The Physical Nature of Social Objects

One of the things that philosophical theories of the social world try to explain is how there gets to be such a thing at all: how social facts and things arise within a world that is, at bottom, just cold hard physics. In this blogpost, Dr Thomas Brouwer worries about a way that this explanatory challenge is often approached in social ontology, and specifically in the debate on the nature of social groups. He suggests an alternative way of thinking about the issue.

A popular view in contemporary philosophy is physicalism: the view that all of reality is made up, ultimately, of the sorts of things that fall within the purview of physics. Not everyone is a physicalist, but by the standards of the philosophy profession, it comes close to a default view. I would consider myself a physicalist.

Being a physicalist does not mean restricting yourself to only ever talking about the kinds of things that physicists spend their time talking about – particles, fields, strings, etc. It means having a commitment to thinking that the nature and existence of all the other stuff we find ourselves talking about, the stuff that isn’t mentioned in physics textbooks, can be explained in terms of that physical stuff, on some appropriate understanding of ‘explained’. 

Most people in my field of specialisation – social ontology – have this outlook. They are committed to thinking that, and explaining how, social phenomena aren’t just a brute feature of the world but arise somehow out of other stuff which isn’t already social and is ultimately physical in nature.

One phenomenon for which this question arises is social groups – how do those fit into our material world? Luckily, the answer seems rather obvious: groups fit into the material world because they are literally made of people. It seems the only question is ‘how’: what metaphysical relation is it that groups bear to their members? Among other options, some suggest that groups are constituted by their members, or that they are composed of them. But pick some such relation, and you have a story about how groups have all the features that a material object ought to have, courtesy of general metaphysical accounts of constituted or composite objects.

Pretty neat. Problematically so: this approach tells too neat a story about the material features of groups. Either composition or constitution will imply, for instance, that groups are always located where their members are. But this doesn’t square with how we talk about groups outside the ontology room. Yes, for many collectives we do talk as if they are located where their members are. But for many other collectives, we find it more practically convenient, for the purposes of e.g. taxing them, to treat them as located where their real estate is located, or where their economic activities, if any, take place.

We could understand that as loose talk, and stick to the predictions of a composition or constitution view. But I think it reveals a broader issue for such approaches. The kinds to which social groups belong are often socially constructed. That is to say: their nature is determined by, and varies with, our social practices. In theorising such entities, our presumption should be that, if we have a general practice of treating them as if their features (e.g. their locations) work in such-and-such a way, then they do work that way.

The cost of taking things at face value is that the material natures of social groups might then work out quite heterogeneously: and then there may well be no well-recognised metaphysical relationship, like composition or constitution, that predicts the right results across the category. This will be unattractive to some – it seems to give up on an ambition of theoretical unity. But I think it is the result to embrace. 

I want to say that the physical features of social groups (e.g. locations) don’t need to work in any way that’s systematic across the category. Moreover, I want to say that these entities may entirely lack kinds of material properties that other, non-social things have. There may be no such thing as the weight, or the velocity, or the density of a social group. And this is because we may lack any social practice that requires them to have such features. If there are no interactions that we have with social groups that turn on their weight or density, then these features don’t exist, even if there would be theoretically reasonable ways of ‘defining them up’ out of their members’ features.

Would this compromise on physicalism, thinking that some social objects lack features that the medium-sized dry goods of this world all seem to have? It might seem so, but I don’t think so. I think that the features of social objects can be entirely tied down to the physical world. But here’s how I think we should understand that: our every interaction with a social object should be understood as, in the final analysis, a physical action in the physical world. 

For that to be the case, any type of social object needs to have such physical features – but only such features – as are required by the kinds of interactions that we need to have with it. Our social practices need to define – construct – how those features work, for those objects. And there need be no more system to that than is required by our practical interests. Social reality is messy, to an extent that might offend metaphysical sensibilities trained up on other domains. But if so, it’s those sensibilities that have got to give.

Dr. Thomas Brouwer is Lecturer in Theoretical Philosophy at the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds. He has worked at Leeds since 2015; before that he worked at the University of Aberdeen, and before that did his PhD also at Leeds. Having worked in metaphysics and the philosophy of logic, he now works in social ontology. For another reflection on how the social world might be a messy place, see his 2022 article “Social Inconsistency”.