Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups

Abstract

Social groups—like teams, committees, gender groups, and racial groups—play a central role in our lives and in philosophical inquiry. Here I develop and motivate a structuralist ontology of social groups centered on social structures (i.e., networks of relations that are constitutively dependent on social factors). The view delivers a picture that encompasses a diverse range of social groups, while maintaining important metaphysical and normative distinctions between groups of different kinds. It also meets the constraint that not every arbitrary collection of people is a social group. In addition, the framework provides resources for developing a broader structuralist view in social ontology.

Hybrid collective intentionality

“…The importance of structure for collectives and of the functional roles played by their members is well-acknowledged in the literature on the ontology of groups (see, for instance, Varzi (2006), Ritchie (2015) and, more recently, Uzquiano (2018), Ritchie (2020) and Harris (2020)).…”

The Identity of Social Groups

“…Thus the edges are ordered n-tples of nodes, for n > 0, and there is a function assigning an n-ary relation (or non-empty set of n-ary relations) to each edge. This is something like the representation of structure that is implicit in Ritchie (2013Ritchie ( , 2015Ritchie ( , 2020; and the treatment of groups and their structure as hypergraphs has recently been developed in Strohmaier (2020). 20 One might also model structures by means of arbitrary objects along the lines of Fine (1998Fine ( , 2000Fine ( , 2017.…”

Social Categories in Context

“…Empty social categories cannot be given a metaphysical interpretation, but other social categories may warrant such treatment. General treatments of the nature of social categories offer a unified approach to social categories, incorporating various strategies for accommodating differences between cases, such as whether group membership is voluntary (Ásta 2018; Epstein 2017; Epstein 2015; Gilbert 1989; Ritchie 2013, 2018). However, there are also specific treatments of particular social categories, including most notably accounts of race and gender categories, and some of these recommend treating those categories as metaphysically different from other social categories (Haslanger 2000; Jenkins 2016; Mills 2000; Witt 2011).…”