Raimo Tuomela: Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents

Excerpt

In Social Ontology, Professor Raimo Tuomela addresses the ontology of certain organized groups such as corporations and states. His book concentrates on institutional groups in which decision-making and acting are based on the authorization of some members to carry out one or more of the group’s tasks (p. 160).¹ Although this book was written to expound his previous work on social ontology, Tuomela places more emphasis in this book on group agency and group reasoning (p. 14) as well as on the hierarchal nature of certain kinds of we-mode groups (p. 9). He also addresses the issue of non-autonomous groups in order to account for cases where external coercion and cooperation exist, and improvements on his analyses of the concepts of collective intention and collective acceptance are made (p. 14). One of Tuomela’s central claims is that the social world can be understood with the help of irreducible we-mode concepts as well as I-mode concepts (p. 15). Both are necessary to explain social actions and institutions (p. 4). …