The book is dedicated by the editor to the memory of Peter Winch, and in
general it pays a fair tribute to both the ingenuity and the high standard of
Winch’s research in the metaphysics of social reality (influenced primarily by
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy). It examines the contemporary debate between individualists
(who deny the independent reality of social relations/collectivities) and holists
or collectivists (who claim that social relations/collectivities amount
to more than the associated individuals and their non-social relations) in the
social sciences and the humanities (from philosophy to politics, sociology,
economics, psychiatry, psychology, education and gender studies). Even though
it is restricted to contemporary debates, it shows with great clarity the
applicability of the ideas expressed and in many instances surprises the
careful reader by the depth and boldness of analyticity employed.

Let us look in summary at its contents and discuss briefly about some of
its main ideas.

Schmitt introduces the discussions by charting the associated
metaphysics: he distinguishes between ontological individualism and conceptual
individualism, conceptual nonindividualism and social
constructivism. In ontological individualism (which admits only
individuals, their non-social properties and admissible composites of these),
he finds that there are also two tendencies: reductivism (which reduces
all social reality to individual reality) and eliminativism (which
denies the reality of all social relations and collectivities).

Schmitt discusses briefly the reductivist accounts of ontological
individualism (plural reference, set-theoretic, mereological and structural)
and the main critiques that these proposals have attracted (mainly from key
figures such as Margaret Gilbert and David-Hillel Ruben), as well as the
radical proposal of eliminative ontological individualism. He finds that more
interesting is conceptual individualism: the view that groups and social
relations can be considered as individuals, their non-social properties and
admissible composites of these. Schmitt believes that this view is quite an
improvement on ontological individualism, since it does not attack the literal
truth of our casual talk of groups, while accepting the individualistic attack
on the independence of social reality; in other words it retains the truth of
the quite Thatcherite in inspiration dictum: " ‘the group’ succeeds in
referring and… ‘the group’ fails to refer" (p.8).

In examining conceptual individualism’s advantages, Schmitt here
discusses briefly Seumas Miller’s suggestion that social actions can be
considered both as interdependent and as interpersonal, if placed in the
context of a common end (termed "collective end"). Schmitt
finds that Miller’s account, even though quite successful in meeting the
counterfactual dependence requirement of joint actions, it does quite poorly in
explaining both the persistence of joint actions as well as their
counterfactual existence conditions (i.e., it does not explain how the joint
action persists or changes over time, nor how it might differ from what it actually
is). In Schmitt’s interpretation of social action, looking at conceptual
nonindividualism’s emphasis on the unitary character of joint actions can help
us cope with the theoretical inefficiency of conceptual individualism and
explain both the persistence and the counterfactual existence conditions of
joint (and thus social) actions. Schmitt examines in detail here the
nonindividualist account of Margaret Gilbert (as found in her On Social
Facts, 1989) and its emphasis on the joint readiness of members of a group
to share in an action or attitude as a body. In discussing two possible
objections to Gilbert’s account, he shows the tensions within her theory:
either the readiness to join is too strong and thus susceptible to circularity
or it is too weak and thus insufficient for the unity criterion of jointness in
action.

Gilbert deals with this tension in her own contribution to the volume
("The Structure of the Social Atom: Joint Commitment as the Foundation of
Human Social Behaviour"); she modifies her previously published theory
slightly in favour of an unconditional now personal readiness to enter a
joint commitment (leaving aside the circularity apprehensions of her previous quasi-readiness
account).

This commitment however, can be interpreted both as a commitment in
relation to goals and purposes, as well as a commitment to specific reasons for
action jointly decided. So, Abraham Roth, in his "Practical
Intersubjectivity", analyses in detail the non-individualistic account of
what it means for someone to jointly participate in a decision for action.
According to Roth, we have a characteristic that he calls "dynamics of
intention revision" (p.83) in all joint actions, and in this way there is
a normative rational constraint to act so as to achieve the desired goal of the
joint action. Furthermore, this rational constraint is independent from any
individualistic rational intentions to carry out the joint action. 

Raimo Tuomela in his "The We-Mode and the I-Mode" also
supports the non-reductivist account by distinguishing an individual’s
attitudes and actions in the I-mode from the ones in the we-mode. Tuomela’s
account emphasises that in order to have the we-mode attitudes and actions
there has to be a group’s collective acceptance of the attitude/action in
question (the intentional "ethos" of the group, p.100); he also notes
that for a group to exist there have to be at least some members which have
we-mode attitudes, and that a variety of group actions (including paradigmatic
cases of game theory) cannot succeed unless some group members have these
we-mode attitudes (pp. 115-122).

Schmitt in the Introduction and in his own contribution ("Joint
action: From Individualism to Supraindividualism") suggests that there may
be some, who, in considering real life examples, may think that both Tuomela’s
as well as Gilbert’s accounts are lacking in explanatory power of what makes a
group to be a group. He cites in the Introduction (p. 15) the examples of
spontaneous mobs or chanting crowds (as against Gilbert’s account of readiness
of joining) and wolf packs and elephant herds (as against Tuomela’s account of
the we-mode and the intentionality of ethos criterion) and, in his own
contribution, the example of Searle’s Chinese Room Argument (which, contra
Searle, he thinks can be considered as a group or an organisation, p.155) and
large multinational corporations (p.160). Schmitt favours another alternative: conceptual
supraindividualism (or holism in relation to social reality) and he
thinks that, even if such a perspective may lead some to eliminativism, it
still can be a successful candidate, especially when coupled with "common
sense" (p.161). Here the group property is an analogous property to the
one of being an intentional subject. As individuals co-ordinate their body
parts and their behaviour forms a unity in connection to the bearer’s system of
intentional beliefs and desires, so the group forms a unity and the behaviour
of the group can be unified, when considered as a system of intentional beliefs
and desires. Schmitt observes that, since conceptual supraindividualism is a
view about the content of group talk, it is not committed to the truth of the
(supraindividualist) independent reality of the groups themselves, and so it is
not committed to the truth of ontological supraindividualism (p.15).

Philip Pettit examines the proposal of combined conceptual and
ontological supraindividualism (in "Groups with Minds of Their
Own").  Pettit, while accepting
that groups can be interpreted through an individualist account of shared
co-operative activity (similar to Bratman’s conceptual supraindividualism), he
makes a stronger supraindividualist claim, in which social integrates are not
only intentional subjects, who are defined through their coherent and constant rationality,
but they are social persons, i.e., institutional persons considered as
intentional subjects who can be held responsible for being rational or not
(pp.172-188). This ontological supraindividualism transforms group-talk to
institutional person-talk, with the individual’s attitudes having priority over
the group (p.190): the group is defined, formed and dissolved through the
comprising individuals’ beliefs, desires, attitudes and actions (contra
Gilbert).

The book would not live up to the expectations of its relation to Winch,
if it did not have a special reference to Winch’s own conviction that an
individual’s properties and characteristics (both social and non-social) can
only be understood within their social context. Edward Witherspoon in "Conventions
and Forms of Life" together with Schmitt in his Introduction (pp.22-27)
try to unpack and discuss the implications of Winch’s thesis that "all
meaningful behavior must be social" (from Winch’s The Idea of Social
Science). They provide an interpretation for Winch’s "meaningful
behavior", through a distinction between a conventionalist
interpretation (which claims that the "significance" of an action can
only be established by direct reference to the social conventions within which
it arises) and a correlational interpretation in terms of content, based
on specific (social) types of attitude (as put forward by Dretske and Fodor).
And while for the first they find that it leads to quite debilitating
difficulties (e.g., see pp. 233-243, where Witherspoon suggests that it leads
to infinite regress and he insists that Wittgenstein’s view against the private
language argument is only a denial about the clarity of content in the relevant
discussions, and his support to Cavell’s "ethnological sense" of
Wittgenstein’s forms of life, in pp.211-233), they regard the second
interpretation more promising (leaving aside the Kripkean critique, which they
think is not a proper interpretation of Wittgenstein and can be answered via
Fodor’s insistence on the law-like regularities in the application of types,
see pp.216-219 and p.27). Related here are the Putnam-Kripke-Chalmers debates
between denotation in causal-historical accounts and deflationism. Gary Ebbs,
in his "Denotation and Discovery", discusses these arguments and
concludes that kind terms do not depend for their meaning and reference only to
individual dispositions but also to the subsequent social/community’s agreement
in practical use (the community’s "practical judgments of sameness of
denotation", pp.247-8, 261-2).

In such a social context of meaning determination and reference however,
a worry about individual autonomy easily arises. Seumas Miller in his
"Individual Autonomy and Sociality" (see also above) addresses this
worry by admitting that socialisation is necessary as a cultural and normative
background for individual autonomous action (pp.261, 274-294).

The discussion about the way social norms and conditions form and
influence individuals progresses with the discussion of social
constructionism by Sally Haslanger and Ron Mallon. Haslanger, in
"Social Construction", influenced by the Putnam-Kripke debates on
kind terms, discusses critically Ian Hacking’s social constructivism (The
Social Construction of What?, 1999), concluding that for human kind terms
(such as "woman", "schizophrenic" etc.) social relations
are what determines their meaning and reference (pp.318-323. A more favourable
attitude towards Hacking’s theory is taken in Mallon’s "Social
Construction, Social Roles and Stability", where naturalistic explanations
and social explanations are similar, since they explain on the basis of
stability of exhibited behaviour (pp.342-351). 

 I left for the end the
discussion of John R. Searle’s "Social Ontology and Political Power".
By far, Searle’s contribution may seem particularly interesting to all who fear
the recently developed terminology in social metaphysics. However, even though
Searle does discuss an extremely interesting topic, especially for our
police-vs-rogue-states times, his conclusions are far too pessimistic and
unimaginative: even though he distinguishes human political reality from
collective animal behavior, and he does tie political institutional reality
with the system of deontic powers that it represents (rather than brute force),
he nevertheless admits the necessity of threat-of-armed-violence requirement
for effective government (pp.203-210), he does not ask himself what good is
political government for, if it cannot guarantee the lack of violence in our
societies! This lack in imagination and hope is represented in the vision of a
peaceful Searlean society that is bound and based on the use (or threat of use)
of violence!

There are other issues in the book that do not satisfy the demanding
reader. Consider for example the lack of detailed discussion of Kripke’s theses
in the theory of types and in the proper interpretation of Wittgenstein’s
corpus and the rather hasty dismissal of them in Schmitt’s Introduction as well
as in Witherspoon and Ebb; the lack of serious and detailed discussion of what
is rationality, of what exactly is the relation of rationality to normativity
and why we should be interested in it when we think about joint actions in Roth
and Schmitt; the dismissal of Hacking’s "idea-constructionism" in favor
of Haslanger’s "debunking" project, with its more unanswered and
unanswerable questions than Hacking’s theory; the lack of serious and detailed
discussion of what is intentional in Mallon and Miller.

However, despite its few shortcomings, the volume has far too many
virtues to be left outside any course reading lists or library orders on social
theory. With its quite informative and up-to-date bibliography and quite useful
index is a necessary tool for all researchers into social theory.

 

© 2005 Constantinos Athanasopoulos

 

Dr.Constantinos
Athanasopoulos has a Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow (on the topic of
The Metaphysics of Intentionality in the Philosophy of Language and Mind of
Sartre and Wittgenstein). He has also studied philosophy, psychology and
religion at Brandon U., Canada, and Moral Philosophy at the University of St.
Andrews. His many research interests include metaphysics, philosophy of mind
and language, Continental and Analytic, and Medieval and Byzantine Philosophy,
moral psychology, ethics, environmental philosophy and ethics, political
philosophy, philosophy of education, philosophy of psychology and
psychiatry.  He has published two books
in philosophy with Hellenic Open University, as well as two other books with
independent publishers in Greece (one in Modern Ethical Theory and the other in
Medieval and Byzantine Philosophy). He has published many articles in
international journals of philosophy, volumes of proceedings and encyclopedias.
Currently, he is writing a book on Wittgenstein (in English). Parallel to
job-hunting his other hobbies include Byzantine Music, Orthodox Theology and
going to the movies.

Categories: Philosophical