Abstract
Mental, mathematical, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview due to the peculiar kinds of properties inherent to them. In this paper I argue that a significant class of social entities also presents us with an ontological puzzle that has thus far not been addressed satisfactorily. This puzzle relates to the location of certain social entities. Where, for instance, are organizations located? Where their members are, or where their designated offices are? Organizations depend on their members for their existence, but the members of an organization can be where the organization is not. The designated office of an organization, however, need be little more than a mailbox. I argue that the problem can be solved by conceptualizing the relation between social entities and non-social entities as one of constitution, a relation of unity without identity. Constituted objects have properties that cannot be reduced to properties of the constituting objects. Thus, my attempt to solve the Location Problem results in an argument in favor of a kind of non-reductive materialism about the social.
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Acknowledgments
I presented this paper at Reduction and the Special Sciences, a conference held at Tilburg University (the Netherlands), and in the Research Seminar Mind and Action at the Radboud University Nijmegen, both in April 2008. I gratefully acknowledge helpful comments from the audiences there. I also thank Lynne Rudder Baker, Arno Wouters, and three anonymous referees for their written comments.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Hindriks, F. The location problem in social ontology. Synthese 190, 413–437 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-0036-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-0036-0