Introduction

Many social and collective properties and notions are man-made in a collective sense. In particular, this holds true of social institutions of the general kind, such as natural languages, legal systems, and economic notions (e.g. money, market). Similarly, such social institutions as the school, church, government, leadership, and authority are collectively created and maintained. The resulting collectivity features (ontologically: ideas in people's minds and their collective activities) characterize the man-maintained parts of the social world.

In this chapter we will study “collectivity” in the sense that a feature of the social world can be regarded as collective as opposed to being private or personal. We argue in this chapter that collectivity is created through collective acceptance. We have elsewhere (in Balzer and Tuomela 1997b; Tuomela and Balzer 1999) offered a conceptually precise and partially formalized “Collective Acceptance” account of collectivity in a “constructivist” group phenomenon. The first two sections of the chapter will be concerned with the presentation of that account. The basic contribution of this chapter concerns the nature of collective attitudes and collective goals in particular (section 3). It turns out that our account of collective acceptance and collective goals throws some light on collective and public goods, which are notions of interest to an economist. However, our main interests in this chapter are not so much in the philosophical and conceptual problems related to economics but rather in the philosophy of social notions and social ontology.

INTRODUCTION

Social practices are often spoken of in social science literature, but I have not found comprehensive conceptual accounts of them in that literature (with the partial exception of the elucidations by the sociologists Giddens and Bourdieu). In philosophy, the recent rich book by Schatzki (1996) contains interesting discussions and can be recommended. In this book I will, however, make a fresh start. The basic idea is that social practices in their core sense are activities performed for social reasons of a certain broad kind, viz., shared we-attitudes (either in the I-mode or in the we-mode). My approach has as its starting point the philosophy of social action and it is quite different from previous work in this area. Using the terminology of chapter 1, the nature and role of social practices is crucially central for arguing both for the “wide” and the “narrow” constructivist programs in my sense.

The phrase “social practice” is used in many different ways, and social practices will form a very broad category of activities. For instance, there are work-related institutionalized practices. These include banking practices and teaching practices of various kinds, as well as practices for building sailing boats or violins. These practices typically involve specific and widespread techniques or ways of doing things. Accordingly, there are skills embedded here and thus better and worse ways of performing the activities constituting the social practices.

INTRODUCTION

Several philosophers, most notably Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) and Wilfrid Sellars (1963), have argued that social practices, qua central elements of “forms of life,” are conceptually crucial for conceptual activity. This is because they – or rather some fundamental kinds of them – in some instances are themselves inherently conceptual activities. This entails that they are activities which do not psychologically depend on the participants' following rules or meeting standards of any kind. This feature of social practices can be used to argue that the correctness of activities such as rule following and in general the application of concepts to the world crucially depends on the social practices of the community in question. Basic social practices are a kind of “discussion stopper” and form the irreducible and noncircular conceptual fundamenta of conceptual activities, according to this line of thought. The same communitarian idea can be applied to argue that language – or rather language use – is conceptually prior to thinking, even if thoughts may be argued to cause action. This is what Sellars (1963) argues. I will conduct part of my discussion within a Sellarsian framework (although without accepting all of his central views). Furthermore, I will not accept strong communitarianism, nor does Sellars.

Let me here say briefly what I mean by action and how I use some central related terms. When I speak of a strictly intentional action, I mean action performed on purpose.

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS INTRODUCED

In this chapter I will consider social institutions (or, as I would like to say, “collective-social” institutions) but mainly in a broad sense. They form the most important class of collective-social entities. Roughly speaking, by a social institution in the broad sense (e.g. money, language) I mean a specific type of norm-based – and possibly also aim-based – social practice. Roughly speaking, social institutions give or “define” the ground rules for how to act or for what counts as a collective item with a signified symbolic or social status in a society (or other collective). In this sense they are a kind of collective good available to all (cf. the forgroupness requirement). One can also say in more technical terms that institutions are special kinds of ordered pairs of social practices and norms (or systems of norms). This way of speaking emphasizes that there are two key elements in an institution – norms and collective activity, and the norms must confer a special symbolic or social status to the activity (or an item involved in the activity).

The notion of a social institution is used in several different senses in the literature. In different disciplines there are various ingrained usages and theorists often have different things in mind when speaking of institutions; and even when they have the same thing in mind they often emphasize different features of their shared analysandum.

It is acknowledged in philosophical and theoretical writings concerning the basic nature of the social world that social practices are central elements of “forms of life” and, consequently, of social life. Nevertheless, very little serious analytical work concerning social practices and, for that matter, social institutions exists in philosophy or elsewhere. The present work aims at remedying this situation. The novel approach taken in this book is called the “Collective Acceptance” account, and it is heavily based on “shared we-attitudes,” which represent a weak form of collective intentionality (or “social representations,” in social psychology terminology). As a slogan, “we-attitudes drive human life.”

There are several good reasons for embarking on a conceptual and philosophical study of social practices. The deepest sense is that they form the conceptual basis of thinking and other conceptual activities, viz., thinking and acting on the basis of concepts. They can be regarded as conceptually crucial in that they – or rather some fundamental kinds of them – can in themselves be meaningful, “rock-bottom” activities. Furthermore, it can be argued that the concept of correctness of such activities as rule following and in general rational conceptual activities crucially depend on the social practices of the community in question and that basic social practices are a kind of irreducible and noncircular conceptual fundamentum of conceptual activities.

WIDE AND NARROW SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM

The central claim of this book is that collective intentionality in the form of “shared we-attitudes” is crucial for the proper understanding of social practices and social institutions as well as sociality in general. The systematic elaboration of this grand thesis will occupy most of what follows. Underlying this central theme, and closely related to it, is that collective intentionality is also central for the ontology of the social world in that a central part of the social realm is collectively constructed in terms of “collective acceptance.” I will start by a brief discussion of this grand thesis, which can also be called the social constructivist program in the wide sense.

It may sound like a platitude to say that the social world is made and maintained by people by means of their social practices. Today the various views that fall under the label “social constructivism” emphasize the constructed nature of the social world. The construction can be performed on purpose or it can take place in part in terms of the unintended consequences of intentional action. As to modern literature related to social constructivism, I will not attempt to survey it here, nor will I take a stand on its various versions. I wish to emphasize that the physical world on my account, contrary to some other forms of constructivism, is not a social construct and that, furthermore, only some parts of the social world are intentionally collectively constructed.

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this chapter is to study social practices and the dynamics of their maintenance in precise mathematical and logical terms, relying on the theoretical developments of the earlier chapters. While the present chapter does not much advance the philosophical arguments presented earlier in this book except for the dynamic account it offers, it shows that the views espoused in the book are practical in the sense of being implementable in formal mathematical terms. This also serves the interests of research in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI), and the system can, furthermore, be used for computer simulations of social processes. While chapter 6 was concerned with social institutions in a synchronic sense, the present chapter creates a mathematical account of the diachronic case, which in principle applies to all (core) social practices, including all the institutional ones discussed in chapter 6.

The chapter will concentrate on the function of collective attitudes in this dynamics, and on the macroscopic level. Social practices will be regarded as core social practices, viz., recurrent collective activities based on collective attitudes, more precisely shared we-attitudes. They are maintained (upheld, renewed, and changed) on the basis of their (believed) success. The success of an action within a social practice depends on the content of the collective attitude (especially intention) that causes the action. This content may concern not only the mere performance of a collective action but also its performance in a certain manner or as meeting certain normative standards.

INTRODUCTION TO COLLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY

Suppose two persons plan to carry a table upstairs together. Their plan will consist of their intentions to carry the table together and their shared beliefs concerning how to do it. There is joint or collective intentionality here about the joint action of carrying the table and about the means for doing it. Thus there is collective intentionality or aboutness related to intending and believing. In the case of joint intending the relevant part of the world has to be (jointly) changed to accord with the content of the intention for it to be satisfied. Thus the satisfaction relation here has the world-to-mind direction of fit. In the case of shared or mutual belief the correctness of the belief is determined on the basis of what the world is like and the direction of fit is mind-to-world (cf. Searle, 1983 and 2001 for this kind of account). In the “fitness” relation the first term is the variable and the second one the constant factor in the situation. We may speak of collective intentionality also in the case of emotions like joy, fear, and shame.

Not only intentions and beliefs but also emotions, such as shared joy, can be analyzed in terms of shared we-attitudes. In the case of shared we-attitudes the social bond between the agents is their relevant beliefs concerning others' attitudes and beliefs concerning them.