Alessandro Salice

Social Ontology encompasses a wide variety of inquiries into the nature, structure and perhaps essence of social phenomena, and their role and place in our world. Topics of research in Social Ontology range from small-scale interactions to large-scale institutions, from spontaneous teamwork to the functioning of formal organizations, and from unintended consequences to institutional design. Social Ontology brings together theoretical work from a large number of disciplines. This rapidly evolving field of research has attracted increasing attention over the last couple of decades, and the conceptual tools recent research in Social Ontology has provided have proved to be useful in a large number of domains, such as the study of the evolution of communication, the structure of social norms, social structure, and social change, the nature of collective responsibility, and the status of corporate agents. The Journal of Social Ontology aims to further this research. It provides a forum of exchange between scholars of diverse disciplinary, scholarly, and methodological backgrounds, and invites submissions from all branches of Social Ontology. The Journal of Social Ontology adopts strict standards of selection and relies heavily on its carefully selected referees. In a world in which publication strategies and outlets are changing at a tremendous pace, it is difficult to say what the future of scholarly publication will look like. With a generous grant from the University of Vienna for the start-up phase, the Journal of Social Ontology now appears as an Open Access Journal with De Gruyter, thus combining professional support by an established publisher with unlimited accessibility. In addition, the Journal of Social Ontology has been founded together with the International Social Ontology Society (ISOS) that supports the work of this journal. We wish to express our thanks to our supporters, contributors, and referees; we hope that our joint effort will grant the work published in this journal the impact it deserves.

Based on a qualitative study about expert musicianship, this paper distinguishes three ways of interacting by putting them in relation to the sense of agency. Following Pacherie, it highlights that the phenomenology of shared agency undergoes a drastic transformation when musicians establish a sense of we-agency. In particular, the musicians conceive of the performance as one single action towards which they experience an epistemic privileged access. The implications of these results for a theory of collective intentionality are discussed by addressing two general questions: When several individuals share an intention, does this fact secure plural self-knowledge? And is it possible to have non-observational knowledge about a collective action? It is claimed that the results drawn from the study about expert musicianship supports negative answers to both questions.

This paper investigates the possibility of designing robots that are able to participate in commitments with human agents. In the first part of the article, we tackle some features that, we claim, make commitments crucial for human-human interactions. In particular, we focus on some reasons for believing that commitments can facilitate the planning and coordination of actions involving multiple agents: not only can commitments stabilize and perhaps even increase the motivation to contribute to other agents’ goals and to shared goals, they also reinforce agents’ willingness to rely on other agents’ contributions. In the second part, we turn our attention to human-robot interaction. Here, we elaborate on five problems that roboticists could encounter in the attempt to implement commitments in human-robot interactions, and we argue in favor of some possible solutions to those problems. Finally, in the last part of the paper we zoom in on joint commitments, i.e., on commitments held by a plurality of agents towards shared goals. Given that the concept of joint commitment invokes the notion of a group, we discuss some more specific challenges that would have to be met for human agents to group-identify with robots.

The paper offers a systematic reconstruction of the relations that, in Husserl’s work, bind together our shared social world (“the spiritual world”) with shared intentionality. It is claimed that, by sharing experiences, persons create social reasons and that these reasons impose a normative structure on the social world. Because there are two ways in which persons can share experiences (depending on whether these experiences rest on mutual communication or on group’s identity), social normativity comes in two kinds. It is either directed (it has an addressee) or it is collective or absolute (it applies to all group members). Social normativity should be distinguished from axiological normativity: The first is grounded in shared intentionality, the second in values.

This volume sheds light on the affective dimensions of self-knowledge and the roles that emotions and other affective states play in promoting or obstructing our knowledge of ourselves. It is the first book specifically devoted to the issue of affective self-knowledge. The relation between self-knowledge and human emotions is an often emphasized, but poorly articulated one. While philosophers of emotion tend to give affectivity a central role in making us who we are, the philosophical literature on self-knowledge focuses overwhelmingly on cognitive states and does not give a special place to the emotions. Currently there is little dialogue between both fields or with other philosophical traditions that have important contributions to make to this topic, such as Phenomenology and Asian philosophy. This volume brings together philosophers from the relevant fields to explore two related sets of questions: First, do philosophers of emotion exaggerate the importance of our affective lives in making us who we are? Or is it philosophers of self-knowledge who misunderstand emotions? Second, what is the role of emotions in self-knowledge? What sort of self-knowledge can be secured by paying attention to our emotions? Emotional Self-Knowledge is an essential resource for researchers and advanced students working on philosophy of emotion, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophical psychology and Phenomenology.

An important thesis discussed in the literature on shared agency is that group identification motivates pre-school children to act together. This paper aims at further illuminating this thesis by clarifying what triggers the process of group identification in young children. It is argued that joint attention, among other functions in supporting joint actions, can reveal to the co-attenders that they share some preferences. Since sharing preferences has been established by the literature to be a reliable motivation of group identification and since joint attention has an early emergence in development, one can consider joint attention to be a putative trigger of group identification in pre-school children. If this is on the right track, group identification, joint attention, and preferences identify a cluster of minimal pre-conditions for joint actions.

This article reconstructs and systematically assesses Else’s Voigtländer’s theory of self-feelings. In the first section, I introduce the reader to the basic ideas of this theory by supporting the exegetical claim that the notion of self-feeling encompasses two distinct kinds of experiences: (i) a subject’s long-standing and enduring self-feeling, which is innate and biologically grounded, should be distinguished from (ii) the plurality of episodic self-feelings (or self-conscious emotions) this subject can experience. In the second section, I focus on the particular class of self-feelings that Voigtländer labels as “inauthentic:” these are feelings where the evaluation of the self depends on the evaluations that others have about the self. After elaborating on the morally and epistemically negative connotation Voitgländer attaches to the notion of a feeling’s “inauthenticity,” I reject the generality of her claim in the third section: some social self-feelings are not inauthentic.

Within emotion theory, envy is generally portrayed as an antisocial emotion because the relation between the envier and the rival is thought to be purely antagonistic. This paper resists this view by arguing that envy presupposes a sense of us. First, we claim that hostile envy is triggered by the envier's sense of impotence combined with her perception that an equality principle has been violated. Second, we introduce the notion of â hetero-induced self-conscious emotionsâ by focusing on the paradigmatic cases of being ashamed or proud of somebody else. We describe envy as a hetero-induced self-conscious emotion by arguing that the impotence felt by the subject grounds the emotion's self-reflexivity and that the rival impacts the subject's self-assessment because the rival is framed by the subject as an in-group member. Finally, we elaborate on the asset at stake in envy. We contend that this is esteem recognition: The envier covets the esteem that her reference group accords to the rival. Because, in envy, the subject conceives of herself as member of a group to which the other is also understood to belong, we conclude that envy is a social emotion insofar as it presupposes a sense of us.

Within social psychology, group identification refers to a mental process that leads an individual to conceive of herself as a group member. This phenomenon has recently attracted a great deal of attention in the debate about shared agency. In this debate, group identification is appealing to many because it appears to explain important forms of intentionally shared actions in a cognitively unsophisticated way. This paper argues that, unless important issues about group identification are not illuminated, the heuristic function ascribed to this notion for an understanding of shared agency remains dubious at best and unfulfilled at worst. This paper offers such a clarification by distinguishing and describing two different mental processes that constitute group identification: adoption of the group perspective and transformation in self-understanding. It is claimed that the latter process consists in the production of what Ruth Millikan labels “Pushmi-Pullyu representations” and that it is developmentally prior with respect to the ability of adopting the group perspective.

John Searle’s account of collective intentions in action appears to have all the theoretical pros of the non-reductivist view on collective intentionality without the metaphysical cons of committing to the existence of group minds. According to Searle, when we collectively intend to do something together, we intend to cooperate in order to reach a collective goal. Intentions in the first-person plural form therefore have a particular psychological form or mode, for the we-intender conceives of his or her intended actions as singular contributions by means of which – or: by way of which – a collective goal is pursued. Accordingly, we-intentions are held to have a psychological mode with a “collective goal by means of singular contribution” structure, which makes them primitive and irreducible to intentions in the I-form. It is further contended that, albeit primitive and irreducible, we-intentions are not the mental states of an alleged group mind but always of an individual’s mind. This paper targets Searle’s claim of irreducibility by developing an argument whose aim is to show that, pace Searle, it is possible to track the idea of intentions with a psychological mode structured in terms of “collective goal by means of singular contribution” back to the concept of intentions in the I-form. The argument mainly relies on the idea that Searle’s technical expressions “being a collective goal by means of singular contribution intention in action” or “being a collective goal by way of singular contribution intention in action” are susceptible to conceptual analysis. The upshot of this analysis is that we-intentions can be reduced to complex bundles of mental states, all of which come in the first-person singular form. If this argument is sound, Searlean we-intentions do not belong to a primitive kind of mental states

The present article discusses Dietrich von Hildebrand’s theory of action as presented in his Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung, and focuses on the moral relevance Hildebrand assigns to diff erent kinds of motivations. The act of will which leads to a moral action, Hildebrand claims, can be “founded” or “motivated” in different ways and, in particular, it can be motivated by an act of cognizing or by an act of value-taking. The act of cognizing grasps the state of aff airs that the action strives to bring about as a deontic state of aff airs, i.e., as a state of aff airs that ought to be. By contrast, the act of value-taking is primarily directed towards the values inhering in this state of aff airs. Although both kinds of motivations are morally sound, Hildebrand argues that the latter is preferable due to its vicinity to values and to its immediacy in the way in which it grasps values. In what follows, Hildebrand’s view is reconstructed, assessed and evaluated against the background of Adolf Reinach’s theory of intentionality. More specifically, two elements of Reinach’s thought are highlighted as being central for Hildebrand’s understanding of the notion of an action. First, it is argued that Hildebrand’s idea of the act of willing as a stance that can be founded either by an act of cognizing or by an act of presentation is developed in strict symmetry with Reinach’s view that conviction is a stance that can be founded by means of an identical mechanism. Secondly, it will be shown that Hildebrand adopts the notion of a state of affairs from Reinach.

What are the intentional objects of groups’ beliefs? This paper claims that they are immanent facts, i.e., facts which exist only within groups’ minds. Since in relevant literature the notion of immanent object and the related theory of “immanent realism” arise in connection with the work of Franz Brentano, the paper begins by briefly sharing historical information on Brentano, making clear why – contrary to common belief – Brentano did not argue for immanent realism in his work. In a second part, I then look more closely at groups’ beliefs and illustrate why the insight of immanent realism – despite its historically inadequate reconstruction – can bear on my initial question. In doing so, I pay particular attention to John Searle’s theory of institutional facts, using it as a conceptual basis to develop my own pseudo-Brentanian approach. This approach allows me to introduce a further class of social entities in the last part of the paper: contrary to institutional facts the immanent entities of collective beliefs presuppose neither the assignment of functions nor the generation of deontologies, but they do presuppose groups’ beliefs for their existence. Being the precipitates of collective experiences, such entities are intrinsically related with the first plural person perspective and hence play an important role in what we may call the “cultural layer” of social reality.

According to the Group Mind Hypothesis, a group can have beliefs over and above the beliefs of the individual members of the group. Some maintain that there can be group mentality of this kind in the absence of any group-level phenomenal consciousness. We present a challenge to the latter view. First, we argue that a state is not a belief unless the owner of the state is disposed to access the state’s content in a corresponding conscious judgment. Thus, if there is no such thing as group consciousness, then we cannot literally ascribe beliefs to groups. Secondly, we respond to an objection that appeals to the distinction between ‘access consciousness’ and ‘phenomenal consciousness’. According to the objection, the notion of consciousness appealed to in our argument must be access consciousness, whereas our argument is only effective if it is about phenomenal consciousness. In response, we question both parts of the objection. Our argument can still be effective provided there are reasons to believe a system or creature cannot have access consciousness if it lacks phenomenal consciousness altogether. Moreover, our argument for the necessary accessibility to consciousness of beliefs does concern phenomenal consciousness.

Volume XVII Part 1: Phenomenology, Idealism, and Intersubjectivity: A Festschrift in Celebration of Dermot Moran's Sixty-Fifth Birthday Part 2: The Imagination: Kant's Phenomenological Legacy Aim and Scope: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. Contributors: Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Lilian Alweiss, Timothy Burns, Steven Crowell, Maxime Doyon, Augustin Dumont, Richard Kearney, Mette Lebech, Samantha Matherne, Timothy Mooney, Thomas Nenon, Matthew Ratcliffe, Alessandro Salice, Daniele De Santis, Andrea Staiti, Anthony J. Steinbock, Michela Summa, Thomas Szanto, Emiliano Trizio, and Nicolas de Warren.