What are social groups? Their metaphysics and how to classify them

Abstract

pickup baseball teams, research groups, musical groups, pop bands, symphony orchestras, marching bands, social classes, races, genders, demographic cohorts, psychographic cohorts, geographic cohorts, corporate marketing groups, corporate HR groups, boards of directors, rioting mobs, marching platoons, processions of mourners,… we could go on and on, listing kinds and sub-kinds.A chaotic list like this cries out for order and explanation. What, if anything, do social groups have in common? What sorts of entities are social groups, how are they individuated, and what are their persistence and identity conditions? How are they set up, and what do they do for us? How can we best construct a classification or typology of groups?In approaching these questions in this article, I have two aims. First is to challenge the idea that they have simple answers. There seems to be a powerful drive among theorists to unify and simplify the endless diversity and variation among kinds of groups. Many people, for instance, try to draw simple lines between social groups and mere collections of people, or else to divide groups into a few fundamental varieties. 1 I hope to show that this is a non-starter. Too much faith in parsimony misleads an investigation of social groups from the outset.The second aim is to present a practical and systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of groups. Instead of thinking mainly about the umbrella category of social groups, I propose to investigate their details from a "micro" or "bottom-up" perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. I propose that we can characterize any given kind of social group with four complementary profiles:1. Its "construction" profile. This profile characterizes how groups of a * I am grateful to Katherine Ritchie, Amie Thomasson, and Robin Dembroff, to participants in the 2016 ENPOSS, CollInt, and MANCEPT conferences, and to three anonymous referees, for valuable comments and suggestions.

Two theories of group agency

“…1 Two theories answer these questions and dominate the current debate on group agency. On the functionalist side, we find the proposals by Huebner (2014) and Epstein (2015Epstein ( , 2017. On the interpretivist side, there are the accounts of Tollefsen (2015), as well as List and Pettit (2011).…”

“…While he argues that the functional profile of propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires are rather demanding, he suggests that some groups meet the requirements and become full agents. Epstein (2015Epstein ( , 2017 has also endorsed a functionalist theory of group agency. 8 I will argue that such approaches are to be preferred over the interpretivist accounts by throwing up a problem which the functionalists can solve, but the interpretivists cannot.…”

“…But collapsing the groups goes against the growing consensus in the group ontology debate (see Gilbert 1992: 220-221;Uzquiano 2004;Sheehy 2006;Ritchie 2013Ritchie , 2015Epstein 2015Epstein , 2017Thomasson 2016): groups which share all their members can remain numerically distinct. Generally, the argument relies on Leibniz's law that a group cannot differ from itself in its properties.…”

“…He argues that whether we should attribute agency to a particular group depends on its kind rather than the features specific to the particular group. That is, we would attribute group agency to a particular committee in virtue of it being a member of the kind committee(Epstein 2017). 9 See alsoDennett (1987Dennett ( : 15, 1991b.10 There are two comments to be made about my characterisation of interpretivism at this point: First, interpretivism typically also allows for an indeterminism where there is no deeper fact whether an ascription is correct or not (seeMölder 2010: 109-110).…”

“…Coinciding groups have been endorsed by most account of group ontology, includingGilbert (1992: 220-221),Uzquiano (2004),Sheehy (2006),Ritchie (2013Ritchie ( , 2015,Epstein (2015Epstein ( , 2017, andThomasson (2016). 20 Brian Epstein's way of handling differs from that of other authors.…”