Jack Bissett -What is a Social Group? Adjudicating the Plural View and Ritchie's Structural Ontology

This paper adjudicates over two competing accounts of social group grounding: John Horden and Dan López de Sa’s ‘plural view’; and Katherine Ritchie’s structural ontology. The ‘plural view’ posits the reductive claim that social groups are nothing over and above the plurality of their members. While Ritchie’s structural ontology proposes that there are two types of social group: ‘organised groups’—which are the realisations of wholes with internal social structures; and ‘feature groups’—which are the realisations of externally constituted nodes that exist in social structures.

With regards to these accounts, this paper advances two claims. Firstly, there exists a number of theoretical gaps in the plural view which leave it untenable as a grounding of social groups. This claim is defended by demonstrating that the plural view’s responses to two prominent objections are unsuccessful. Horden and López de Sa’s response to the problem of coextensionality is circular, since it relies on the identification of social group terms with pluralities as opposed to abstract social objects. While their various responses to the problem of arbitrary groups either fail to properly demarcate non-social arbitrary groups from social groups, or concede the plural view’s central thesis.

This paper’s second claim is that Ritchie’s structural ontology is successful and cogent as a grounding of social groups. This claim is supported by defending Ritchie’s account against a number of prominent objections. Against the accusation of typological reductionism, this paper responds that Ritchie’s most recent formulation of the distinction between organised and feature groups is able to adequately justify its typology, providing a more clearly delineated boundary, and an increasingly nuanced understanding of feature. While in response to Strohmaier’s problem of empty groups for mereological ontologies, this paper argues that the persistence of non-spatial parts, such as structure, explains group continuity in the absence of membership.