Alessandro Salice

Pride, shame, and group identification

Self-conscious emotions such as shame and pride are emotions that typically focus on the self of the person who feels them. In other words, the intentional object of these emotions is assumed to be the subject that experiences them. Many reasons speak in its favor and yet this account seems to leave a question open: how to cash out those cases in which one genuinely feels ashamed or proud of what someone else does? This paper contends that such cases do not necessarily challenge the idea that shame and pride are about the emoting subject. Rather, we claim that some of the most paradigmatic scenarios of shame and pride induced by others can be accommodated by taking seriously the consideration that, in such cases, the subject “group-identifies” with the other. This is the idea that, in feeling these forms of shame or pride, the subject is conceiving of herself as a member of the same group as the subject acting shamefully or in an admirable way. In other words, these peculiar emotive responses are elicited in the subject insofar as, and to the extent that, she is (or sees herself as being) a member of a group – the group to which those who act shamefully or admirably also belong. By looking into the way in which the notion of group identification can allow for an account of hetero-induced shame and pride, this paper attempts to achieve a sort of mutual enlightenment that brings to light not only an important and generally neglected form of self-conscious emotions, but also relevant features of group identification. In particular, it generates evidence for the idea that group identification is a psychological process that the subject does not have to carry out intentionally in the sense that it is not necessarily triggered by the subject’s conative states like desires or intentions.

Social Reality – The Phenomenological Approach

Phenomenological investigations about social reality could be argued to center around three general concepts: Social and Institutional Facts, Collective Intentionality and Values. Even though it is certainly not possible to speak of one unified theory that phenomenology as such puts forward about social reality, the systematic interconnections between these concepts make the single contributions of phenomenologists tesserae of a larger mosaic. This introduction is an attempt to sketch this mosaic by situating these notions within the debate about social ontology as conducted by phenomenologists roughly from 1910 to 1927. It also highlights the systematic connections between phenomenological insights and contemporary discussions on social ontology.

Group-Directed Empathy: A Phenomenological Account

This paper is an attempt to build a bridge between the fields of social cognition and social ontology. Drawing on both classical and more recent phenomenological studies, the article develops an account of group-directed empathy . The first part of the article spells out the phenomenological notion of empathy and suggests certain conceptual distinctions vis-a-vis two different kinds of group. The second part of the paper applies these conceptual considerations to cases in which empathy is directed at groups and elucidates the sense in which individuals can empathically target not only other individual’s emotions, but also shared emotions as such. Clarifying the structure of group-directed empathy, it will also be argued that the latter is, by default, more informative than individual-directed empathy. The third and last section of the paper is devoted to one central consequence of the proposed account: if it is possible to empathize with groups as such, and if empathy necessary builds on body-perception, then both ideas seem to be conducive to the claim that groups as such have a body.

Social Ontology as Embedded in the Tradition of Phenomenological Realism

Following Edmund Husserl’s distinction between formal and material ontology, social ontology can be defined as that material ontology focusing upon the species of social objects and its essential properties. Husserl himself never developed a scheme for social ontology in extenso, the main promoters of this discipline being the philosophers of the Munich/Gottingen phenomenological circles. Their theories converge on an antireductionist and essentialist approach: there are social objects, and these objects instantiate essential properties. Interestingly, not all social objects can be described by recurring to this model of explanation, and indeed, only some specific types of social objects were considered within phenomenological researches. Some of the most important are social acts, social relations, and social groups. In fact, it is exactly the essentialist approach that makes the phenomenologist blind with respect to a huge class of (social) objects (such as restaurants, driving licenses, screwdrivers, and the Holy Roman Empire) that do not instantiate essential properties. The properties these objects exemplify serve to fulfill a social function, and this function contingently exists in connection to social groups. In the last part of the chapter, I hence suggest to improve the phenomenological approach by considering the species of social objects as divided into two distinct subspecies: social objects with an essence and social objects without essence, i.e., social artifacts.

The Sense of Commitment in Human–Robot Interaction

The sense of commitment is a fundamental building block of human social life. By generating and/or stabilizing expectations about contributions that individual agents will make to the goals of other agents or to shared goals, a sense of commitment can facilitate the planning and coordination of actions involving multiple agents. Moreover, it can also increase individual agents’ motivation to contribute to other agents’ goals or to shared goals, as well as their willingness to rely on other agents’ contributions. In this paper, we provide a starting point for designing robots that exhibit and/or elicit a sense of commitment. We identify several challenges that such a project would likely confront, and consider possibilities for meeting these challenges.

Communities and Values. Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Social Ontology

Within the debate on the ontology of social groups, a prominent view holds that, if one wants to know what a group is and how a group is created or constituted, one has to look at the internal or subjective conditions that either the group’s members or the group as such have to fulfill. This idea is clearly illustrated by a by now rather standard approach to we-ness, which seeks to locate this property either in the subject of a given attitude (which, most perspicuously, is used to being characterized as an intention), or in the mode of the attitude or in its content. This view also suggests that there is one prototypical notion of group which conceptually has to be traced back to one of the three constituents of an intentional attitude and that the main way to access the notion of a group is by means of the concept of intention and/or intentional action.

The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality

Phenomenological investigations about social reality could be argued to center around three general concepts: Social and Institutional Facts, Collective Intentionality and Values. Even though it is certainly not possible to speak of one unifi ed theory that phenomenology as such puts forward about social reality, the systematic interconnections between these concepts make the single contributions of phenomenologists tesserae of a larger mosaic. This introduction is an attempt to sketch this mosaic by situating these notions within the debate about social ontology as conducted by phenomenologists roughly from 1910 to 1927. It also highlights the systematic connections between phenomenological insights and contemporary discussions on social ontology.

Thinking (about) groups: a special issue of Synthese

In the last three or four decades philosophers have started to pay more attention to the ontology of groups and the circumstances under which it might be legitimate and fruitful to ascribe to groups such properties as agency, consciousness, responsibility and personhood. This development has been paralleled by an increased interest in the nature of groups in the social sciences, psychology and the cognitive sciences. This special issue aims to forge a link between these various endeavours by examining the theoretical and practical uses they put the concept of a group to. At the same time, all of the seven contributions collected in the issue demonstrate in one way or another how philosophical reflection can contribute to integrating the different accounts offered within these multidisciplinary domains. “Reminiscing Together: Joint Experiences, Epistemic Groups and Sense of Self” by Axel Seemann is an investigation into a rather neglected kind of group in the literature on social ontology. Attention has mostly been devoted to groups that emerge as result of their members sharing goals or being involved in collective actions. By contrast, Seemann focuses on “epistemic groups” formed when several individuals

Joint Commitments and Group Identification in Human-Robot Interaction

This paper investigates the possibility of designing robots that are able to participate in commitments with human agents. In the first part of the article, we tackle some features that, we claim, make commitments crucial for human-human interactions. In particular, we focus on some reasons for believing that commitments can facilitate the planning and coordination of actions involving multiple agents: not only can commitments stabilize and perhaps even increase the motivation to contribute to other agents’ goals and to shared goals, they also reinforce agents’ willingness to rely on other agents’ contributions. In the second part, we turn our attention to human-robot interaction. Here, we elaborate on five problems that roboticists could encounter in the attempt to implement commitments in human-robot interactions, and we argue in favor of some possible solutions to those problems. Finally, in the last part of the paper we zoom in on joint commitments, i.e., on commitments held by a plurality of agents towards shared goals. Given that the concept of joint commitment invokes the notion of a group, we discuss some more specific challenges that would have to be met for human agents to group-identify with robots.

Acts of Terror as Collective Violent Acts

On March 3, 1972, Idalgo Macchiarini, an executive of a mid-size firm in Milan, was kidnapped by a group of masked persons. He was subjected to an interrogation about the future financial plans of the firm he was employed in, and released after a couple of hours. A black and white photo was shot to document the kidnapping. The photo shows Macchiarini with a tag on which one could read the following words (among others): “Brigate Rosse. Colpiscine uno per educarne cento. [Red Brigades. Strike One to Educate Hundreds.]” This was the first time that the Italian Brigate Rosse had targeted a human person and also the first of a long series of actions that endured throughout the 1970s and 1980s and culminated in the kidnap and then murder of the Italian ex-prime minister, Aldo Moro, in 1978.