Carolina Berrutti
University of Amsterdam
When considering what a social entity is, there is agreement within the literature that social groups have a particular set of properties which differentiate them from both individuals and a plurality of material objects. However, there is an ongoing debate about what those properties are and what that entails for the ontological status of social entities. For example, at the level of groups of people, realists –people who think that groups cannot be reduced to their individual members– argue that they should either be considered as set-theoretic entities (Effingham, 2010), sui generis entities (Uzquiano, 2004), or as mereological fusions of their members (Ruben, 1985; Hawley, 2017). Simultaneously, there is a parallel discussion in the literature about whether social entities are institutionalized by means of supervenience and emergence (Pettit and List, 2019; Stalkner, 1996), anchoring-grounding (Epstein, 2015), or constitution (Searle, 1995, 2010; Hindriks, 2013), among others. In this article I explore how these two subfields intersect with one another, by arguing that not all social entities are constituted by the same mechanisms and that how they are constituted partly determines the ontological status we ascribe to them. As a consequence, I argue that a conditional claim bridging these two debates is necessary to provide an explanatorily successful theory of social groups.
Chair: Satbhav Voleti
Time: 03 September, 14:40-15:10
Location: HS E.002
SOPhiA 2026 