Ontological individualism reconsidered

Epstein, Brian

doi:10.1007/s11229-007-9272-8

Cited by 52 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Brian Epstein (2008Epstein ( , 2009) has put forward a similar argument concerning the supervenience base of social properties. However, he concludes from it that ontological individualism is false.…”

Section: Ontological Individualismmentioning

confidence: 93%

The location problem in social ontology

Hindriks

2011

Synthese

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Mental, mathematical, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview due to the peculiar kinds of properties inherent to them. In this paper I argue that a significant class of social entities also presents us with an ontological puzzle that has thus far not been addressed satisfactorily. This puzzle relates to the location of certain social entities. Where, for instance, are organizations located? Where their members are, or where their designated offices are? Organizations depend on their members for their existence, but the members of an organization can be where the organization is not. The designated office of an organization, however, need be little more than a mailbox. I argue that the problem can be solved by conceptualizing the relation between social entities and non-social entities as one of constitution, a relation of unity without identity. Constituted objects have properties that cannot be reduced to properties of the constituting objects. Thus, my attempt to solve the Location Problem results in an argument in favor of a kind of non-reductive materialism about the social.Keywords Constitution · Constitutive rule · Location · Organization · Non-reductive individualism · Normative power · Social ontology · Status Mathematical, mental, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview. Mathematical entities present an ontological puzzle to philosophers because they are abstract. How the relation between mental and physical properties should be conceptualized is complicated by qualia because of their inherently subjective phenomenology. And the moral domain resists reduction, many believe,

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Section: Ontological Individualismmentioning

confidence: 93%

The location problem in social ontology

Hindriks

2011

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“…The question is whether doing so would saddle the responsibility-collectivist with unwelcome ontological commitments such as ontological holism. Almost everyone today, and certainly responsibilitycollectivists discussed in this paper, embrace ontological individualism (Zahle 2007;Epstein 2009). This is the view that group-level properties supervene on properties of individuals.…”

Section: Causal Group-control and Ontological Individualismmentioning

confidence: 95%

Collective Responsibility and Group-Control

Szigeti

2014

Synthese Library

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Collectives are more or less structured groups of human beings. Responsibilitycollectivism is the view that the moral responsibility of at least some such collectives is something over and above the combined moral responsibility of individual group members. This paper focuses on one of the key conditions of responsibility: the requirement of control. It is plausible that this requirement also applies to collective agents and so collective responsibility presupposes group-control. Responsibilitycollectivists have often tried to unpack the idea of group-control as non-causal control. I argue that non-causal control is not an admissible basis for attributing responsibility. Only causal group-control is. This is because non-causal group control does not provide the right kind of information regarding the ancestry of a certain outcome. In the second half of the paper, I discuss the difficulties which arise for responsibility-collectivism if one understands group-control as causal group-control. One of these difficulties is whether causal group-control is consistent with ontological individualism. The second concerns the relationship of group-control and individual control. I argue that the first difficulty is manageable, but only at the price of having to accept a solution to the second difficulty which runs counter to the original aim of the responsibility-collectivist of characterizing irreducible collective responsibility as compatible with individual responsibility. Worse still, responsibility-collectivists may have to choose sides in other areas of social ontology as well. This further raises the price of this position.2

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“…Note also that some philosophers (e.g. Epstein 2009Epstein , 2015 apply the term to certain social object realists who deny that social objects can be identified with individuals. Thus, I think the term "ontological individualist" has become too inexact to be useful.…”

Section: And T = T (Where [… … …] Is An Event X(y) Is An Object Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…to non-members) and to laws have also to be invoked in the relevant satisfaction conditions (see e.g. Currie 1984;Searle 1995;Hindriks 2008;Epstein 2009Epstein , 2015my 2014c). If such additional relations are taken to be literal parts of the satisfiers of the predicates in question (i.e.…”

Section: The Emerging Bridge Principlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why the social sciences are irreducible

Wahlberg

2017

Synthese

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It is often claimed that the social sciences cannot be reduced to a lowerlevel individualistic science. The standard argument for this position (usually labelled explanatory holism) is the Fodorian multiple realizability argument. Its defenders endorse token-token(s) identities between "higher-level" social objects and pluralities/sums of "lower-level" individuals (a position traditionally called ontological individualism), but they maintain that the properties expressed by social science predicates are often multiply realizable, entailing that type-type identities between social and individualistic properties are ruled out. In this paper I argue that the multiple realizability argument for explanatory holism is unsound. The social sciences are indeed irreducible, but the principled reason for this is that the required token-token(s) identifications cannot in general be carried through. In consequence, paradigmatic social science predicates cannot be taken to apply to the objects quantified over in the lowerlevel sciences. The result is that typical social science predicates cannot even be held to be co-extensive with individualistic predicates, which means type-type identifications are ruled out too. Multiple realizability has nothing to do with this failure of co-extensiveness, because the relevant social science predicates are not multiply realized in the sense intended by the explanatory holists, a sense which presupposes reductive token-token(s) identifications.

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Ontological individualism reconsidered

Cited by 52 publications

References 35 publications

The location problem in social ontology

The location problem in social ontology

Collective Responsibility and Group-Control

Why the social sciences are irreducible

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