Emanuele Bottazzi

From collective intentionality to intentional collectives: An ontological perspective

This paper presents a methodology for the analysis of the entities which the discourse on collective intentionality usually refers to. We aim, in particular, at characterizing the notion of intentional collective. Based on reviews of the relevant literature, we apply three formal-ontological tools of our choice (namely, DOLCE, DnS, and DDPO) to the treatment of the notions of collection, agent, plan and collective, all underlying the concept of intentional collective. We believe that the proposed approach offers several advantages, among which its explicitness, modularity and formality. This makes it particularly suitable for a founded specification of typologies of collections and collectives, hence for contributing to both philosophic and scientific research on these topics.

Open Ontology-Driven Sociotechnical Systems: Transparency as a Key for Business Resiliency

Most business and social organisations can be seen nowadays as complex sociotechnical systems (STSs), including three components: technical artifacts, social artifacts, and humans. Within social artifacts, a special role have norms, which largely influence the overall systems behavior. However, norms need to be understood, interpreted, negotiated, and actuated by humans, who may of course deviate from them, or even decide to change them. STSs are therefore essentially prone to failure: critical situations are part of STS’s life, and may sometimes lead to tragic outcomes. That’s why resilience to failure must be built into such systems, and is a crucial parameter to determine their quality. We argue in this paper that, to achieve a high level of resilience, transparency is the key: actors within the system need to take a reflective stance toward the system itself. In other words, an STS must be open to its actors, which by observing and understanding its dynamics can take the appropriate initiatives in presence of unforeseen problems, possibly modifying the system at run time. Ontological models can play a crucial role in this context. However, we need to make a radical change in our modelling approach, shifting the focus of analysis from ontology-driven information systems to ontology-driven sociotechnical systems.

Group Conflict as Social Contradiction

This paper is a contribution to the development of an ontology of conflict. In particular, we single out and study a peculiar notion of group conflict, that we suggestively label “social contradiction.” In order to do so, we shall introduce and discuss the methodology of social choice theory, since it allows for defining the notion of collective attitude that may emerge from a number of possibly divergent individual attitudes. We shall see how collective attitudes lead to define a specific notion of group and therefore a specific notion of group conflict. As a conclusion, we shall present our abstract analysis of group conflicts and we shall position social contradiction with respect to other types of conflicts.

Social Objects and Perspectile

In this work we introduce the notion of perspectile, that is a social object as a token. This is meant to be a flexible and yet clear way of constructing entities by means of a definition. Whenever we define something we create it in the very specific context of its application. Searle (2010) provides an explanation about social types, but he overlooks the importance of social tokens. If, on the one hand, to be a queen in chess means to be associated to a context of constitutive rules, what about the specific chess queen that I have in my hand? One could answer this question by saying that a specific queen is a “a certain piece of wood qua having the role of white queen in that particular game”. But problems arise when we consider change through time. Suppose that by accident, during a single game bases – the pieces of wood – change, say, three times. We would like to say that the white queen in the game stays the same, regardless the change of its material support. According to Fine (1982) we will have just three things, i.e. three pieces of wood. We believe that there is an individual, the perspectile, which includes the three bases in one single entity, and that stays the same during all phases of the game; this is because in the context of chess it is not important – given certain restrictions – what plays the role of queen. Its value is positional. This means that perspectiles are therefore “more flexible” than Fine’s qua-objects. They are able to change their bases, depending on what is constitutively established by the definition of their role. For example, unlike the case of chess pieces, who is President of the Government matters, because to the base, to the one who plays that role are constitutively associated specific institutional responsibilities. The perspectile is then Searle’s social object regarded as a token, that “X qua Y in C”. The term “perspectile” is to emphasize the fact that this object exists as something put into perspective by a role, it is in a system, and what exists of it, its properties, is what the system we have built and adopted filters out from the properties of the base. To complicate a bit the situation we can imagine that Ada and Lucy, two chess players, lose the piece of wood that plays the role of white queen in their game. Because the one they use to play is the only chess set available to them, they decide to use a coin as their white queen in the game. According to our model, the white queen in Ada and Lucy’s game is a perspectile, an object made of the definition of its role and two different physical objects at a time: a piece of wood and a metal coin. The qua-individual is therefore included within the concept of perspectile, being, in a sense, its “istantaneist version”, or its snapshot. If we were to photograph a perspectile at a given time t we would see that it is a qua-individual, since, for every moment, the perspectile has some object as its basis. If we were to film it, we would see instead a change of different bases. This allows us to call a qua-individual an “instantaneous perspectile”. Social organizations may be viewed as complex perspectiles in which each individual perspectile would be a special “brick”, that brings with it part of the structure of the house. I.e. it cannot be placed in any position whatsoever: by its very nature it is meant to be placed in a way rather than another. This is thanks to the relational properties that, through roles1, are “inherited” by perspectiles and that act as basic “glue” for organizations. An ontology of organizations equipped with the notion of perspectile could be helpful in solving the complex problem of diachronic identity. Roughly, we could say that if we look at the ontological nature of perspectiles, we can see how these are “flexible enough” to allow, in principle, the continued existence of organizations over time in spite of their members, i.e. persons, changing. People can change, but the agents – that is “individuals in that specific role” – may stay the same through time, if the definition of the role allows it. From the system’s standpoint, there must be that specific agent, but that specific agent may be a “specific someone acting as”, no matter who is the basis, if John or Jane, it suffices that he or she displays certain features or make certain things.

Arbitral Functions and Constitutive Rules

Nowadays, it is widely recognized that constitutive rules play a key role in social ontology. They are considered the primary source of meaning for every rule-based activity. But what can ensure the persistence of such activities? The most common proposed solution is to rely on social acceptance, and even though this is certainly part of the story, it is nonetheless not sufficient to explain what happens in breakdown situations. We need to embed into the system something that would preserve it from destruction. Our claim is that for this purpose, an arbitral function is needed. Intuitively, an arbitral function is a mechanism which is—at least partially—extra-contextual, and it is introduced to solve possible or actual impasses. This function may equally well be played by an intentional agent (like a referee in a football game) or by an extra-contextual rule (as the 50-move rule in chess). Our contribution aims to introduce the novel concept of arbitral function and show that it is widespread in institutional reality and it is essential in every institution. Finally, if constitutive rules determine that a certain activity counts as a valid element of an institution, then arbitral functions ensure that this activity persists by preventing impasses.