The Paradox of Government: Explaining the Life and Death of a State

According to Searle (2010), the existence of a State brings a paradox with it. On one side, since a State is a social object, its existence seems to imply the existence of a collective acceptance towards it; on the other side, the existence of this collective acceptance seems to be granted only by the existence of a State that is capable to exercise violence – if needed – on its citizens by means of the military and the police. This implies a contradiction for, if the existence of a government should in principle rely on the free and voluntary acceptance of a certain social system, at the same time it seems that this acceptance derives only from the exercise of brute force, and thus it is all but voluntarily. I will argue that this paradox can be solved only if we distinguish two different notions of collective acceptance: one that can be individuated at the level of natural facts, the other at the level of social – and, more precisely, institutional – facts

Methodological Individualism, the We-mode, and Team Reasoning

Raimo Tuomela is one of the pioneers of social action theory and has done as much as anyone over the last thirty years to advance the study of social action and collective intentionality. Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents (2013) presents the latest version of his theory and applications to a range of important social phenomena. The book covers so much ground, and so many important topics in detailed discussions, that it would impossible in a short space to do it even partial justice. In this brief note, I will concentrate on a single, though important, theme in the book, namely, the claim that we must give up methodological individualism in the social sciences and embrace instead irreducibly group notions. I wish to defend methodological individualism as up to the theoretical tasks of the social sciences while acknowledging what is distinctive about the social world and collective intentional action. Tuomela frames the question of the adequacy of methodological individualism in terms of a contrast between what he calls the I-mode and the we-mode. He argues that we-mode phenomena are not reducible to I-mode phenomena, and concludes that we must reject methodological individualism. I will argue that the irreducibility of the we-mode to the I-mode, given how the contrast is set up, does not entail the rejection of methodological individualism. In addition, I will argue that the three conditions that Tuomela places on genuine we-mode activities, the group reason, collectivity, and collective commitment conditions, if they are understood in a way that does not beg the question, can plausibly be satisfied by a reductive account. Finally, I will argue that the specific considerations advanced in the book do not give us reason to think that a reductive account cannot be adequate to the descriptive and explanatory requirements of a theory of the social worl

Granny Would Be Proud: on Doing Vintage, Practices and Emergent Socialities

It is proposed that vintage consumption must be understood as an embodied practice. This paper seeks to initiate a Vintage Turn within consumer research, to consider vintage as a practice of transformation and togetherness in an alternative consumption space

On waiting for something to happen

This paper seeks to examine two particular and peculiar practices in which the mediation of apparently direct encounters is made explicit and is systematically theorized: that of the psychoanalytic dialogue with its inward focus and private secluded setting, and that of theatre and live performance, with its public focus. Both these practices are concerned with ways in which “live encounters” impact on their participants, and hence with the conditions under which, and the processes whereby, the coming-together of human subjects results in recognizable personal or social change. Through the rudimentary analysis of two anecdotes, we aim to think these encounters together in a way that explores what each borrows from the other, the psychoanalytic in the theatrical, the theatrical in the psychoanalytic, figuring each practice as differently committed to what we call the “publication of liveness”. We argue that these “redundant” forms of human contact continue to provide respite from group acceptance of narcissistic failure in the post-democratic era through their offer of a practice of waiting

International sentencing in the context of collective violence

This article evaluates some of the theoretical and practical arguments which suggest that the potential for international trial justice to make a significant contribution towards reconciliation and peace following mass atrocity is limited. Conversely, it argues that it is possible to move beyond the current narrow conceptualisation of penality in international trials by re-thinking the ideological framework for punishment and sentencing and giving trial outcomes a greater sense of moral purpose and legitimacy in the eyes of victims and those communities seeking justice. The article argues why this is necessary and achievable through the adoption of more constructive strategies and interventions in international trial process

'Word from the street' : when non-electoral representative claims meet electoral representation in the United Kingdom

Taking the specific case of street protests in the UK – the ‘word from the street’– this article examines recent (re)conceptualizations of political representation, most particularly Saward’s notion of ‘representative claim’. The specific example of nonelectoral claims articulated by protestors and demonstrators in the UK is used to illustrate: the processes of making, constituting, evaluating and accepting claims for and by constituencies and audiences; and the continuing distinctiveness of claims based upon electoral representation. Two basic questions structure the analysis: first, why would the political representative claims of elected representatives trump the nonelectoral claims of mass demonstrators and, second, in what ways does the ‘perceived legitimacy’ of the former differ from the latter

Group Knowledge

There is knowledge in groups or communities, e.g. in the\ud scientific community, that such and such is the case, and\ud that in some cases groups as groups know; and in all\ud these cases there must be or have been actual knowers.\ud Accordingly, there is knowledge available in social groups,\ud and this knowledge can be "picked up� and had by\ud individual members as knowledge. My main concern in this\ud paper is to give an account of group beliefs and knowledge\ud in the sense that the group members as a group believe or\ud know something. A central case here is normatively\ud binding group belief and knowledge. In such a case the\ud group is obligated to reason and act on the truth of the\ud content of the belief in question. I will assume that a group\ud cannot know unless its members or at least some of them\ud know the item in question. The general ground for this\ud assumption is that group properties supervene on their\ud members' relevant properties (see Tuomela 1995 Chapter\ud 6, for a discussion). A group's normatively binding belief\ud concerning a topic will accordingly depend on its members,\ud beliefs, indeed we-mode "acceptance� beliefs, about the\ud topic and on their relevant "interconnections" concerning it.\ud We-mode acceptance belief centrally involves the idea of\ud functioning fully as a group member (see Tuomela 2002a,\ud 2003a for the we-mode). A member"s private or I-mode\ud beliefs may differ from his relevant we-mode beliefs

Introduction to Judgment Aggregation

This introduces the symposium on judgment aggregation. The theory of judgment ag­gregation asks how several individuals' judgments on some logically connected propo­sitions can be aggregated into consistent collective judgments. The aim of this intro­duction is to show how ideas from the familiar theory of preference aggregation can be extended to this more general case. We first translate a proof of Arrow's impos­sibility theorem into the new setting, so as to motivate some of the central concepts and conditions leading to analogous impossibilities, as discussed in the symposium. We then consider each of four possible escape-routes explored in the symposium.Judgment aggregation, Arrow's theorem, Escape routes

“Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know”: the pervasive socio-medical and spatial coding of mental health day centres

In a research area typically dominated by the biomedical field, this paper seeks to explore the emotional experiences of long-term, mental health service users who attend charitable day centres. Academic literature has predominantly focussed on a macro-analysis of the social, political and geographical position of those with mental health distress. Subsequently, service users have been positioned as a largely homogenous group who mainly reside on the boundaries of social integration due to the negative social representations of mental health impairment. These postulations can advocate a romanticised notion of how service users engage in consensual and non-judgemental social norms in terms of social inclusion of those within therapeutic spaces. Thus, indicating that a high level of mutual camaraderie exists within a day centre. However, this approach can negate the realities encountered by service users on a daily basis whereby differing medical ascriptions such as ‘depression’ and ‘schizophrenia’ can not only influence a service user’s own self-identity and behaviour but ultimately, the acceptance of other members. In conclusion, this work indicates that rather than a discrete linear position between the ‘otherness’ of mental health distress and ‘normative’ human geographies, this area remains a complex phenomenon with levels of diversity when linked to diagnostic criteria