Jan Tomasz Balcerowski
University of Warwick / Vienese Forum for Analytic Philosophy
The financial press often employs language suggesting that markets are rigid entities capable of interacting with social reality. This portrayal contradicts the consensus of viewing markets as mere collections of profit-oriented individuals. Such discord is caused by a lack of a coherent social ontology of markets and accompanying action theory that could explain interactions between market participants. I sketch a beginning of both.
My discussion revolves around Margaret Gilbert’s (1992) Simmelian Account, to answer the question: Why are markets social groups?. She claims that all that is required to form a group is that members share in an action, belief, attitude, or some attribute. Gilbert focuses on readiness to act. I argue that her account leaves out certain types of social interactions. Especially, those relevant in the markets. Therefore, I propose two friendly revisions of the account. The first suggests that people who form groups do not always have specific partners in mind. The second suggests they can implicitly express their readiness to join an activity. To apply Gilbert’s account to markets, I need to know what activities market participants partake in together.
A straightforward answer would be a transaction. However, it seems to lack the conventional components of a collective action, for example, a shared goal (Butterfill and Sinigaglia, 2023). It could be modelled as an aggregate of two individual actions. Therefore, I study different rivalling theories of action (Tuomela and Miller, 2003; Bratman, 2013; Gilbert, 2017) and attempt to extract their core idea. In all of them, there is some sufficient condition for joint acting. I argue that they can be identified with sharing some standard for success. Under such a minimal formulation, transactions – key market interactions can be described as collective actions.
The modified account models market better and could be a starting point for research striving to offer a better conceptual understanding of our economy’s central institutions. A possible conclusion is that markets are social groups – participants share in joint readiness to transact with some previously unspecified agent and their readiness can be expressed implicitly. Such a more nuanced view of groupness could lead to a better social ontology reconciled with the best in class economic theory.
Reference:
Bratman, M.E. (2013) Shared agency: A planning theory of acting together. Oxford University Press.
Butterfill, S.A. and Sinigaglia, C. (2023) ‘Towards a Mechanistically Neutral Account of Acting Jointly: The Notion of a Collective Goal’, Mind, 132(525), pp. 1–29. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzab096.
Gilbert, M. (1992) On social facts. 1. Princeton paperback print. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Gilbert, M. (2017) ‘Joint commitment’, in The Routledge handbook of collective intentionality. Routledge, pp. 130–139.
Tuomela, R. and Miller, K. (2003) ‘We-intentions’, Social Ontology in the Making, 69.
Chair: Aleksandar Draskovic
Time: September 13th, 14:40-15:10
Location: HS E.002
SOPhiA 2026 