The 12th Edition of the Collective Intentionality Conference is now over.

Grounding Social Facts

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This talk outlines a form of ontological individualism, articulated within a grounding-theoretical framework. Taking an ontologically permissivist stance, this form of individualism does not dispute the reality of many macro-level entities or that a variety of facts obtain with respect to these. But it does involve a distinction between basic and derivative social facts, where the basic ones are always facts about individuals. It is also argued that while basic social facts are always substantive, some derivative social facts are non-substantive and involve a form of label-sticking. For instance, given a certain understanding of what is involved in being a war criminal, it is a fact that Genghis Khan was a war criminal. This is however merely a non-substantive social fact, and where this non-substantivity is not just about historical distance. In other kinds of cases we might retrospectively (and correctly) identify substantive social facts, even though these were opaque at the time.

Discussion

3 thoughts on “Grounding Social Facts

  1. Brännmark, Johan says:

    Thanks for the comment! I think that in this type of case there’s an important sense in which nothing has yet happened overnight with respect to the relevant socal facts, but since we foresee what will happen in terms of how people will relate to each other, we are inclined to say that it’s already a done deal. The events that will cause Sam’s business to be destroyed have certainly happened, and given those events it might even be inevitable that he will go out of business, but in terms of the constitutive ground of Sam’s business being destroyed, that ground won’t strictly speaking be in place until the events of that night have eventually caused a realignment of how people relate to each other (and to Sam as a seller of coffee in particular). If by some miracle people kept paying Sam even though he can just serve them tepid water, his business would in fact survive. Of course, Sam will act differently once he learns of what has happened, but on the kind of account that I seek to develop, this is simply a type of social actions that are done in anticipation of how others will behave once they find out that he cannot serve them coffee anymore.

  2. Schaffer, Jonathan says:

    Thanks Johan, and apologies for possibly missing your live session. I am generally sympathetic to your approach but still thinking that it is going to be hard to defend ontological individualism. I’m worried (following Brian) about material objects in the social environment. Suppose that Sam owns a coffee shop. Sam’s shop contains coffee machines and refrigerators and cash registers etc. Now imagine that overnight there is flooding and all of Sam’s equipment gets destroyed. It seems to me that the social facts have changed overnight, but none of your “basic social facts” (given your Weber-style perspective, involving how we act towards others) have yet changed. It is true that when Sam finds out about the flooding, Sam might then act differently towards others. But it seems to me that the social facts have already changed (Sam’s business has been destroyed by the flooding) before anyone finds out and acts differently to anyone else — and indeed the reason why Sam will now act differently is at least partly in recognition of this pre-existing social change. So doesn’t that at least show that your “basic social facts” are not the whole grounds of the social facts?

    1. Brännmark, Johan says:

      It seems the reply became posted as a regular comment, but anyway, there’s an attempt at dealing with this type of issue.

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