=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2518/paper-SOLEE2
|storemode=property
|title=Towards an Upper-Level Ontology
for the Social Domain
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2518/paper-SOLEE2.pdf
|volume=Vol-2518
|authors=Ludger Jansen
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/jowo/Jansen19
}}
==Towards an Upper-Level Ontology
for the Social Domain==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2518/paper-SOLEE2.pdf
Towards an Upper-Level Ontology
for the Social Domain
Ludger JANSENa,1
a
University of Rostock and Ruhr University Bochum
Abstract. This paper borrows from philosophical discussions about social entities
in order to lay the foundations for an upper-level ontology for the social domain. It
starts from an analysis of those social entities which are established through explicit
speech acts (‘formal institutions’), and which include marriages, the President of the
United States, and money. The paper then reviews other social entities which are
not explicitly established, including informal institutions like friendship and
language, but also emergent social processes like inflations. The paper analyses the
properties of explicitly established social entities and discusses how other social
entities may deviate from the paradigm of explicitly established entities. Finally, it
suggests a formal characterization of these classes as a first step towards a principled
upper-level ontology of the social entities.
Keywords. Applied Ontology, Social Ontology, Upper-Level Ontology,
Institutions
1. Introduction
Within the OBO Foundry (obofoundry.org) [18], social entities still have something like
a niche existence. Relevant entities are discussed in the Information Artifact Ontology
(IAO) and the Ontology of Medically Related Social Entities (OMRSE). However, a
principled upper-level ontology for social entities is still a desideratum. In this paper, I
turn to philosophical discussions of social entities to lay the foundations for such an
upper-level ontology for the social domain. In particular, I will discuss the theories of
John Searle [15–16] and Margaret Gilbert [5–9]. In doing so, I will also draw on previous
work of mine [10–12].
Many paradigmatic social entities are established through explicit speech acts. These
include marriages, the President of the United States, and money. Various authors
identify different kinds of speech acts relevant for such an explicit establishment of social
entities. While Searle stresses declarations, Gilbert rather cites commissive speech acts
like promises or agreements. Not all social entities, however, are explicitly established.
Both Searle and Gilbert mention and discuss various examples of such entities. These
include cocktail parties, inflation, friendship, and language. The social sciences often
address these two groups of social entities as “formal” and “informal institutions”,
respectively.
1
Corresponding Author, Ludger Jansen, Institute of Philosophy, University of Rostock, 18051 Rostock,
Germany; ludger.jansen@uni-rostock.de. Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its author. Use permitted under
Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Both Searle and Gilbert want to extend their respective account to cover at least
some entities that are not established explicitly. For Searle, institutional reality is rooted
in collective intentionality – that is, according to Searle, in sufficiently many individuals
having appropriate we-intentions for the ascription of a certain institutional status. These
intentions are part of a complex neural-causal background that leads to role-conforming
behaviour. For Gilbert, in turn, plural subjects are constituted by joint commitments –
which, or so Gilbert claims, can arise without an explicit agreement, e.g., gradually by
repeated interaction of the same kind.
I argue that both of these strategies are problematic. Gilbert’s strategy faces the
problem that it cannot explain how repeated action can have the same obliging power as
an explicit agreement. While repeated interaction will indeed lead to certain expectations
on the side of participants, these seem to be rather epistemic than deontic expectations.
Searle’s strategy fails for the opposite reason: If having appropriate neural-causal
background is sufficient for the ascription of an institutional status, it is difficult to
explain how this can possibly come along with the transfer of deontic powers.
An explicit establishment comes along with the immediate transfer of deontic
powers and the possibility of codification. This is, however, not possible without an
explicit establishment, because without it, no such transfer of deontic powers is possible.
Instead of leading to obligations, matching we-intentions lead to matching dispositions
of their bearers to act accordingly. Analogously, repeated interaction will primarily lead
to action dispositions, not to joint commitments. Only secondarily, duties can be attached
to the action patterns in questions. These duties will be derived from moral norms, while
the explicit establishment of social entities brings about social norms.
The paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 analyses explicitly established social
entities. Section 3 reviews a list of deviant examples, argues that an adequate upper-level
ontology for the social domain has to do justice to both formal and informal institutions,
i.e., of those social entities that are explicitly established and those that are not. Section
4 suggests candidate classes for such an upper-level ontology. Section 5 concludes the
paper by demonstrating how these classes can help to categorise the examples from
Section 3.
2. Making it Explicitly
There can be little doubt that there are some social institutions explicitly created by
human beings. Companies are established, charities are founded, constitutions approved
and amended.
Important proposals in contemporary social ontology take on this idea of explicit
establishment of institutions. Margaret Gilbert, for example, suggests that people can
fuse to so-called plural subjects – subjects, that is, for joint actions – by mutually
signalling their will to participate in these joint actions. One person asking, ‘Shall we go
for a walk?’, the other person answering, ‘Yes, let’s do it!’, is sufficient to establish a
plural subject for walking together. And at least one strain in John Searle’s complex
theory of the construction of the social world uses the language of explicit speech acts to
establish institutional facts (I will later turn to other strands of Searle’s theory): We can
declare the bazaar open, the electorate of the United States can elect someone President
of the United State, and a bishop can ordain priests.
Most of these acts of establishment of institutions employ themselves an institutional
framework. When companies are established, they are established within the legal
framework for businesses of the respective country. When charities are founded, they are
founded on the background of the respective laws for association and taxation. When
priests are ordained, they are ordained according to the respective church regulations.
Not all establishments of institutions, however, require a pre-existing institutional
framework. For a long time, political theories have discussed the idea that states and
government have their roots in a social contract – an agreement that requires no more
than individual expressions of will in a mutually understood language. At this point, it is
not important whether actual states have in fact been established this way. The point is,
rather, that even in the absence of a binding legal framework, there is one mechanism
always at hand to create institutions, namely the expression of unanimous agreement
among a plurality of persons. This, or so it seems, is the basic mechanism of explicit
establishment of institutions. It is by far not the only mechanism, as it can be used to
develop mechanisms that are more sophisticated – by passing constitutions, laws, and
by-laws which can from then on regulate further acts of establishment of institutions. Not
all institutions are established by unanimous agreement. Some institutions may have
members without them knowing to be members of this institution, and many institutions
(like money or borders) do not have members at all.
Margaret Gilbert discusses a whole bunch of such mechanisms: Persons can decide
to join forces for a single action, but they can also decide to join forces for regular actions
(e.g., meeting every Wednesday), or conditional actions (e.g., meeting if the weather is
fine). Persons can also delegate a certain decision to a particular person or group; e.g., a
couple may decide to go to the cinema together and leave it to her to decide which film
to watch. Delegation is, of course, also possible to people outside the group (as in
Hobbes’s social contract theory of the state, where the sovereign is not part of the group
establishing the state), or to a subgroup, or to another group altogether.
2.1. Presuppositions of Explicit Establishment of Institutions
Nevertheless, the procedure of unanimous decision notwithstanding, there seem to be
some presuppositions for the successful creation of institutions. Most explicit
establishments of institutions make use of language. It is debated whether this language
needs to be a language shared by all participants, e.g., in a social contract. Maybe
participants can, to employ Gilbert’s terminology, signal their readiness in languages not
shared by the others, be it by means of a translator or by means of natural meaning.
What seems clear, though, is that institutional facts need to have a linguistic
description, and this description is part of the intentional content of what goes on in
establishing an institution. Nobody who has no idea of what a cardinal is can create one,
and if whoever does not know that he or she is currently about to marry, cannot be said
to actually marry someone. This makes also clear that the establishment of institutions
require a shared cultural background. Understanding the word “marriage” implies rich
knowledge of not only linguistic, but also social, legal and cultural norms. Only in a
culture in which marriage is known will it be possible to marry someone.
Moreover, whoever wants to establish an institution needs the authority to do so.
Only the pope has the authority to create cardinals. But whence comes such authority?
Such authority to establish an institution seems itself to be an institution. This would
constitute a vicious circle, were it not for the option to create institutions ‘from scratch’
by unanimous consent.
2.2. What Happens in an Explicit Establishment of Institutions?
What happens when institutions are explicitly established? First, of course, there need to
be some mental acts: Relevant participants of the act of establishment need to have
appropriate intentions; they need the will to establish the institution in question. However,
while the mere will may be sufficient to create a cardinal, it is not normally sufficient for
the establishment of an institution. That is, second, some actual speech acts are necessary
in order to establish the institution in question, be they in spoken or written language. In
the latter case, we could more appropriately talk about ‘document acts’ [4, 17]; in the
following, I will nevertheless use the term ‘speech act’ in a generic way in order to
include acts in both spoken and written language. I will now argue that these speech acts
can be of several types.
Theories of the social world differ with respect to which kind of speech acts they
give pride of place. Central to Gilbert’s theory are promises and agreements – that is,
commissive speech acts. In contrast, declarations are central to Searle’s account of
institutional facts: X counts as Y in a context C, because someone has declared X to be
a Y in C.
To be sure, these speech acts do not need to be explicit speech acts, but they may
well be explicit, as in the following example:
• I declare you man and wife.
• I agree to go for a walk with you.
But establishing speech acts need not be explicit, for the same force is exercised by their
implicit counterparts:
• You are now man and wife.
• I will go for a walk with you.
Somewhat paradoxically, that is, an explicit establishment of an institution may make
use of an implicit speech act. It might as well make use of an indirect speech act. Relevant
speech acts might, e.g., take the form of a question or a request:
• Do you want to go for a walk?
• Come on, go for a walk with me!
2.3. Properties of Explicitly Established Institutions
So far, I have argued that the explicit establishment of an institution requires one or
several speech acts. This implies a number of important properties of explicitly
established institutions. To start with, the establishment of such an institution will be
datable. We will thus be able to say when the institution commences. Second, we will be
able to attribute the establishment to the speakers or writers involved in these speech acts.
Thirdly, as speech acts can be counted, we will also be able to count explicitly established
institutions. Fourthly, explicit establishment comes along with a clearly ascribed status
and specific deontic powers. Finally, there are often culturally or even legally approved
procedures to establish an institution of a certain kind.
A paradigmatic example for explicitly established institutions is marriage. Indeed,
we marry by uttering speech acts in churches or town halls. We memorize the date and
celebrate it every year. Normally, we register in detail who married whom, that is we can
count how many marriages there have been in a given church in a given year. Though
people may have more than one married partner (either successively, or in some cultures
even at the same time), people normally know exactly how many times they have been
married. Fourthly, married people are, for example, mutually the heir apparent of the
other; they may be eligible for tax redemption, or special housing benefits, or so on.
Finally, cultures, states or religious communities normally have specific rites or
procedures how to marry, which most people are glad to obey.
3. Beyond Explicitly Established Institutions
3.1. Deviant Examples
Having now discussed explicitly established institutions and their typical properties, I
will now go on to review a number of deviant (or seemingly deviant) examples from
Searle, where particular institutions are not explicitly established. This should both
clarify and further develop my thesis.
First, imagine Searle’s example of a particular dollar bill that has fallen between the
cracks in the printing plant [15]. Nobody ever declares this dollar bill a dollar bill. As a
particular, it will indeed never be the object of any thought or speech act. Nevertheless,
Searle tells us, it can have the institutional status of a dollar bill because there is a status
ascription to the type it belongs to:2 All instances of the type “green rectangular paper of
a specified form, printed following a request from the Federal Reserve Bank” will have
the status of being a dollar bill. The rule regarding this type of paper needs, of course, to
be explicitly established by law or decree. Dollar bills, thus, are explicitly established
institutions, only that they are established on the level of types, not of particular tokens.
This means that it is sufficient to be the instance of an institutional type that has been
explicitly established in order to be an explicitly established institution.
A clear case without an establishment is an episode of inflation [16, p. 22] with
reference to [1]). Searle calls such ‘macro institutional facts’ ‘systematic fallouts’:
Whether there is inflation or not does not hinge at all on someone declaring something
an episode of inflation. Nor does it require anyone to know that there is inflation.
Inflation, for sure, requires a dynamic development of the exchange value of money.
That money has a certain face value is an institutional fact explicitly established by law.
That you can exchange it for a certain amount of bread is also an explicitly established
institutional fact, though this fact is normally established not by law but by the bakeries
and grocers. While the face value remains stable, the prices for bread may change.
Inflation, one may say, is the average development of prices in a certain regional market.
It does not need to be explicitly established, but supervenes on the explicit price decisions
in this market.
Cocktail parties are another interesting example discussed by Searle [15, p. 53].
Nobody needs to explicitly declare a certain party a cocktail party. But, or so Searle
2
The type–token distinction used by Searle is close to the distinction between a universal and its instances,
with the difference that types can be delineated quite arbitrarily and can also comprise arbitrarily defined
classes (as the example shows).
suggests, somebody has at least to think that it is a cocktail party. Close to cocktail parties
are, according to Searle, friendships. In both cases, you may think of such a mental
representation of the party as a cocktail party, or of that acquaintance as a friend.
Finally, there is the case of language, to which I turn in the following section.
3.2. The Presupposition of Language
The examples discussed so far show that there must be more to the institutional world
than explicitly established institutions. Not only are there a lot of institutions which are,
as we have seen, not explicitly established. In establishing institutions, there is also
always the need to rely on language, which can, in its beginnings, not have been created
by the use of language. At the most basic level, language cannot be introduced by an act
of institution – or, as Searle says, by declaration – because this would already presuppose
language [16].
Once we have language, we can use it to establish other institutions. We can also
use it to introduce new linguistic elements. For example, we can introduce new words
by means of an explicit definition. This happens very often in mathematics, science or
law. But it cannot be the first beginning of language – simply because it already
presupposes language. This argument bears a strong structural similarity to the regress
problem for definitions. Definitions, or so it is sometimes said, are not possible because
they either are circular, yield an infinite regress, or use undefined terms. Along this line
we can build a regress argument for the ultimately informal basis of social entities:
Formal institutions presuppose language as a means for their establishment. Ultimately,
language itself cannot be established by means of language. Hence, at its bottom,
language cannot be a formal institution.
Whitney has put forward another argument against the creation of language by
means of an explicit establishment [20, p. 444]. We can, of course, imagine that someone
constructs a whole new language – like Esperanto or Volapük, for example. But what
happens in the construction of such an artificial language is like what happens when we
today tell an engineer to ‘invent’, say, a steam engine or a car. Today, an engineer already
knows what a car is and how it functions, and she may exchange some parts and improve
on others. Before the invention of the car, however, it would not make any sense to
encourage anyone to ‘invent a car’, because nobody knew what that is. The same applies
to language. Before there was language, nobody knew what language is about, how it
could function and for what purposes it might be used. Thus, it is not possible to construct
a language if there is not already a language that could serve as its paradigm.
3.3. Friendship as a Paradigmatic Informal Institution
We have, thus, to acknowledge the existence of institutions that are not explicitly
established. One might be tempted to defend the unity of the social domain by dismissing
the class of explicitly established institutions. This, however, is not possible either. We
cannot simply abandon explicitly established institutions, as institutions without an
explicit establishment have quite different properties [10]. Marriages, I said, are
paradigmatic explicitly established institutions. They are crisp entities in several
respects: temporally, intensionally and extensionally. Marriages have a crisp beginning
and a crisp end (by death or divorce). There is a clear meaning connected to the term
“married”, and couples either are married or they are not. Part of the reason for this is
that there is a clear procedure for marriage, which comes along with codified rights and
duties.
Friendship is different in all these respects. Friendship is a paradigm for an
institution that is not explicitly established. Friendship is vague – temporally,
intensionally and extensionally. Normally we cannot point to the very day and hour when
we became friends with each other. In addition, there are quite different types of
friendship, which are often not distinguished terminologically – like business friends,
sport friends, intimate friends, and so on. Moreover, friendship seems to come in degrees,
and sometimes it might be difficult to tell whether someone is a distant friend or a good
acquaintance only. Finally, friendship does not come along with codified rights and
duties.
We have, thus, to distinguish two levels or aspects of institutions. First, there are
explicitly established institutions – sometimes called ‘formal institutions’. Second, there
are those institutions that are not explicitly institutionalized – sometimes called ‘informal
institutions’ in the social sciences [12].
Moreover, it is not possible to turn at will institutions without an explicit
establishment, like friendship, into institutions that are explicitly established. Just
imagine what would happen if states introduce the status of ‘officially registered
friendship’. Just as now in the case of marriage we would go to the town hall and register
as friends, and have the respective rights and duties conferred on us. However, as in the
case of sham marriages, we can imagine people to register as friends with arbitrary
people without really being befriended with them, in order to take advantage of the
codified benefits connected with this institutional status. Explicit establishment of an
institutional status, that is, comes along with the possibility of abuse. (One might wonder
how close ‘friends’ in social media come to this thought experiment.) There are, thus,
informal institutions that are essentially informal. This implies that at least in some cases
it is not an accidental feature whether an institution has been established explicitly or not.
An upper-level of the social domain has to take this into account.
Table 1: Suggested class hierarchy for an upper-domain ontology for the social domain
• Social entity
o Institution
§ Formal institution
• Token-related formal institution
• Type-related formal institution
§ Informal institution
• Token-related informal institution
• Type-related informal institution
o Emergent social entity
• Institutional entity
o Act of establishment
§ Token-related act of establishment
§ Type-related act of establishment
o Bearer of institutional status
4. Implications for Formal Ontology
In order to represent institutions within formal ontologies, we need to pay attention to
the distinctions laid out during the discussion so far. First, we have seen that there are
several types of social entities: explicitly established social entities (aka formal
institutions), institutions that are not explicitly established (informal institutions), social
entities that are not themselves institutions, but somehow related to them, either as acts
of establishments, or as social entities emerging from institutions or institutional changes.
Thus, we can establish the following provisional class hierarchy detailed in Table 1.
The next task then is to characterise the respective classes axiomatically. First, social
entities can be defined as those entities that are ontologically dependent on some social
act. The class Social act is already contained in the Information Artefact Ontology (IAO),
defined as a subclass of the class Planned process from the Ontology of Biomedical
Investigations (OBI). Inspired by Reinach [13], it is defined as a Planned process that is
“carried out by a conscious being or an aggregate of conscious beings, and is spontaneous,
directed towards another
conscious being or another aggregate of conscious beings, and that needs to be
perceived” (IAO_0021003):
Social entity equivalentTo Social act
or specifically dependent on some Social act
or generically dependent on some Social act)
We can characterise formal institutions as those institutions that arise from explicit acts
of establishment:
Formal institution equivalentTo
(Institution and specified outcome of some Act of establishment)
Act of establishment subclassOf (Planned process
and has part some (Speech act or Document act)
and has specified outcome some Formal institution)
As I have argued in Section 3.1, acts of establishments can impose a status on particulars
or on certain types of particulars. Accordingly, we can distinguish two subclasses.
Token-related acts of establishment are those which refer to one or several particulars;
as these particulars can be from virtually any ontological category, the top-most class
Entity is used in defining them. In contrast, type-related acts refer to types. While this
cannot be expressed in OWL, they can nevertheless be characterised as acts of
establishments that are not token-related:
Token-related act of establishment equivalentTo (Act of establishment
and is about some Entity)
Type-related formal institution subclassOf (Act of establishment
and not Token-related act of establishment)
Similarly, type- and token-related formal institutions are distinguished by virtue of their
respective act of establishment: A formal institution is token-related (or type-related,
respectively) if and only if its act of establishment is. Hence:
Token-related formal institution equivalentTo (Institution
and specified outcome of some Token-related act of establishment)
Type-related formal institution equivalentTo (Institution
and specified outcome of some Type-related act of establishment)
Second, we can characterise informal institutions. I argue elsewhere that, in contrast to
formal institutions, informal institutions are grounded in certain socially acquired
dispositions to act in certain ways [12]. Although there are some patterns to model
dispositions [3, 14], it is not obvious how to capture this in a formal characterisation.
Therefore, I suggest defining them via negativa as those institutions that are no outcomes
of explicit acts of establishments:
Informal institution equivalentTo
Institution and not (specified outcome of some Act of establishment)
Finally, we need to classify those entities that relate to institutions but are not themselves
institutions. For lack of a better term, I will call these ‘emergent social entities’. The class
Emergent social entity can be defined in a negative way as those social entities that are
neither institutions nor social acts (which include those social acts that are acts of
establishment of formal institutions). The class Institutional entity is intended to
comprise all those entities that either are institutions or are related to institutions, e.g., by
being the bearer of the institutional status in question:
Emergent social entity subclassOf (Social entity
and not Institution
and not Social act)
Status bearer subclassOf Institutional entity
Status bearer equivalentTo bearer of some Institution
All instances of Emergent Social Entity are social entities; the instances of Institutional
entity, or of Status bearer, however, may or may not be social entities. E.g., a bearer of
the institutional status of citizenship is a human being, and thus a natural and not a social
entity. Note that Act of Establishment is a subclass of Institutional entity because of the
last clause in this characterisation – they have institutions as their outcome. It would be
tempting to say that Institutional entity comprises those entities that are specifically
dependent on an institution, while Emergent Social Entity is explicitly characterised as
those social entities that are generically dependent on some institution. Indeed,
participation, inherence and outcome are relations of specific dependence. However, the
characterisation does not feature inherence, but its inverse, bearer of, which is a relation
of generic dependence: A person, say, can be bearer of some political office at any time,
though this does not need to be the same political office at all times.
The suggestions given here are first attempts at formal characterisations. The
specific way of generic dependence should be spelt out more explicitly. It should also be
noted that the classification presented here is orthogonal to existing top-level ontologies
like the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) [2]. E.g., there can be institutions that are material
objects, places or times [12, Ch. 9]. Following the rule that a social F is an F [11], there
are, thus, institutions in the BFO classes Material object, Spatial region, and Temporal
region.
5. Conclusion
In this paper, I contrasted explicitly established social entities, sometimes also called
‘formal institutions’, from other varieties of social entities. It turned out that we need to
distinguish a wide variety of social entities that do not have an explicit establishment.
Formal institutions are ‘made’, to use Sumner’s term [19]: They are explicitly instituted,
often (but not always) codified, and they come along with direct deontic powers. In
contrast, informal institutions are ‘grown’ [19]: They are never codified, come along
with derived deontic powers only.
I suggested that at the upper level of an ontology of the social world, several distinct
categories are needed: Next to formal and informal institutions, there need to be several
categories for social entities that are related to institutions, but are no institutions
themselves. I suggested the categories of Institutional entity and Emergent social entity
for these entities, for example, acts of establishments or episodes of inflation. Moreover,
acts of establishments, as well as formal and informal institutions can relate to types or
to tokens.
These classes can help to classify the examples discussed in Section 3: A particular
marriage is, of course, a token-related formal institution; the respective marriage
ceremony is a token-related act of establishment. A particular friendship is, in contrast,
a token-related informal institution, while the cultural rules how to deal with your friends
in general are type-related informal institutions. The persons that are spouses, friends, or
presidents, are bearers of an institutional status, and thus institutional entities. Inflation,
finally, is an emergent social entity.
The suggestion presented here cannot be more than a first suggestion. It remains for
future work to characterise these categories more precisely, to check their completeness,
and to connect them more thoroughly with a general top-level ontology like the Basic
Formal Ontology. It is also very much desirable to connect this fragment to already
existing suggestion for the treatment of social entities in formal ontologies. Future work
should also test their usefulness in organising classes from the social domain in a
consistent and coherent way.
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