Volume 2, Issue 1

Barry Smith has recently argued against John Searle’s thesis that institutional facts exist because they are represented as existing in a certain community. Smith argues that institutional facts can exist even though they are not represented as existing and that institutional facts can fail to obtain even though they are represented as obtaining. In this paper it is argued that Smith’s challenge can be met for a certain class of legal facts. I argue that in order to solve the problem posed by Smith, we must distinguish between three different kinds of institutional facts and between three different kinds of representation which sustain their existence.

The purpose of this article is to bridge the gap between critical theory as understood in the Frankfurt school tradition on the one hand, and social ontology understood as a reflection on the ontological presuppositions of social sciences and social theories on the other. What is at stake is the type of social ontology that critical theory needs if it wants to tackle its main social ontological issue: that of social transformation. This paper’s claim is that what is required is neither a substantial social ontology, nor a relational social ontology, but a processual one. The first part of this article elaborates the distinction between substantial, relational and processual social ontologies. The second part analyzes the various ways in which this distinction can be used in social ontological discussions. Finally, the third part focuses on the various possible social ontological approaches to the issue of social transformation.

In contemporary philosophy of collective intentionality, emotions, feelings, moods, and sentiments do not figure prominently in debates on the explanation and justification of joint action. Received philosophical theories analyze joint action in terms of common knowledge of cognitively complex, interconnected structures of intentions and action plans of the participants. These theories admit that collective emotions sometimes give rise to joint action or more typically, unplanned and uncoordinated collective behavior that falls short of full-fledged jointly intentional action. In contrast, minimalist theorists pay some attention to affective elements in joint action without much concern about their collective intentionality. They refer to an association between low-level synchrony in perceptual, motor, and behavioral processes, and increased interpersonal liking, feelings of solidarity, and cooperativeness. In this paper, we outline an account of collective emotions that can bridge this theoretical divide, linking the intentional structure of joint actions and the underlying cognitive and affective mechanisms. Collective emotions can function as both motivating and justifying reasons for jointly intentional actions, in some cases even without prior joint intentions of the participants. Moreover, they facilitate coordination in joint action.

A précis of Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Michael Tomasello has greatly expanded our knowledge of human cognition and how it differs from that of other animals. In this commentary to his recent book A Natural History of Human Thinking , I first critique some of the presuppositions and arguments of his evolutionary story about how homo sapiens’ cognition emerged. For example, I question the strategy of relying on the modern chimpanzee as a model for our last shared ancestor, and I doubt the idea that what changed first over evolutionary time was hominin behavior, which then in turn brought about changes in cognition. In the second half of the commentary I aim to show that the author oscillates between an additive and a transformative account of human shared intentionality. I argue that shared intentionality shapes cognition in its entirety and therefore precludes the possibility that humans have the same, individual intentionality (as shown in, e.g. their instrumental reasoning) as other apes.

According to the shared intentionality hypothesis proposed by Michael Tomasello, two cognitive upgrades – joint and collective intentionality , respectively – make human thinking unique. Joint intentionality, in particular, is a mindset supposed to account for our early, species-specific capacity to participate in collaborative activities involving two (or a few) agents. In order to elucidate such activities and their proximate cognitive-motivational mechanism, Tomasello draws on philosophical accounts of shared intentionality. I argue that his deference to such cognitively demanding accounts of shared intentional activities is problematic if his theoretical ambition is in part to show that and how early (prelinguistic and precultural) capacities for joint action contribute to the development of higher cognitive capacities.

In this paper I first introduce Tomasello’s notion of thought and his account of its emergence and development through differentiation, arguing that it calls into question the theory bias of the philosophical tradition on thought as well as its frequent atomism. I then raise some worries that he may be overextending the concept of thought, arguing that we should recognize an area of intentionality intermediate between action and perception on the one hand and thought on the other. After that I argue that the co-operative nature of humans is reflected in the very structure of their intentionality and thought: in co-operative modes such as the mode of joint attention and action and the we-mode, they experience and represent others as co-subjects of joint relations to situations in the world rather than as mere objects. In conclusion, I briefly comment on what Tomasello refers to as one of two big open questions in the theory of collective intentionality, namely that of the irreducibility of jointness.

Social accounts of objective content, like the one advanced by Tomasello (2014), are traditionally challenged by an ‘essential tension’ (Hutto and Satne 2015). The tension is the following: while sociality is deemed to be at the basis of thinking, in order to explain sociality, some form of thinking seems to be necessarily presupposed. In this contribution I analyse Tomasello’s two-step theory of the evolution of human thinking vis-à-vis this challenge. While his theory is in principle suited to address it, I claim that the specifics of the first step and the notion of perspective that infuse it are problematic in this regard. I end by briefly sketching an alternative.

This paper is a reply to the comments by Henrike Moll, Glenda Satne, Ladislav Koreň and Michael Schmitz on Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014).

This article summarizes The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences . The book develops a new model for social ontology, applies it to groups and collective intentionality, and criticizes various forms of individualism. Part One of the book presents two traditional approaches to social ontology and unifies them into the “grounding–anchoring model” for the building of the social world. Part Two shows that individualism is mistaken even for basic facts about groups of people, challenges prevailing views of group intention and action, and illustrates how to approach facts about groups in general.

The distinction between anchors and grounds is one of the most innovative contributions of The Ant Trap . In this commentary I will argue that the distinction suffers from an ambiguity between tokens and types. This leads Epstein to endorse pluralism about anchors and grounds, a position that is not justified in the book and to which there are plausible alternatives.

The anthropocentric view holds that the social world is a projection of mental states and attitudes onto the real world. However, there is more to a society of individuals than their psychological make up. In The Ant Trap , Epstein hints at the possibility that collective intentionality can, and should, be discarded as a pillar of social ontology. In this commentary I argue that this claim is motivated by an outdated view of the nature and structure of collective attitudes. If we aim at a good theory of social ontology, we need a good theory of collective intentionality.

This article responds to comments by Francesco Guala and Mattia Gallotti on The Ant Trap . In the replies, I address the relation of new advances in cognitive science to the study of collective attitudes, clarify distinct questions we might ask about grounding and about anchoring in social ontology, defend various forms of pluralism about grounds and about anchors, and discuss the type-token distinction as it applies to social entities.