legal Powers

Burazin

2023

Law and Philosophy Library

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Institutional Identity

Rust

2019

Journal of Social Ontology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For some sufficiently long-standing institutions, such as the English Crown, there is no single thread, whether specified in terms of constitutive rules or assigned functions, that would connect the stages of that institution. Elizabeth II and Egbert are not connected by an unbroken chain of primogeniture and they have importantly different powers and functions. Derek Parfit famously sought to illuminate his account of personal identity by comparing a person to a club. If Parfit could use our intuitions about clubs to help motivate his neo-Lockean account of personal identity over time, which resists the idea that personal identity requires a common psychological thread, then I argue that an adapted version of his account of identity might, in turn, be reapplied to clubs and other institutions, such as the Crown.

show abstract

On the Relation between Institutional Statuses and Technical Artifacts: A Proposed Taxonomy of Social Kinds

Cited by 3 publications

References 15 publications

How Social Objects (Fail to) Function

How Social Objects (Fail to) Function

Legal Offices and Legal Powers

Institutional Identity

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About