The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences -- Introduction and Table of Contents

Abstract

We live in a world of crowds and corporations, artworks and artifacts, legislatures and languages, money and markets. These are all social objects — they are made, at least in part, by people and by communities. But what exactly are these things? How are they made, and what is the role of people in making them?

In The Ant Trap, Brian Epstein rewrites our understanding of the nature of the social world and the foundations of the social sciences. Epstein explains and challenges the three prevailing traditions about how the social world is made. One tradition takes the social world to be built out of people, much as traffic is built out of cars. A second tradition also takes people to be the building blocks of the social world but focuses on thoughts and attitudes we have toward one another. And a third tradition takes the social world to be a collective projection onto the physical world. Epstein shows that these share critical flaws. Most fundamentally, all three traditions overestimate the role of people in building the social world: they are overly anthropocentric.

Epstein goes on to provide an alternative theory, bringing the resources of contemporary metaphysics to bear. In the place of traditional theories, he introduces a model based on a new distinction between the grounds and the anchors of social facts. Epstein illustrates the model with a study of the nature of law, and shows how to interpret the prevailing traditions about the social world. Then he turns to social groups, and to what it means for a group to take an action or have an intention. Contrary to the overwhelming consensus, these often depend on more than the actions and intentions of group members.

Full text

1
e Ant Trap
Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences
BRIAN EPSTEIN
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 3 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

CONTENTS
Introduction 1
PART ONE FOUNDATIONS, OLD AND NEW 11
1. Individualism:ARecipe for Warding o “Spirits” 13
2. Geing to the Consensus View 23
3. Seeds of Doubt 36
4. Another Puzzle:ACompeting Consensus 50
5. Tools and Terminology 61
6. Grounding and Anchoring 74
7. Case Study:Laws as Frame Principles 88
8. Two Kinds of Individualism 101
9. Against Conjunctivism 115
PART TWO GROUPS AND THE FAILURE OF
INDIV IDUALISM 129
10. Groups and Constitution 133
11. Simple Facts about Groups 150
12. e Identity of Groups 169
13. Kinds of Groups 182
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 7 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

viii 
14. Group Aitudes:Paerns of Grounding 19 7
15. Group Action:More than Member Action 217
16. Group Intention 236
17. Other eories I:Social Integrate Models 250
18. Other eories II:Status Models 264
Looking Ahead 276
Acknowledgments 281
Bibliography 283
Index 293
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 8 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

1
Introduction
Shortly aer Igot out of college, back in the early 1990s, Itook a job at a
management consulting rm. e rm was employed by mammoth compa-
nies like Gillee and AT&T, doing projects that now seem almost absurd.
Ateam consisting of several “analysts” like me and a couple of “managers”
just out of business school would spend weeks writing questionnairesHow
oen do you make international calls? Is a close shave most important to you, or
is it more important to avoid razor burn? en we would send researchers into
malls across the country, stacks of questionnaires in hand. ey would survey
ve to eight hundred people, and our statistics department would type the
responses into a computer, analyze them, and send us the results. We would
then take those results, sketch out a set of bar charts and scaergraphs, and
nally hand them to the production department (in those pre-PowerPoint
days) to make a slick presentation.
Companies paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for those presentations.
(Sadly, Iwas a lowly analyst, so Ionly saw these numbers on the invoices, not
in my bank account.) ere was a reason they paid so much. ey needed
information about peoplewhat they buy, what they read, what they do in
their spare time, whom they vote for, and how they shaveand there was no
other way to get it. ese companies had policy decisions to make:what prod-
ucts to develop and what to abandon, which markets to enter and which to
ee, whether to hike prices or reduce the length of warranties. In 1993, doing
expensive lile surveys was the best way to inform such decisions.
e last twenty years have seen a revolution in how we collect data about
people. Today, a company does not need to pay the price of a house in Boston
to survey 800 mall-walkers. People are throwing information at companies as
fast as those companies can collect it. In the next month, 200million people
will run 13 billion searches on Google in the United States alone. In the same
period, Facebook will compile personal information from 1.3 billion people
across the world. Walmart will process and record 7 billion purchases by
100million people. Verizon, AT&T, and other wireless carriers will record the
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 1 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

2 
locations of 110 billion telephone calls made by 280million people, and will
track the senders and recipients of 170 billion text messages. Nowadays, run-
ning a manual sur vey of 800 people would be both inecient and unscientic.
Much of this transformation is, of course, explained by technologies: the
internet and mobile phones; point-of-sale, tracking, and surveillance systems;
data analysis and paern recognition soware; computer processing and
storage; and so on. But technology is only part of the explanation. Nearly as
important is social change. People have turned out to be surprisingly eager to
publicize their personal information. Contemporary labor markets are push-
ing each of us to advertise ourselves. And the ecosystem of modern corpora-
tions has made it an imperative of surv ival to use persona l information i n order
to increase prots.
Increasingly, economic activity turns on collecting and mobilizing
information about people. Industries built for this purpose now dwarf the
traditional academic departments and think-tanks that once dominated the
social sciences. Googlewhose business, aer all, is directing people to
documents wrien by people and tailoring advertisements to peoplehas
over 35,000 employees, more than twice the 13,000 academic economists
in the United States. And the marketing department of Procter and Gamble
is larger than the sociology departments of all US universities combined. It
is only a slight exaggeration to say that the world economy is transforming
into a massive system for doing social science. For all our talk of the “infor-
mation economy,” the “knowledge economy,” and the “technology econ-
omy,” a more accurate name for the present epoch is the “social sciences
economy.”
e Paradox of the Social Sciences
Given all this, you would think the social sciences themselves, wielding data
that just a few years ago no one had dreamed possible, would be riding high.
But despite it allall the data and all the computers and all the corporate
aentionthe social sciences are hardly budging. So far, the new advantages
have been of lile help in deciding among conicting theories of the workings
of the economy, the sources of poverty, the prescriptions for improving edu-
cation, and nancial regulation. If anything, the last few years have deated
whatever optimism we might have had about social theory.
e latest blow came in the form of the recent nancial crisis. Just a few
years before, economists were gaining condence in their abilities to under-
stand and guide social systems. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, before becom-
ing chairman of the Federal Reserve, wrote a paper describing the “Great
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 2 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

Introduction 3
Moderation” in the global economic system.1 Like many other economists,
Bernanke was impressed by the apparent decline of risk in nancial markets,
as economies grew less volatile. He saw an end to the successive crises of ear-
lier generations. Bernanke weighed three possible explanations. Perhaps this
Great Moderation was a result of structural changes in the economy, such as
the shi from manufacturing to services. Perhaps it was a result of improved
macroeconomic policies, guided by contemporary economics. Or perhaps it
was just good luck.
Of these three possibilities, the second one represents a triumph of applied
social science. And this is the explanation Bernanke found evidence to sup-
port. “I think it is likely,” said Bernanke, “that the policy explanation for the
Great Moderation deserves more credit than it has received in the literature.”2
In a classic case of poor timing, Olivier Blanchard, chief economist at the
International Monetary Fund, published a paper in early 2008 agreeing with
this assessment, saying “e state of macroeconomics is good.”3
ese pronouncements were premature. e unraveling of nancial mar-
kets in late 2008 took the profession by surprise, its speed and magnitude
terrifying economists and policymakers alike. Amid the crisis, the economics
profession did not have even roughly consistent recommendations about how
to react to it. Prominent economists excoriated the Treasury and the Federal
Reserve for every action they took and for every action they failed to take:for
allowing Lehman Brothers to fail, for bailing out AIG and protecting its credi-
tors from losses, for pushing an economic stimulus, for eectively national-
izing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for three episodes of quantitative easing,
and so on. Inasmuch as the nancial authorities deserve some creditwhich
they surely doprobably the best that can be said is that they did a good job
puing out short-term res, and avoided wholesale catastrophe. But there was
no unied theory guiding them.
Since the crisis, economists have been wringing their hands about the dis-
cipline. Paul Krugman has been a vocal critic, titling his cover article for the
NewYork Times Magazine “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?”4 But even
the most ort hodox voices were shaken. A lan Greenspan, testif ying to Congress
in 2009, disowned some of his most deeply held beliefs about the rationality
of markets:“e whole intellectual edice,” he admied, “collapsed in the
summer of last year.”5 e economist Andrew Lo has reviewed 21 books on
1 Bern anke (2004) 2012.
2 Bernanke (2004) 2012, 159.
3 Blancha rd 2008. See also Cassidy 2010, Krugman 20 09, Kirman 2010.
4 Kr ug man 20 09.
5 Alan Greenspan, testifying before the House Commiee on Oversight and Government
Refor m on October 23, 2008.
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 3 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

4 
the nancial crisis, and concluded, “there is still signicant disagreement as to
what the underlying causes of the crisis were, and even less agreement on what
to do about it.”6 And Olivier Blanchard has withdrawn his optimism, retract-
ing his earlier views in a paper titled “Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy.”7
is swing, from unrelenting optimism to self-critical breast-beating, is a
familiar stor y in the social sciences. One doesn’t have to be a historian to think
of innumerable times that social scientists played the role of Icarus (or Wile E
Coyote), thinking they have safely taken ight, only to plunge to earth. Over
and over, we have seen plausible theories across the social sciences slapped
down.
As compared to past crises, the overcondence of theorists in 2008 was
not extreme. In fact, this is what is depressing about our latest episode. Part
of what is noteworthy about the situation today is that, preceding the crisis,
the ambitions of social scientists were actually fairly limited. We thought we
had learned, through theory and trial and error, not how to create a utopia on
earth, not how to solve the world’s social ills, but just how to avoid wild eco-
nomic swings and massive recessions.
Reactions
Many people inside and outside the profession have reacted to the failures of
social science as Friedrich Hayek did, back in the 1940s:namely, economies
and societies are unimaginably complex systems. As a result, policymakers
cannot possibly have enough knowledge to make choices on behalf of a society
as a whole. Chances are that they will be worse at it than a distributed market
will. erefore, it is folly even to try to explain, predict, or direct economic
activity. In the face of policymaker ignorance, we should minimize policy
and regulation, leing the market direct itself rather than trying to give it any
direction from above.
A dierent response to the failures of social science is to be a conserva-
tive in the style of Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century political theorist.
Burke too argued that economies and society are too complex to understand.
But instead of concluding that we should minimize regulation, he argued
that we should be suspicious of abstract reasoning and radical change of any
kind. Whatever we do, there is a good chance we will make things worse than
they are. On a Burkean approach, it is not the absolute level of regulation that
should be minimized, but the pace of change.
6 Lo 201 2.
7 Blancha rd etal. 2010, Blanchard 2011.
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 4 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

Introduction 5
ere is value in both of these reactions. But if the last few years have show n
anything, it is that refusing to design and intervene in social systems is oen
worse than designing them in partial ignorance. Many recent policy failures
have been a result of under-design, from Donald Rumsfeld’s failed “hands o”
policy in the Iraq reconstruction to the limits on nancial regulation in recent
years. Likewise, Burkean conservatism is untenable in many domains. As the
economist Paul Romer recently pointed out, if you adopt a set of nancial reg-
ulations and keep them unchanged, the markets will nd a way around them,
and ten years later, you’ll have a nancial crisis.8 ough they continually dis-
appoint us, theory-led policy interventionsthat is, the prescriptions of the
social sciencesare indispensable.
What, then, has gone wrong with theories in the social sciences? Why,
despite the information revolution, are we not beer o? ere is no short-
age of diagnoses out there. With each failure of the social sciences, theorists
have turned their critical sights toward its methods. In many ways, the various
methods of the social sciences have been found wanting. e prevailing diag-
noses fall, more or less, into ve general categories:
(1) Our models of the individual are inadequate. Individuals are modeled as
rational, when they are not rational. ey are modeled as being similar to
one another, when they are radically heterogeneous. ey are modeled as
having perfect information about the world and about the future, and as
being perfect calculators of their own interests, when they are far from it.
ey are modeled as being independently operating atoms, when they are
socially constituted. All of these diagnoses criticize the way widely used
models treat individual people.9
(2) We have a poor understanding of the “emergence” of group properties out of
aggregates of individuals. Systems of interacting parts oen have very dif-
ferent properties than the individuals that compose them. Abrain has
dierent properties than individual neurons, an ant colony has dierent
properties than the individual ants, and likewise a society has properties
that cannot easily be predicted from the properties of individuals. e
diagnosis is that our models of individuals may be ok, but our theories are
not good at determining how individuals aggregate into large groups.10
(3) We are building models in the wrong style. Some theorists hold that our mod-
els are too mathematical, or that we have been seduced by the elegance of
8 Ro mer 2011.
9 For discu ssion of a number of these in econom ics, see Colander 1996.
10 Approac hes to aggre gation are omn ipresent in t he social sc iences, draw ing on elds su ch as
equi librium t heories, network theory, theories of complex sy stems, and ma ny others.
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 5 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

6 
certain abstract structures that do not reect the real world. Others argue
that models in the social sciences are not mathematical enough, or use
mathematics incorrectly. Still others argue that we will never be able to
model society in terms of systems of equations, but that we should per-
form computer simulations instead.11
(4) We are building models at the wrong level. From the beginning, the social
sciences have been bierly divided about the right “level” for social expla-
nations. Some theorists argue that macroscopic social phenomena, such
as nancial bubbles or the growth of economies, can only be explained
in terms of other macroscopic social phenomena. Others are commied
to explaining social phenomena in terms of individuals. Recently, some
theorists have even argued that individuals are too “high-level,” and that
social theory should be founded in neuroscience.12
(5) “Grand theorizing” is out of our reach altogether. In recent years, many social
scientists have grown suspicious of theories that intend to model societ-
ies or economies as a whole. In fact, one of the hoest elds in economics
today involves only minimal theory. Instead, it takes its cues from medi-
cine, designing and running randomized trials. Other theorists are devot-
ing their energies to small models that test hypotheses about very narrow
parts of the economy.13
Dierent research strategies correspond to each of the prevailing diagnoses.
If the rational choice model of the individual is a problem, we should develop
more rened theories of individual choice. If the problem is the aggregation
of individuals, we should develop mathematical or computational techniques.
If the problem is grand theorizing, we should develop experimental methods
such as randomized testing.
A Deeper Flaw:e Anthropocentric Picture
of the Social World
All of these are plausible diagnoses. To some extent, each of these avenues
needs to be explored if we are to make real headway in the social sciences. All
11 For example, in economics see Axtell (2006) 2014; Beed and Kane 1991; Debreu 1991;
Epstei n 2005; Farmer and Foley 2009; Krugman 20 09; Lo and Mueller 2010.
12 See, for instance, A lexander eta l. 1987; Archer 20 03; Hoover 200 9; Ross 200 8.
13 Mills 1959 and Geertz 1973 are inuential critiques of “grand theorizing” in sociology a nd
anthropology. Recent work on randomized trials in economics can be found in Banerjee etal.
(2010) 2013; Duo 2006.
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 6 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

Introduction 7
the data and technology in the world only gets us so far if the models that make
use of it are awed. And so it makes sense that legions of theorists, and mill ions
in research dollars, are dedicated to exploring these models and reactions.
In recent years, however, Ihave begun to worry that much of this eort is
misdirected. It is not that the diagnoses are wrong, but that they overlook a
deeper problem. e ve categories of diagnosis above are not unique to the
social sciences. ey are diagnoses that one might apply to meteorology, or to
cell biology, or to ecology. We might be modeling meteorological phenomena
at the wrong level. We might have poor models of the parts of cells. We might
misunderstand how ant colonies aggregate out of interacting individual ants.
Implicit in these ve diagnosesand in the practice of the social sciences
from its earliest daysis a particular analogy between the social sciences and
the natu ral sciences. Namely, that the objec ts of the social sc iences are bu ilt out
of indiv idual people much as an ant colony is built out of ants, or a chimpanzee
community is built out of chimpanzees, or a cell is built out of organelles.
When we look more closely at the social world, however, this analogy falls
apart. We oen think of social facts as depending on people, as being created
by people, as the actions of people. We think of them as products of the mental
processes, intentions, beliefs, habits, and practices of individual people. But
none of this is quite right. Research programs in the social sciences are bu ilt on
a shaky understanding of the most fundamental question of all:What are the
social sciences about? Or, more specically:What are social facts, social objects,
and social phenomenathese things that the social sciences aim to model and
explain?
My aim in this book is to take a rst step in challenging what has come to be
the seled view on these questions. at is, to demonstrate that philosophers
and social scientists have an overly anthropocentric picture of the social world.
How the social world is built is not a mystery, not magical or inscrutable or
beyond us. But it turns out to be not nearly as people-centered as is widely
assumed.
e term ‘anth ropocentric’ comes, of cou rse, from ast ronomy. For centurie s,
astronomers believed that the features of the universe depended in a crucial
way on uson earth and on man. is illusion was natural. Anthropocentric
astronomers had perfectly good reasons for believ ing that the sun, planets, and
stars revolved around the earth. Although they ran into problems of predic-
tion and explanationmuch like the social scientists of todaythey found
ingenious ways of patching their theories, for example, the famous Ptolemeic
“epicycles.” But no renement of their knowledge of the planets, or the math-
ematics of orbits, would x the problems. W hat was needed was a deeper theo-
retical revision: they needed to abandon the anthropocentric picture of the
universe.
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 7 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

8 
is is a surprising criticism to levy at social science. It is one thing to
accuse medieval cosmologists of overestimating the importance of humans in
the universe, but quite another to accuse the social sciences of doing so. e
phenomena of the social scienceseconomic systems, family relationships,
education, crime, languagethese are things that involve people. How could
the social sciences be too anthropocentric?
People are not, of course, irrelevant to the social sciences. Social phenom-
ena involve people. e question is how. How exactly are people involved in
social facts, objects, and events? How are these things made? What roles do
thoughts, actions, and practices play, and how might they fall short?
ese are questions about metaphysics. ey are questions about the
nature of the social world. To make headway on them, we have a number of
resources at our ngertips. Metaphysics has, in recent years, become one of
the most careful and sophisticated disciplines in philosophy. It has developed
and rened a number of tools for thinking about just these kinds of questions.
How does one entity depend on another entity? What are facts, and how are they
grounded by other facts? And so on. Yet few of these tools have been applied in a
serious way to the social world.
To be sure, many people in many traditions have theorized about the nature
of the socia l world. From Hobbes to Hume, Comte to Mill, Herder to Durk heim,
and Marx to von Mises, theories of the social world abound. e topic is also
increasingly prominent in the contemporary philosophical literature. e most
inuential of these contemporary accounts is John Searle’s. In his 1995 book e
Const ruction of Social R eality, Searle aempt s to give a reasonably comprehensive
theory.14 Others have plunged in as well. Raimo Tuomela has followed up on
Searle in several books, detailing more elaborate theories along similar lines.15
Adierent approach is taken by Margaret Gilbert in her 1989 book On Social
Facts. In that book and in a series of subsequent papers, she develops nuanced
theories of groups, along with the commitments, norms, and aitudes that
accompany group membership. Michael Bratman focuses in particular on the
actions and intentions of groups, in his inuential account of shared intention.16
Philip Peit, in his 1993 book e Common Mind, gives a theory of the nature
of the social world. And in the 2011 book Group Agency, Peit and his coauthor
Christian List give a theory of the nature and actions of groups.17 Others have
also developed theories of institutions, artifacts, and other man-made entities.18
14 Searle 1995 . He updates the v iew in Searle 2 010.
15 E.g., Tuomela 20 02, 2007.
16 Bratman 1993.
17 List and Peit 2011; Peit 1993.
18 E.g., Sally Haslanger, Ruth Millikan, Richard Boyd, Lynne Baker, Amie omasson,
Crawford Elder, Frank Hindriks, Francesco Guala, Ron Mallon, and others.
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 8 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

Introduction 9
It is not, in other words, that social metaphysicsthat is, the nature of
the social worldhas escaped aention. Yet only recently have people really
started to examine the metaphysics in detail. Historically, questions about
the nature of the social world were treated in a fairly cursory way, dispatched
quickly to make way for points about morality or politics or game theory. And
so the sophisticated toolkit of metaphysics mostly sat idly by. Because of this
neglect , the seled view of t he social world has gone more or less unchallenged.
Social Metaphysics and Social Groups
If it is true that we misunderstand the building blocks of the social world, it is
no surprise that we are having trouble in the social sciences, since that misun-
derstanding distorts our models. Some of the most obvious cases are nancial
markets. Despite their prominence in the daily newspaper, just what nancial
markets and nancial instruments are, or what their function is, has never
been clear to economists. And so they have largely been le out of models,
particularly models in macroeconomics. Economists have rationalizations for
this:at least until 2008, it was common to argue that the “nancial economy”
does not bear too much on the “real economy” of houses, cars, and dish soap.19
In recent years, that arg ument has fallen at, and economists have been scram-
bling to gure out how nancial markets and instruments should gure into
macroeconomic models. But that scramble does not change the basic problem.
Knowing that we need to incorporate nancial markets and instruments into
our models does not help much if we are clueless about their building blocks.
Until we improve our understanding of their nature, we do not have a prayer
of modeling them well.
While the exclusion of nancial markets from macroeconomics is a glaring
example, it is far from the only case of a distorted understanding of the social
world. In fact, the eld of social metaphysics is only in its infancy. Our awed
understanding starts with much simpler things than the nancial economy.
Even the very simplest cases are thornier than one might imagine.
A prime example of a simple case is a group of people. e social world is
rich with groups:classes, populaces, mobs, legislatures, courts, faculties, stu-
dent bodies, and so on. In any social science, we are interested in investigating
facts about groups, facts like the educational aainments of kindergarteners,
the voting paerns of legislators, the levels of corruption in bureaucracy, the
responsibilities of soldiers for the conduct of war, or the salaries of university
19 See, for instance, Kydland and Presco 1982; Lucas 1972, 1977.
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 9 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM

10 
faculties. And, it seems, the building blocks of groups couldn’t be any simpler.
Agroup of people is constituted by people, no more, no less.
But this apparent simplicity is deceptive. Aclose look at the metaphys-
ics of social groups shows it to be subtler than this. One trick is in the word
“constituted.” As I will discuss later on, it is technically true that groups of
people are constituted by people. Constitution, however, has received an enor-
mous amount of aention in the recent metaphysics literature. In the last few
years, it has become clear that to say “x is constituted by such-and-such” only
gives a tiny bit of information about what x is. It is not hard to see this. One of
the examples Iwill be discussing in some detail is the United States Supreme
Court. It is smallnine membersand very familiar, so there are lots of facts
about it we can easily consider. Even a moment’s reection is enough to see
that a great many facts about the Supreme Court depend on much more than
those nine people. e powers of the Supreme Court are not determined by
the nine justices, nor do the nine justices even determine who the members
of the Supreme Court are. Even more basic, the very existence of the Supreme
Court is not determined by those nine people. In all, knowing all kinds of
things about the people that constitute the Supreme Court gives us very lile
information about what that group is, or about even the most basic facts about
that group.
ese quick observations about the Supreme Court raise more questions
than they answer. But that, for now, is the point. Even to understand the nature
of simple social groups, we need to take the metaphysics seriously. is book
is wrien with the conviction that we are wasting our time with the most com-
plex cases, if we get even the simple ones wrong.
Part One of this book sets out a general framework for social metaphysics.
How do we approach the problems of social metaphysics, what are the projects
involved, what are the tools we need, and why have people goen it so wrong?
Part Two applies the tools of social metaphysics to g roups. Groups are not even
close to being the only social entity. But they are important in their own right,
and guring out how to work with them gives us a template for approaching
more complicated things. Groups are also a powerful example for advancing
the central point of the book. My aim is to allow us to start freeing ourselves
from “the ant trap”the anthropocentric picture of the social world as being
composed by individual people. For this aim, inquiry into groups strikes the
target directly. If anything in the social world should be anthropocentric, it is
groups of people. Even the most lukewarm defender of anthropocentrism may
nd it hard to see what could possibly be wrong with an anthropocentric pic-
ture of groups. us when, in Part Two, we see that anthropocentrism is wrong
even for groups, we plant the stake deep into its heart.
OUP UNCOR RECTED PROOF – R EVISES, Tue Dec 02 2014, NEWGEN
acprof-9780199381104.indd 10 12/2/2014 7:54:46 PM