Abstract
This article identifies and tries to solve five puzzles in Tuomela’s Collective Acceptance View of sociality and institutions. If it is framed in terms of collective acceptance of sentences as true for a group, and that need not mean objective truth, does collective acceptance shed any light on the ontology of institutions? Is it the CA-events or CA-states that have the possible ontological consequences for social reality? If theoretical claims about CA conflict, which ones should we revise? How to make sense of CA-states sometimes being intentions and sometimes beliefs? In cases where the related attitudes are there, but for some reason or another the corresponding activity does not take place, should we say that collective acceptance is whatever is needed (not merely attitudes, but also related actions) for the related ontological effect to take place? The article discusses these challenges and argues among other things that Tuomela’s account has the desired ontological relevance, but as Tuomela sees collective acceptance as an achievement-notion, only effective collective acceptance is collective acceptance at all.
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Notes
- 1.
Or also: “In colloquial talk a social institution can be of various ontological kinds. As examples from literature and common parlance witness, there are at least the following possibilities for what ontological kind of entity a social institution prima facie is: (a) social practice—for example the old practice of sauna bathing on Saturdays in Finland; (b) object—money (as notes, coins, etc.); (c) property of an individual—for example being an owner; (d) linguistic entity—for example natural language; (e) interpersonal state—for example marriage; (f) social organization—for example the national postal system, a university” (2002, p. 161). He continues: “I will accept that social institutions can be conceptualized in these various ways, but I emphasize that they are all related to norm-governed social practices and signify some elements in them. Indeed, one can say even that a social institution ultimately amounts to a special kind of norm-governed social practice (or set of practices)” (2002, p. 161).
- 2.
As in Tuomela (2002, p. 152): “Genuine holding of an attitude obviously also requires appropriately acting on the attitude in question.”
- 3.
See e.g. Tuomela (2002, p. 151), where CA is linked to we-attitudes with one or another direction of fit, and the claim is made that the CA is constituted by coming to hold and holding the we-attitude: “collective acceptance always results in and involves that the members of the collective come to hold either a conative we-attitude (one with the world-to-mind direction of fit) or a doxastic we-attitude (one with the mind-to-world direction of fit or the world-to-mind direction of fit—the latter when the belief is a constitutions institutional one) and in general also maintain, and act (or at least are disposed to act) on the basis of, the we-attitude in question. As argued, in the context of the formula (CAT) the we-attitude must be in the we-mode (at least for a substantial number of group members). We can then say that collective acceptance in a sense is constituted by the corresponding we-attitude (or, more precisely, by coming to hold and holding it)” (italics added).
- 4.
See Schweikard and Laitinen (2023) for discussion on four definitions of “realism” in social ontology. There is ample conceptual room for realism in social ontology concerning mind-dependent (and thus not strictly speaking “objective”) properties and entities; Tuomela seems here more guarded than he needs to be. Below I will suggest that the fact that squirrel fur was money in medieval Finland (FM) makes the sentence “squirrel fur is money in group FM” true for anyone, it is not merely true-for-the-group. Yet, the fact is grounded in something group-dependent, whereas the shape of the earth is not. As facts they are equally objective, but the ground of one involves facts about a group, whereas the other does not.
- 5.
Cf. also Tuomela and Balzer (1998, p. 176): “We formulate our approach by speaking mainly of the acceptance of collective ideas and thoughts, assumed to be linguistically expressible so that we can speak of the acceptance of sentences (with certain meanings or uses).”
- 6.
There may be benefits to sticking to propositional attitudes, rather than attitudes towards entities (such as recognition of persons, or acceptance of institutions or recognition of norms), although for other reasons these are important attitudes to analyze. See Ikäheimo and Laitinen (2007).
- 7.
I thank Raul Hakli for formulating this suggestion.
- 8.
See the exchange between Laitinen (2017) and Tuomela (2017) about realism and perspectivalism. The view outlined above can be called realism about (facts about) institutions. Tuomela wants to retain a stronger form of group-perspectivalism: “my ontological view is a combination of the second form of realism and group-perspectivalism”. A number of Tuomela’s other publications, such as (2007) and (2013), characterize his way of understanding the ontological difference between group-phenomena and natural phenomena. For him, reality is tied to causality, whereas others would allow for facts that are epiphenomenal or only normatively, but not causally, relevant. For a systematic discussion of realisms in social ontology, see Schweikard and Laitinen (2023).
- 9.
In whatever sense it is that collectives have intentional states—Tuomela later makes explicit that group’s attitudes are in some relevant sense fictitious (see Tuomela 2013).
- 10.
Promises are a good example of how events make a difference, but the state does not need to be sustained by anything. The event of promising creates the obligation, and the promisor’s or promisee’s attitudes are not needed for sustaining the obligation, and the obligation vanishes only when fulfilled (an event), or when the promisee releases the promisor of the obligation (an event). It is possible to argue that similarly only CA-event have ontological consequences, and not the CA-state.
- 11.
Even though such a state has ontological consequences and so is in the business of “making” things and not merely “taking in”, the temptation to say that it thereby has the direction of fit of intentions, is to be resisted. See Laitinen (2014).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Raul Hakli, Pekka Mäkelä, Rachael Mellin and Miguel Garcia for encouraging feedback and critical comments on a draft version. I hope it is not inappropriate to also express my heartfelt gratitude to Raimo Tuomela (1940–2020) for welcoming me in his group’s research meetings and projects especially for the decade or so since 2007.
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Laitinen, A. (2023). What Is Collective Acceptance and What Does It Do?. In: Garcia-Godinez, M., Mellin, R. (eds) Tuomela on Sociality. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22626-7_6
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