Par auteur > Flament Miguel

Does Social Ontology encounter an exclusion problem analogous to the one in the Philosophy of Mind? If so, how can this problem be resolved? The issue arises from the conjunction of three premises:

(1) Causal efficacy of higher-level properties;

(2) Causal completeness of the lowest ontological level; and

(3) Absence of causal overdetermination.

In this talk, I will focus on a class of properties that has recently drawn the attention of metaphysicians: status role properties (e.g., “being the president-elect” or “being money”). Like many properties featuring in the Special Sciences, status role properties are multiply realizable and face the threat of causal irrelevance. The exclusion problem, in this context, asks whether a property like “being the president-elect” possesses any intrinsic causal efficacy. On the one hand, by definition, status roles are intended to confer new, genuine causal powers to individual agents. On the other hand, if we accept this common sense view, we risk assuming that the social world is massively causally overdetermined—both in terms of individual actions and the social properties they instantiate—which would violate premise (3). Conversely, denying that “being the president-elect” may grant genuinely new causal powers leads to a form of epiphenomenalism about social properties, thereby undermining premise (1).

This dilemma primarily challenges holist accounts by questioning their commitment to social causation, thereby placing the debate at the heart of the holism–individualism controversy. In this talk, I first describe the exclusion problem in Social Ontology and argue that it affects social causation but not individual causation. I then propose that we can safeguard premises (1) and (3) by adopting a proportionality constraint on causes relative to their effects within a conceptual framework that takes 'events' as the basic units of analysis. Finally, time allowing, I will address possible objections to this proposal.