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What are social groups? Their metaphysics and how to
classify them
by BRIAN EPSTEIN Synthese, DOI 10.1007/s11229- 017 - 1387 - y, 2017 This paper presents a systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of social groups. I argue against prominent views that attempt to unify all social groups or to divide them into simple typologies. Instead I argue that social groups are enormously diverse, but show how we can investigate their natures nonetheless. I analyze social groups from a bottom-up perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. We can characterize any given kind of social group with four complementary profiles: its “construction profile,” its “extra essentials” profile, its “anchor” profile, and its “accident” profile. Together these provide a framework for understanding the nature of groups, help classify and categorize groups, and shed light on group agency. When we catalog the innovations that make contemporary life possible, social groups are hardly the first things to come to mind. We think of artifacts, technologies, and infrastructure—things like wheels, forms of shelter, the printing press, networks of paths and roads, mechanized agriculture, antibiotics, refrigeration, microprocessors. No doubt, these are nice to have. But at least as crucial to the modern world is how we design and set up groups of people. Social groups have innumerable functions and purposes. They arise from a combination of conscious invention, unconscious habits, repeated patterns, routines, practices, and environmental features. And they come in staggering variety. Among the kinds of groups are sports teams, baseball teams, major league baseball teams, minor league baseball teams, college baseball teams, intramural baseball teams,
pickup baseball teams, research groups, musical groups, pop bands, symphony orchestras, marching bands, social classes, races, genders, demographic cohorts, psychographic cohorts, geographic cohorts, corporate marketing groups, corporate HR groups, boards of directors, rioting mobs, marching platoons, processions of mourners,… we could go on and on, listing kinds and sub-kinds. A chaotic list like this cries out for order and explanation. What, if anything, do social groups have in common? What sorts of entities are social groups, how are they individuated, and what are their persistence and identity conditions? How are they set up, and what do they do for us? How can we best construct a classification or typology of groups? In approaching these questions in this article, I have two aims. First is to challenge the idea that they have simple answers. There seems to be a powerful drive among theorists to unify and simplify the endless diversity and variation among kinds of groups. Many people, for instance, try to draw simple lines between social groups and mere collections of people, or else to divide groups into a few fundamental varieties.^1 I hope to show that this is a non-starter. Too much faith in parsimony misleads an investigation of social groups from the outset. The second aim is to present a practical and systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of groups. Instead of thinking mainly about the umbrella category of social groups, I propose to investigate their details from a “micro” or “bottom-up” perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. I propose that we can characterize any given kind of social group with four complementary profiles:
- Its “construction” profile. This profile characterizes how groups of a
- I am grateful to Katherine Ritchie, Amie Thomasson, and Robin Dembroff, to participants in the 2016 ENPOSS, CollInt, and MANCEPT conferences, and to three anonymous referees, for valuable comments and suggestions. 1 For a number of approaches to this question see Greenwood 1997. See also Sartre 1960; Held 1970; Gruner 1976; French 1984; McGary 1986; May 1987; Gilbert 1989; Harré 1997; Graham 2002; Brewer 2003; Greenwood 2003; Pettit 2003; Sheehy 2006a, 2006b; Meijers 2007; Tuomela 2007; List and Pettit 2011; Ritchie 2013; Tollefsen 2015.
groups. Even today, this hobbles our understanding of such things as group agency, the composition of groups, how they are generated, and how we should model them. The good news is that—despite the initial complexity—it is within our powers to tame and systematize their analysis.
1. Some troubles with simple typologies
To motivate the approach I am taking, I will briefly discuss Katherine Ritchie’s influential theory of social groups. Ritchie divides social groups into two categories.^2 Type 1 groups (or “organized groups”) have structures that reflect functional organization, with replaceable people filling in roles at the “nodes” of the structures. Groups of this kind also have collective intentionality, and members choose to be members—membership is “volitional.” Type 2 groups (or “feature groups”), in contrast, are unstructured. People are members in virtue of possessing some feature, not because they occupy nodes of a structure. Feature groups lack collective intentionality, and people may or may not choose to be members. With this distinction, Ritchie refines a contrast that many theorists have found intuitive and developed variations of.^3 These categories, however, are problematic, even if they are meant to be ideal types. One problem is that it is unclear that these two categories are distinct at all: it all depends on how the notion of “feature” is elaborated, and this is not a simple matter. Second, if we limit the “feature groups” so that they do not include all of the organized ones, we find that even taken together the two categories leave out nearly all actual social groups. 2 Ritchie 2013, 2015. Ritchie also notes that there may be other categories of groups, such as mobs, queues, and non-human groups. The main categorization, though, is between organized groups and feature groups, and similar categorizations are put forward by many other theorists. My aim in challenging this categorization is to cast doubt on the utility of attempts to classify social groups largely, even if not exclusively, into broad categories like these. In this paper, I do not discuss non-human groups. I am grateful to Ritchie for comments and clarifications on these and subsequent points. 3 Many authors propose similar categorizations of groups. See, among others, Sartre 1960; French 1984; McGary 1986; May 1987; Harré 1997.
A key challenge for this approach is how to understand a “feature” in the latter category. Which sorts of features that members possess count for such groups, and which are ruled out? Ritchie needs to balance this carefully: if we include all properties, including extrinsic ones, then even the property being a person filling in a node of such-and-such a structure counts, so all groups would be feature groups and the intended contrast between the categories would collapse. If, on the other hand, the “features” were restricted to only intrinsic properties, then we would leave out the archetypal groups Ritchie highlights, such as races and genders.^4 So Ritchie proposes to understand feature groups as grouping people according to “socially constructed properties,” and characterizes such properties in a very accommodating way. One characterization she mentions, for instance, is Haslanger’s definition of constitutive social construction: “ X is socially constructed constitutively as an F iff X is of a kind or sort F such that in defining what it is to be F we must make reference to social factors.”^5 Unfortunately, while this is a plausible analysis of constitutive social construction, using it to characterize “feature groups” would mean that all the organized groups fall within the category of feature groups. Consider, for example, structured properties such as being on the Microsoft board, being a member of the Supreme Court, and working at the State House. All of these make reference to social factors in their definitions. And they all come along with norms and roles and structures, so the division between feature groups and organized groups breaks down.^6 Even bigger troubles arise with “organized groups.” To make these 4 Gender properties and racial properties are widely understood to be extrinsic, involving social and historical characteristics. See, among others, Haslanger 2000; Blum 2010; McPherson 2015. 5 Haslanger 2003, p. 318; Ritchie 2015, p. 317. 6 I am not claiming that there is no possible distinction between groups manifesting some sort of organization and those that do not. As I discuss below, however, there are so many cross-cutting lines to group design and organization that I doubt the utility of any one way of making the distinction. And in any case, if there is such a distinction it is far more complex to draw than it might first appear.
organized groups in particular, going so far as to introduce a criterion of identity. This precision, however, also enables us to see where the proposal is not successful, and why even a refined version could not be: different kinds of groups have sharply different criteria of identity, so we need a much finer breakdown of kinds of groups, if we are to formulate such criteria at all. Ritchie’s criterion of identity for organized groups is this: take any pair of organized groups G 1 and G 2. For all times t and worlds w, if G 1 has the same structure as G 2 at t and w, and if G 1 has the same people occupying the structure in the same roles as G 2 has at t and w, then that implies that G 1 =G 2.^9 That is, if G 1 and G 2 have the same structure and same structure-ordered-members at all times and worlds,^10 then G 1 =G 2. Unfortunately, this condition is too weak for many organized groups and too strong for many others. In the following sections I will discuss several criteria of 9 Specifically, this is Ritchie’s expression of the criterion of identity: (Ritchie 2015, p. 316 ) (IDENTITY) A group G1 and a group G2 are identical if, and only if,
- for all t and all w, the structure of G1 at t at w is identical to the structure of G2 at t at w, and
- for all t and all w and all x, x occupies node n in the structure of G1 at t at w if, and only if, x occupies n in the structure of G2 at t at w. As with all criteria of identity, all the interesting work is done in the right-to-left implication; the left-to-right implication is trivial. (If G 1 =G 2 , then they have the same properties at all times and worlds, so a fortiori they will have the same structure and structure-ordered-members at all times and worlds.) 10 An additional problem with Ritchie’s characterization of organized groups is that this criterion admits that a group’s structure can change from any time to any other, and from any world to any other. In fact, (IDENTITY) is compatible with a group having a radically discontinuous and changing structure at every moment in time and in every world. This seems bizarre, but the criterion gives us no constraints on structural change, nor does it give us any information about the persistence of a group over time. If there is to be any force at all to the idea that organized groups are structured, then Ritchie needs to give constraints on structural change.
identity, but to illustrate the problem here are a couple of examples: Too weak: Many kinds of groups plausibly have essential origins. 11 Consider, for instance, the Senate, or the Supreme Court, or a corporate board, or a sports team. Groups like these are formed with a particular action; and the property having been formed by that particular action is essential to the group. In addition, for many groups, it is essential to them that their memberships too have specific historical origins—i.e., that their members are elected or initiated or appointed in a particular way. It is not enough that two groups have the same members playing the same roles, in order for them to be the same group. Too strong: For many kinds of groups, we can get identity with weaker conditions. Typically, we understand criteria of identity as giving minimal conditions to guarantee the identity of a pair of objects of a given kind, but Ritchie’s proposed criterion is far from minimal. Some types of groups, for instance, have their members essentially. Such groups do not persist through changes of members. Such a group may be organized, with roles, structures, and the rest—but there are no substitutions. For kinds of groups like these, a minimal criterion of identity is much weaker: two groups of this kind that have different members at any time or world are different groups. Despite the present criticism, Ritchie’s approach does ask the right questions. We need to give clear characterizations of the essential properties of kinds of groups, analyze distinctions between kinds, and formulate criteria of identity among other characterizations. The underlying problem, however, is the idea that the highly structured, organized, and voluntaristic groups are a basic paradigm rather than a minor variant in the vast ecosystem of social groups.
2. Approaching the question
It might turn out that all the various kinds of social groups share key characteristics, or can be organized into a simple typology. But there are so many different kinds of social groups—committees, boards, legislatures, classes, among others I mentioned at the outset—that we should at least be open to the possibility that social group is just a generic umbrella, and that the real interest 11 On origin essentialism, see Salmon 1981; Kripke [1972] 1980.
idea of a “feature group.” It seems that for some groups, people are members in virtue of having some property, and that is all there is to the group. The group is just made up of people who have that property. In discussing Ritchie, I pointed out that we run into trouble distinguishing feature groups from organized groups. But what if we abandon that aim of marking off the feature groups from other kinds of groups? What if we just allow any property—being a woman, being middle-income, being an adult—to mark off a group? Why not simply analyze that group, without worrying about kinds of groups? The problem is this: suppose we choose a particular property Pg, the possession of which is necessary and sufficient for membership in group g. Even given that property, that does not suffice to determine the other essential properties of group g. Under what conditions, for instance, does g persist? Suppose ten people have property Pg from April to June, then no one has the property from June to September, then eleven people have the property from September to November. Do the ten members in the spring belong to the same group as the eleven in the autumn? Was that one group, or two distinct groups? Furthermore, suppose there is another property Q that has the same extension as Pg. Maybe even the same extension in all possible worlds. Is the Q - group distinct from g, or identical to it? Even though property Pg determines how the group is constituted—that is, how its membership is fixed—it does not answer these questions and others. Rather, their answers depend on the kind of group g is. Here, instead, is a more satisfactory treatment of groups like these. We can agree that the dominant characteristic of certain groups is that they are constituted by and only by people having property Pg. But that dominant characteristic is not their only characteristic, and there is not just one way of filling out the rest. Not all such groups, therefore, will fall into one single kind. Instead, there is a family of kinds of groups, all of which have that dominant characteristic, but whose answers to the additional questions vary. I will call this family the “constitution-dominated” kinds. The groups in some of the kinds, within this family, are essentially continuous: these groups cease to exist as soon as no one has the relevant property. Others admit discontinuity: these groups persist even if there are breaks in the property’s exemplification. Other kinds in this family have different persistence conditions: kinds that persist through three breaks but not four, or that persist through breaks so long as they are brief. And
persistence is not the only issue: kinds within the constitution-dominated family vary along different dimensions as well. In short, there is no single default kind of group that is “features only.” In a moment I will introduce a particular kind in the constitution-dominated family as one of the working examples for us to profile.^13 Once we focus on specific kinds of groups, it is easy to get off and running. To analyze a kind of group K, we need to answer a variety of questions. When and how does an instance of K come to exist? Given a group g of kind K, under what conditions is a collection of people the membership of g at a given time? Under what conditions are instances of kind K identical to one another? What are the rights, obligations, and hierarchies associated with groups of kind K? Where do these come from, and for that matter, where do the conditions come from pertaining to the existence, membership, and identity of groups of that kind? And finally, once we have these characterizations of many kinds of groups, what kinds of kinds are there? How should they be classified? To begin, let us consider several kinds of groups as working examples. If we are to get a sense of the inadequacies of simple models, and see how to analyze diverse kinds, we cannot start with just one or two. So here is a range of kinds: K1: Groups of street musicians. A group of kind K1 is formed when musicians gather together on the street, standing or sitting relatively close to one another, and start playing. Players can join the group or leave the group, with membership dependent on their being in close proximity to the others, joining in, and being responded to appropriately. A group of this kind terminates when it stops playing for more than a few minutes. K2: Tufts University College of Arts, Sciences and Engineering elected standing faculty committees. There are about fifteen actual committees instantiating kind K2. Groups of this kind are created by a process of voting and setup by the faculty, with members nominated and voted on by the faculty. The terms are staggered so that each year only a fraction of the members rotate out and are replaced; replacements are nominated 13 In thinking about these, I have benefitted greatly from discussions with Katherine Ritchie and with the participants of MANCEPT 2016.
3.1 Analyzing groups in terms of their “stages” To treat the constitution and identity of groups, I will center the discussion on “stages” of groups—how stages constitute groups at a given time and how they are related to one another.^14 Talk of stages is familiar from the metaphysics of ordinary objects, and of persons. A stage of a person, for instance, is an instantaneous snapshot of material that typically includes a head, a torso, arms, hands, legs, feet, etc. Similarly, a stage of a group is an instantaneous snapshot of that material that constitutes the group. That is, it is a collection of people in a world at an instant in time.^15 A given stage s exists at and only at a moment in time and in a particular world. I will not assume that a given stage must be a stage of a group of any kind. Stages are merely snapshots of collections of people, and might be able to exist on their own without being constituents of groups.^16 Throughout this paper, I will speak of groups being constituted by stages at a given time and in a given world.^17 In section 4 I discuss the constitution view of 14 This is not the only way to approach groups. In fact, it has some shortcomings, because it biases our understanding toward assuming that groups must always have members and that they cease to exist when they are empty. That assumption would be a mistake; in Epstein 2015 , chapters 11-12, I discuss broader ways of treating and identifying groups. 15 I use the term ‘collection’ reluctantly, without intending to make a strong commitment as to how we should interpret collections. I intend collections to have their members essentially, much like a set but without some of the mathematical baggage. I think it is also preferable to speak of collections rather than fusions, since both Alice and Alice’s hand are parts of the fusion of Alice, Bob, and Carol, while Alice’s hand is not a member of the collection of Alice, Bob, and Carol, even though Alice the person is. 16 Using stages to explicate properties of groups should not be confused with “stage-theories” of persistence. In this paper, I am not committing to any theory of persistence. Inasmuch as this discussion uses the tools of a particular theory, it can be translated into your favorite theory of persistence. 17 This may be imprecise way of putting what constitutes what. It may be better to regard a collection—not a stage—as constituting-at-t a given group (see, for instance, Baker 2000). In that case, the collection in question is the one of which the stage is a
groups directly, but my aim in analyzing and profiling social groups is to be fairly ecumenical about what groups “really are.” Essentially the same profiles can be constructed, with slight variation in terminology, whether groups are real or fictional, whether they are continuants that persist in time or are abstract objects, or whatever else they might be. If, for instance, a group is best understood as a mathematical object like a set, then we could translate talk of stages constituting groups into talk of ordered pairs of sets and times being the elements of a group.^18 I do find it helpful to learn from the ways we analyze ordinary objects, in order to clarify features of groups. But I hope that most of the results we develop will apply regardless of one’s view on the appropriateness of that analogy.^19 To analyze a kind of group K, then, a central task is to find generalizations about how K-groups are constituted by their stages. (I will use the term “K-group” to abbreviate “group of kind K.”) For instance, take a particular stage s. What conditions does s need to satisfy, in order to be a stage of a K-group? Or take two stages, s 1 and s 2. Suppose that both s 1 and s 2 are stages of K-groups. What additional conditions do s 1 and s 2 need to satisfy in order for them to be stages of the same K-group? We can use stages to analyze the constitution or membership of groups of a given kind K, as well as to formulate criteria of identity. But we also will need one more bit that does not always involve stages: formulating the conditions under which a group of kind K comes to exist at all, and the conditions under snapshot. I use stages because they make it easier to see how to treat the dynamic constitution of groups over time, but the same formulas can be restated in terms of collections at times. I am grateful to Arto Laitinen for pointing out this issue. 18 See Effingham 2010 for one way of doing this, though see Ritchie 2013 for fairly conclusive arguments against this approach. Ritchie thinks of groups as realized structures; on her account, the equivalent to a stage is a structure occupied by people at the nodes at a time t in world w (as seen in her criterion of identity, discussed in section 1 above). See footnote 10 above for some problems with structures; in section 5.2 I also raise an issue regarding defining structures in terms of binary rather than multi-place relations. 19 I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
disagree with the answers I give to specific questions, you will probably find that your improved answers are even more textured and varied than mine. The dimensions along which kinds of groups differ will give us rich material for classifying groups and building taxonomies. This, however, is not the only value of working through the examples. With the profiles—construction, extra essentials, anchor, and accident—I hope to provide and illustrate a template for analyzing any given kind of group one is interested in. Without several examples, it would be hard to see how to apply these profiles to new cases. And there are practical benefits to fully profiling a kind of group one is interested in; it is not just a curiosity for metaphysicians. If, for instance, one wants to model the decisions of K2-groups (Tufts faculty committees), then one may want to model their creation and dissolution, how they gain and lose members, and ensure that distinct committees are modeled as distinct. For building models, that is, the construction profile matters. Similarly for the other profiles. We may want to model their rights and obligations, or how existence and membership conditions can be changed, or how rights and obligations come to be acquired, or perhaps even various accidental properties that the groups have over time. My aim in working through the detailed examples is largely to help illustrate the parts and applications of the profiles. 3.2.1 The conditions for a stage to constitute a given K-group Within the construction profile, I will start with the constitution conditions—i.e., the conditions for a stage s to be a stage of a given group g at time t in world w. Those are often the most interesting and important ones for understanding the makeup of a group.^23 To work them out, we need to recall that stage s is an instantaneous snapshot of a collection of people. So the constitution conditions will largely be a matter of the people in that collection having the right characteristics at time t. It can be 23 On the other hand, while the analysis of a kind’s constitution is important, it is often regarded as the entirety of the metaphysics of that kind. This is an unfortunate error: the membership conditions for a group are just one part of the metaphysics of the group as a whole. (The same error often occurs in the analysis of other kinds as well, not just kinds of groups.)
useful to think separately about the synchronic and the diachronic characteristics of the people. What do the people need to be doing at t, and what history must they have had, in order to be part of a stage of the group at t? Further, we need to think not only about what it takes for stage s to be a stage of some group of that kind, but to be a stage of group g in particular. All this needs to be included in the constitution conditions. Consider, for instance, some examples of K1-groups (i.e., street musician groups). Suppose group a plays at 500 Boylston Street on Monday from 10am-2pm, and group b plays at 500 Boylston Street on Tuesday from 10am-2pm. Consider some stage s —e.g., a snapshot of a collection of people playing on Tuesday at noon. What conditions does s need to satisfy in order to be a stage of group b? Some of the conditions on s are synchronic: the people in s need to be standing and playing together at 500 Boylston, and perhaps also have collective intentions regarding their performance. But that much only guarantees that s is a stage of some K1-group, not that it is a stage of group b in particular. (As opposed, for instance, to being a stage of the distinct group a. ) To ensure that, it is also necessary that s be part of an unbroken sequence of stages stretching back to the origin of b. Already with this example we can start to see why this detail is crucial for understanding groups, and why highly idealized categorizations are inadequate. Are all groups held together by collective intentions? Should we divide groups up into those that are held together by collective intentions and those that are not? The reality is more complicated than this. Here is at least a tentative analysis of the constitution conditions for groups K1-K4: Suppose we have a K-group g, a time t, a world w, and a stage s that is a snapshot of a collection of people at t in w. Then, s constitutes g at t in w if and only if… K1 (street musician): g exists at t in w, and s is a snapshot of a collection of people performing with one another and with the relevant collective intentions, and s is part of an unbroken sequence of stages with those characteristics going back to and including the time of origin of g in w. K2 (faculty committee): g exists at t in w, and s has gone through the legislated rotations and processes for its members, and s is part of an unbroken sequence of stages with those characteristics going back to
K1 (street musician): a collection of people playing music together on the street begins at t 0 in w. (That is, playing did not continuously occur at that place prior and leading up to t 0. ) K2 (faculty committee): the appropriate process of voting and setup by the faculty takes place leading up to t 0 in w. K3 (social class): a nation’s economic system becomes structured in a particular way at t 0 in w, with this group playing one of the relevant functional roles. K4 (DICD): there is a property P that is, in w, instantiated for the first time at t 0. If there are n properties P 1 ,…,Pn with distinct intensions that are simultaneously instantiated for the first time at t 0 , then n DICD-groups g 1 ,…,gn come to exist in w at t 0. In these answers, we can see that groups of certain kinds come to exist as soon as an activity takes place. Groups of other kinds come to exist when a functional role is filled by a collection of people, or else when a collection is assigned to be members.^24 With K4-groups, a new group comes to exist in a world whenever a property is instantiated for the first time in that world. We can also see, in these answers, how existence conditions like these help us explain the possibility or impossibility of coinciding groups of a given kind. Many street-musician groups can exist at a given time, but only in separate locations. Many faculty groups can be created and coincide with one another, if the faculty has gone through the appropriate setup repeatedly. There are several kinds of K3-groups, and once they are formed they do not get formed again. And distinct K4-groups can coincide in a given world, but not in all worlds. 3.2.3 The conditions for a given K-group to continue to exist In general, this other part of the existence of K-groups is simpler. Here is a tentative analysis for K1- to K4-groups: Given a K-group g that came to exist at t 0 in world w and a time t>t 0. Then, g exists at t in w if and only if… 24 It may also be possible for groups of some kinds to come to exist even before there are members. I discuss the possibility of empty groups and how to denote them at the times they are empty in Epstein 2015, chapters 11 and 12.
K1 (street musician): musical performing has continuously occurred at that place from t 0 to t in w. K2 (faculty committee): from t 0 to t in w, the college has continued to exist and the faculty has not disbanded g. K3 (social class): the global economic system is structured in the relevant way at t in w. K4 (DICD): there is a time t’≥t such that some person has property Pg at t’ in w (where Pg is the property whose first instantiation at t 0 formed g ). Some groups continue to exist only while an activity continues without break, some allow breaks, and some exist in perpetuity or until they are expressly disbanded. I have labeled K4-groups “discontinuous”: this is because a group g of this kind persists even during times when no one has property Pg. Once it is formed, it continues to exist until Pg is exemplified for the last time in that world, and then ceases to exist. So even if there are times when the DICD-group of people with the top 1% of wealth does not exist at all (for instance, if everyone in the world is economically equal for some period), nonetheless people who are in the 1% before and after that period are members of that same one group. A different kind in the same family is continuous constitution-dominated groups: groups of this kind must be continuously constituted, so the before and after groups of the top 1% would be distinct groups. 3.2.4 The criterion of identity for groups of kind K The fourth part of the “construction profile” of kind K is its criterion of identity. We should note, however, that criteria of identity often add less information than one might suppose, even for complicated kinds of groups. The idea of a criterion of identity is to give a minimal relation R between two groups that guarantees that if they are both K-groups and stand in that relation R, then they are the same group. (This is a “one-level” criterion of identity. A “two-level criterion” gives a minimal relation R between two stages that guarantees that if they are both stages of K-groups and stand in that relation R, then they are stages
