Sean Aas (Georgetown): Present Rights, Future Practices?
It is a commonplace view that some, if not all, of our moral reason depend for their force on the existence of certain social practices. Hume and Humeans take this to be true of many ‘artificial’ virtues, like those associated with promising and property rights. Others have argued that this reasoning extends from these cases to many others; to include our rights in our bodies, perhaps, or all of our rights. Any such view, however, faces a significant challenge: what should we say about cases where practices are, either, absent, or not now as they should be? This paper argues that, in some such cases, moral reasons and even rights can be fixed by facts about future social practices, in much the way and for much the reasons that philosophers imagine promissory and property rights to be fixed by practices already established.
Franz Altner (ETH) and Olof Leffler (Siena): Bratman’s Subject
The aim of this paper is to discuss the treatment of the corporate subject in Michael Bratman’s new book Shared and Institutional Agency (from now and on: SIA). Bratman’s book presents the first in-depth treatment of corporate intentions as temporally extended plan-like states, inspired by his planning theory of individual agency. Bratman’s argument is particularly interesting because he attempts to develop a middle-ground position between holistic group subjects which posit a wide range of intentional states and reductionist individualist views. We leverage Bratman’s treatment to make some general methodological contributions that will be of relevance to the burgeoning debate about the nature of corporate agency in social ontology. We argue that, on the one hand, Bratman lets holism in through the back door through the way he characterizes the functional role and content of his institutional intentional states. Constructing institutional intention in the familiar image of Bratmanian plan-states and requiring them to have an explicit, interpretable content, we argue, generates the same kind of explanatory pressure that leads us to posit a holistic web of mental states to the institutional agents just like in the case of individual agents. On the other hand, Bratman assumes more than what is necessary to explain how group agents stand behind their actions. This means that his account cannot accommodate a range of rather typical corporate actions – among those spontaneous, non-deliberative decisions and actions.
Erim Bakkal (Bilkent): Fictionalism in Social Ontology
In this paper, I will explore how a fictionalist approach can be applied to social ontology by comparing this view with various realist views. In general, while realists argue that entities in the given domain exist, anti-realists argue that they do not exist. In this distinction, social fictionalism, as an anti-realist position, can be thought of as arguing that the utterances of sentences of the discourse of social realists and ordinary people about sociality are best seen not as efforts to say what is literally true but as useful fictions of some sort.) In this paper, I will only focus on the social kinds analyzed by the proponents of the constitutive and conferred accounts. The common feature of these social kinds, such as the president or the woman/man, is that they are conferred properties (Ásta, 2018). That is, people confer them on entities. The social realists in question argue that these conferred properties are deontic powers that are not reducible to pure physicality (Searle, 1995, p. 70), (Epstein, 2015), (Ásta, 2018). I will argue that we can take the talk about conferred properties as a kind of useful fiction for explaining and predicting people’s actions, but nothing more.
Çağla Cimendereli (Syracuse): The Concept of Nonnative Speaker
Political theorists and philosophers working on linguistic justice frequently use the concept of nonnative speaker in order to designate their subject-matter (Van Parijs, 2011) while some linguists and English Language Teaching (ELT) scholars have recently contested the use of the concept. (Cheng et al., 2021; Tsehaye et al., 2021) Even though this is an ongoing debate about what I call ‘eliminativism about the concept of nonnative speaker’ one may worry that the lack of a similar debate among the scholars of linguistic justice indicates that they are lagging behind and falling short in terms of interdisciplinarity. This worry may falsely lead to the conclusion that the entire debate in linguistic justice, built around the native and nonnative speaker dichotomy, is flawed, useless and maybe even harmful for the victims of linguistic injustice. In this paper, I address this potential worry and argue that nonnative speaker is a necessary and useful concept for discussing various injustices. Drawing from similar discussions in social metaphysics, I offer a ‘moderately social constructivist account’ (Barnes, 2016) of nonnative speaker which answers the needs of linguistic justice theories despite some worries partially raised by linguistics and ELT scholars.
Gillian Gray (University of Michigan): Ambivalence and Authenticity
Social group identification has recently received greater attention in the subfield of social metaphysics. Contributions to this discussion have attempted to explain what it is to have a particular group identity (such as, say, a gender identity). These explanations – whether intentional or not – tend to conceive of our group identifications as stable and settled. But our real-life experiences of identifying with social groups are often unstable and fraught. We may be deeply ambivalent about which social groups we identify with. In this talk, I focus on this phenomenon, which I call ‘identity ambivalence.’ I take up three questions related to identity ambivalence: What is identity ambivalence? What is it to resolve identity ambivalence? And what is the relationship between identity ambivalence and authenticity?
I argue that identity ambivalence arises when we are ambivalent about which similarities we share with others are significant. Thinking of identity ambivalence as “ambivalence about which similarities are significant” may seem hopelessly abstract at first. But I hope to show that this isn’t just a “cheat” phrase to further elide explanation; rather, the question of which similarities are significant is actually importantly ambiguous. Identity ambivalence arises because this question – “Which similarities are significant?” – is underdetermined. There are many ways to cash out this question, some of which can (seem to) conflict. It is this conflict that gives rise to identity ambivalence. By working through various cases of identity ambivalence which illustrate these conflicts, I argue that we can learn some interesting and important features of identity ambivalence.
Zach Gudmunsen (Koç)
The Cognitive Diversity Benefit of Advanced Artificial Systems
There are many reasons for desiring advanced artificial systems. This paper narrows in on one reason that has gone underappreciated. I argue that we have the following pro-tanto reason for desiring artificial systems, particularly ‘advanced’ (i.e., highly capable and independent) artificial systems: incorporating artificial systems in groups promotes cognitive diversity within that group, which gives the group an epistemic advantage, allowing it to make better decisions and develop more accurate theories. To argue for this reason, I defend two premises: first, cognitive diversity offers an epistemic advantage; second, artificial agents promote cognitive diversity. I defend the first premise by drawing on evidence from literature on diversity and models of group decision making, theories from feminist epistemology, and empirical evidence from management studies. I defend the second premise by drawing analogies between artificial agents and other non-human agents. Artificial agents, I suggest, offer a distinct epistemic standpoint that can be effectively integrated into group-decision making. Finally, I suggest that advanced artificial systems offer a greater boost to cognitive diversity than ‘cyborgs’ – humans that use artificial agents as tools.
Laszlo Kozseghy (Central Euopean University, Vienna) -
From Collective Recognition to Modulating Algorithms: Towards a Social Ontology in the Digital Age
One of the key projects of social ontology is to accommodate social kinds such as money or marriage in a naturalistic ontological framework. The mainstream view which purports to answer this project, call it Representationalism, holds that social kinds are mind-dependent in the sense that the existence of social kinds depends on their being collectively recognized as existing (cf. Searle 1995, 2010; Ásta 2018; Burman 2023). Some authors pointed out that the view needs some modifications to make it more plausible (Burman 2007, 2015; Khalidi 2015; Ásta 2018). I will briefly highlight three key caveats: restricting its scope to uniquely human social phenomena, weakening the relevant notion of recognition and that of dependence. Can, then, a revised version of Representationalism provide a better answer to our original question? In this talk, I will show that even a revised Representationalism faces a crucial challenge posed by contemporary technological developments in social classificatory practices.
I will argue for the two claims. First, socially significant algorithmically generated real-time classifications – which I will call Modulatory Algorithmic Categories (MACs) – qualify as “social kinds” in the relevant sense. Second, accommodating MACs into our social ontology challenges the Representationalist view regarding the mind-dependence of social kinds. The Representationalist holds that collective intentionality serves as the “glue” that binds the social world together through shared representations of social kinds such as money or marriage. However, MACs present a case where the relevant representation, or the “social glue”, is no longer tied to collective intentionality but rather to digital data. As such, although not being dependent on collective intentionality, MACs are representation-dependent which, as I will show, suffices for their being social. Finally, I will show that MACs prompt us to rethink the relevant sense of mind-dependence in terms of synchronicity and constitutivity.
Jonathan Kwan (NYU Abu Dhabi):
Ecological Sustainability: A People’s Self-Regarding Duty as an Intergenerational Group
I argue for a conception of ecological sustainability as a collective self-regarding duty that a people, understood as an intergenerational group and territorial rights holder, has as a precondition for and a constitutive part of its right to self-determination. This view does not preclude the existence of other duties of sustainability held by other agents or grounded in values distinct from self-determination (e.g., global justice or non-anthropocentric values). Nonetheless, this way of framing a duty of sustainability is distinct from and has certain advantages over other more familiar conceptions.
First, here the duty of sustainability is not a duty that one generation owes another, which raises certain puzzles about how to conceptualize the rights of future generations that do not yet exist. Instead, the duty of sustainability is one that a people—already understood as an intergenerational group—owes itself and is grounded in the right to self-determination that a people claims for itself. Second, my account straightforwardly avoids nonidentity problems, which beset positions that conceptualizes sustainability duties as owed to future individuals, since current environmental policies, while likely necessary conditions for the very existence of certain future individuals, are generally not necessary conditions for future peoples coming into existence. I investigate further the social ontology of the people as a group to explain how, although a people is itself partly constituted by its individual members, its collective duties and rights stand and endure independently of changes in group membership and which specific individuals end up becoming members. My view shows that debates on intergenerational and environmental justice should be expanded to consider values other than justice. The point and meaningfulness of sustainability is not always best understood as oriented toward justice (which is often framed in terms of the claims of others competing against ours) but rather is often tied to our hopes and aspirations as a community extended across time and related to other inhabitants of our shared ecosystems.
Valeria Martino (Torino/Pavia): The metaphysics of future generations
The purpose of the following paper is to define the elements of a metaphysics of future generations, which involves applying the categories typically used in the metaphysics of groups in social ontology to define what constitutes a future generation. Can future generations be considered as a set or as a mereological sum? Do they succumb to the paradox of the Supreme Court (Sharvy 1968; Uzquiano 2004)? Can they be reduced to the sum of their members while still being one of the building blocks of the world, or are they fictional entities?
To comprehend the nature of these groups, I will examine the distinction between generation (which appears to be the most obvious answer, i.e., if they are future generations, they are generations) and age group.In this sense, talking about future generations seems sensible only if by “generation” here we mean an age group, even just for the simple fact that the unborn cannot be a generation in sociological terms, which seems to imply their necessary existence. At this point, however, it becomes interesting to try to identify the necessary characteristics to define an age groupç Given that the classical distinction between aggregates and collectives may not adequately capture age groups, we can utilize the list of features elaborated by Ritchie (2015) to define age groups and ascertain whether they align with groups of Type 1 or Type 2, or if they necessitate a third and distinct concept. I will demonstrate the similarities between age groups and other typical groups of Type 2, where the feature of willingness will assume a significant role. This exploration will assist us in addressing the guiding question of the paper: In what sense can future generations be the subject of collective actions?
Berkay Ozar (Bilkent) Beyond Anthropocentrism: A Heterogeneous Approach to Social
Perhaps by some anthropocentric bias, the contributions of material objects to social phenomenon have been hugely neglected in social ontology. When it comes to metaphysical explanations phenomenon of collective agency and the nature of social facts and kinds, the literature relies heavily on seemingly unique human contributions, such as attitudes and intentionality, to the constitution of such phenomenon. We can see this not only in the ontologically individualistic explanations of collective agency, as such given by Bratman (1999) and Shapiro (2014), but also on the constructivist accounts of social facts, such as Searle’s (1995). However, there recently have been some attempts have been made to introduce the notion material objects into the field, in the form of discussions revolving around ontological hybridity and heterogeneity for social phenomena.(Elder-Vass (2017), , Brouwer et al (2020). I propose to label such approaches as approaches of hybridity.
While I am sympathetic to hybridity approaches, I think to properly establish the thesis of heterogeneity there is a need to go beyond and show the unique ways in which non-intentional spatiotemporal properties of material objects and their organization contribute to the constitution of social ontological phenomena such as collective agency and social entities. One way to achieve this is by drawing a parallel with the Gibsonian notion of affordances. If it is the case that what can be done with an object is a question of the interplay between an agent and the object’s own properties, we can see how such material properties can become relevant to social ontological questions.
Costanza Penna (University of Turin—IUSS Pavia Labont—Center for Ontology):
How Groups Persist Through Generations
The article argues for the relevance of the concept of “collective mental time travel” (Michaelian and Sutton 2019) for understanding the ontology of diachronic group agency and transgenerational social actions. The latter are collective actions that take place over an extended period of time and require the cooperation of multiple generations (Andina 2022). For example, the approval of a new pension system or the commitment to certain climate change mitigation goals necessarily imply the contribution not only of the current members of a considered group, but also of their successors who will carry out the action after them. However, mainstream social ontology struggles to explain how the membership and normativity of such groups can extend to future generations, thus undermining the very structure of group persistence over time. This paper moves from promising findings in psychology and memory studies to offer a way out of this socio-ontological puzzle. In the first section, I argue that transgenerational actions imply, at each of their stages, both some form of collective memory (Olick et al. 2011; Kattago 2016; Barash 2017) by which present members take up and renegotiate the intentions and plans of their predecessors, and collective future thinking (Szpunar and Szpunar 2016), which allows for imagining successors and extending actions to even far distant future generations.In the second section, I define the structure and functioning of a transgenerational group’s memory and future thinking as collective in a strong sense (Halbwachs 1992) and intrinsically interconnected. In the third section, I outline some normative considerations regarding the ontology of diachronic group persistence in light of this structure. The claim is that collective memory and future are definitional of generations as social groups (or subgroups) because they are forms of diachronic mutual recognition (Honneth 2015). However, contra Honneth, I hold that such mutual recognition is not an accomplished experience, for ontological reasons. In fact, “collective mental time travel” does not “presentify” past and future generations because of the limitation of their non-reciprocity (Parfit 1984) and non-existence (Thomasson 1999). This does not condemn to transgenerational actions to presentism or short-term visions, but rather reveals the structural openness of present generations to the future (Lévinas 1979): acting as a group allows members to prepare for a diachronic time that overcomes them and that is accessible only to the group as a collective.
Danny Weltman (Ashoka): Gender Proliferation is Gender Elimination
Different societies at different places and times have recognized different numbers of genders. In many societies there are approximately two genders, but in others there are or were more. This variability suggests the possibility of change in the future: any given society need not have its present genders forever. If it is open to us to determine how many genders our society has, it is natural to ask how many it ought to have. What should the future of gender be? Conservatives say we should stick with whatever we have, or go back to what we had before genders began to proliferate. Eliminativists say we shouldn't even have gender at all: there should be no gender categories. In between, there is a variety of proposals. One common answer is gender proliferation, rather than elimination: we should have lots and lots of gender categories, so that everyone can find a gender that works for them (Bem 1995, Cull 2019). I argue that gender proliferation in its defensible forms amounts to gender elimination. If society creates enough genders to achieve the good things that gender proliferation aims to achieve, then society has ipso facto eliminated gender. We cannot simultaneously get what we want from gender proliferation and keep gender. Or, more accurately, we cannot get what we want from gender proliferation and keep gender in a form that matters. The gender that would exist in a society that accomplishes gender proliferation would not be the sort of gender worth thinking about.