Social Ontology and Collective Action
This area studies the nature of the social world — groups, institutions, money, and social facts — and how individuals form shared intentions and act together, including when their individual interests pull against cooperation.
Definition
Social ontology is the philosophical study of the nature and existence of social entities, properties, and facts; collective action concerns how a plurality of agents can act together and the strategic problems that arise when individual and collective rationality diverge.
Scope
Covers social ontology (what social entities and facts are and how they depend on collective attitudes), collective intentionality and shared agency, the construction of social kinds and institutional facts, the possibility of group agency and corporate responsibility, and the structure of collective-action problems. Excludes empirical sociology proper.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What kinds of things are social groups, institutions, and social facts, and what makes them exist?
- What is it for several people to share an intention or act together?
- Are some facts (like money or marriage) constructed by collective acceptance, and what follows?
- Can groups be genuine agents that bear responsibilities over and above their members?
- Why do rational individuals often fail to cooperate even when cooperation would benefit all?
Key concepts
- social facts
- collective intentionality
- status functions
- joint commitment
- group agency
- free-riding
- public goods
- collective-action problems
Key theories
- Institutional facts and collective acceptance
- Searle argues that institutional reality (money, property, governments) is created by collectively imposing status functions through constitutive rules of the form 'X counts as Y in context C', sustained by collective intentionality.
- Plural-subject theory
- Gilbert holds that social groups and shared actions rest on 'joint commitment', whereby parties together commit to espouse a goal or belief as a body, generating obligations distinct from individual intentions.
- Group agency
- List and Pettit argue that suitably organized groups can be genuine, rational agents whose attitudes are not reducible to those of their members, with implications for collective responsibility and the design of institutions.
- The logic of collective action
- Olson shows that rational, self-interested individuals will often not act to achieve common or group interests — especially in large groups — because of free-riding on collectively provided public goods, absent selective incentives.
History
Concern with social wholes runs from Rousseau's general will and Durkheim's 'social facts' to the 20th century, when analytic philosophers made shared intention and social ontology central. Foundational work by Gilbert (1989), Tuomela, Bratman, and Searle (1995) defined collective intentionality, while List and Pettit (2011) advanced group agency; Olson's economic analysis (1965) framed the collective-action problem.
Debates
- Reductionism about the social
- Whether facts about groups and shared action reduce to facts about individuals and their attitudes, or whether collective intentionality and group agency are genuinely non-reducible, as Gilbert and List and Pettit maintain.
- Solving collective-action problems
- Whether the free-rider problem Olson identifies can be overcome only by coercion or selective incentives, or whether norms, communication, and shared commitments can sustain cooperation.
Key figures
- John Searle
- Margaret Gilbert
- Christian List
- Philip Pettit
- Mancur Olson
Related topics
Seminal works
- searle1995
- gilbert1989
- list2011
Frequently asked questions
- What is social ontology?
- Social ontology is the branch of philosophy that investigates what social entities — such as groups, institutions, money, and laws — are, and how their existence depends on the beliefs, intentions, and acceptance of people.
- What is a collective-action problem?
- It is a situation in which individually rational, self-interested choices lead to an outcome that is worse for everyone than an available cooperative outcome, as when each person free-rides rather than contributing to a public good.