What is it about?
What does it take to form a group? This simple question has engendered a large amount of debate in what is known as 'social ontology'. The standard approach to answering the question is to try to specify what each individual person must think and do in order to form a group with others likewise engaged. This has proven difficult, and some philosophers have suggested that we might have more luck if we flip our thinking on its head, seeing the group 'we' as primary to the individual 'I'. This solves the problem of how individuals form groups 'from the ground up', but involves a radical change in how we view ourselves as individuals. In this article, the author argues that this approach rests on a mistake, and that we need not abandon our view of ourselves as individuals first in order to understand how we can form groups with others. It explains, that is, why we do not have to be a group to form a group.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The article identifies an error in one of the main arguments against the standard approach to explaining how individuals form groups, and suggests more pragmatic ways in which we can understand this process.
Perspectives
To be perfectly honest, this article exhibits many of the vices of analytical philosophy. It is dry, overly technical, abtruse, and fairly far removed from the things that interest us in everyday life. Who, after all, has ever needed a philosophical tract to explain to them how to collaborate on simple tasks like lifting a table? That said, it goes some way towards clarifying a conceptual issue, contributing to the philosophical exploration of a phenomenon so widespread and quotidian that the inability to give any closer analysis of it would in itself be an embarassment to our understanding. Because the phenomenon of groups is so widespread and important, figuring out how we form groups is a central taks in the general project of understanding what it means to be human. This article does its little bit in advancing this procjet, and that, I think, is not such a bad result after all.
Mr. Sveinung Sundfør Sivertsen
Universitetet i Bergen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: No Need for Infinite Iteration, Journal of Social Ontology, January 2015, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/jso-2014-0026.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
