UC Santa Barbara

I put forth and defend a novel metaphysical account of organized social groups (e.g., pick-up basketball teams, families, and rock bands) as composite wholes that may vary in their constitutions. Currently, there are a number of competing accounts concerning what it is to be an organized social group. For example, one such account identifies these things with the pluralities of their members. Another account takes them, instead, to be sets that have certain kinds of objects as elements.

While these competing theories may have some intuitive appeal, they do not adequately capture the intuitive persistence conditions of organized social groups. The first paper of this dissertation, titled “On organized social groups and their persistence conditions,” aims to show this. In this paper, I examine three leading accounts of organized social groups and argue that none of them can accommodate a perfectly possible organized social group that changes its membership over time, changes the functional relations in which its members must stand over time, and eventually ceases to exist.

In the second paper, “What is an organized social group?” I propose and sketch out a novel metaphysical account of organized social groups, one that I think adequately accommodates the various changes that such things can (or might) endure. I proceed in two main sections. In the first section, I show that the relationship between a material object and its parts is intuitively analogous to the relationship between an organized social group and its members, and so we are prima facie warranted in treating these relationships similarly. I then briefly lay out an account of the relationship between a material object and its parts that is particularly fitting for our purposes. In the second section, I use this account as a guide for sketching out a theory of organized social groups, which I call ‘the function correspondence account’. After laying out the function correspondence account’s postulates, I show that it can secure desired results concerning the intuitive persistence conditions of organized social groups.

There are, nevertheless, some worries that one might have about the function correspondence account. One consequence of the account is that its truth entails that an organized social group exists only if it has members, which is incompatible with the commonly held intuition that some organized social groups may exist despite being memberless. The third and final paper of this dissertation, titled “Memberless organized social groups,” addresses this potential major worry.

In “Memberless organized social groups” I examine cases that seem to support the intuition that organized social groups may exist despite having no members. I show that such cases do not entail that organized social groups may exist memberlessly. Further, I show that the function correspondence account is perfectly compatible with such cases, and that the manner by which it may accommodate them is independently motivated. I then go on to argue that we have good reason to reject the possibility of memberless organized social groups. The acceptance of memberless organized social groups, I argue, comes at the steep, theoretical price of effectively preventing organized social groups from being the kinds of things that may interact with the material world.