Group Membership and Parthood
Journal of Social Ontology 4 (2):121-135 (2018)
Abstract
Despite having faced severe criticism in the past, mereological approaches to group ontology, which argue that groups are wholes and that groups members are parts, have recently managed a comeback. Authors such as Katherine Ritchie and Paul Sheehy have applied neo-Aristotelian mereology to groups, and Katherine Hawley has defended mereological approaches against the standard objections in the literature. The present paper develops the mereological approaches to group ontology further and proposes an analysis of group membership as parthood plus further restrictions. While all mereological accounts agree that group members are parts of the group, it has become clear that this analysis is insufficient. I discuss three proposals to develop the mereological analysis of group membership and then put forward a combined solution to the puzzle. According to my proposal, the members of a reading group are agents who are part of the group and have been designated to contribute to the group.Author's Profile
Reprint years
2019
DOI
10.1515/jso-2018-0016
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Citations of this work
Organisations as Computing Systems.David Strohmaier - 2020 - Journal of Social Ontology 6 (2):211-236.
Social Groups Are Concrete Material Particulars.Kevin Richardson - forthcoming - Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
Money as an Institution and Money as an Object.Francesco Guala - 2020 - Journal of Social Ontology 6 (2):265-279.
Ontology, neural networks, and the social sciences.David Strohmaier - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):4775-4794.