What sorts of social things exist? Does the "proletariat" exist as a social entity? There are certainly workers; but is there a "working class"? What is needed in order to attribute existence to a social agglomeration?
We might want to say that things exist when they have enough persistence over time to admit of re-identification and study from one time to another. Persistence involves some degree of stability in a core set of properties. A cloud shaped like a cat has a set of visible characteristics at a given moment; but these characteristics disappear quickly, and this collection of water droplets quickly morphs into a different collection in a short time. So we are inclined not to call the cat-shaped cloud an entity. On the other hand, "the Black Forest" exists because we can locate its approximate boundaries and composition over several centuries. The forest is an agglomeration of trees in a geographical space; but we might reasonably judge that the forest has properties that we can investigate that are not simply properties of individual trees (density and canopy temperature, for example). The forest undergoes change over time; the mix of types of trees may shift from one decade to another, the density of plants changes, and the human uses of forest products change. And we can ask questions like: "How has the ecology of the Black Forest changed in the twentieth century?" So it seems reasonable enough that we can refer to the forest as a geographical or ecological entity.
We can also classify individual forests into types of forests: temperate rain forest, tropical rain forest, coniferous forest, etc. (Here is a 26-fold classification of forests by UNEP-WCMC; the map below represents the global distribution of these types of forests.) And we can ask ecological questions about the properties and processes that are characteristic of the various types of forests.
So what characteristics should a putative social entity possess in order to fall within the working ontology of the social sciences? Here are a few possible candidate ontological features that might be associated with thing-hood in the social realm:
- persistence of basic characteristics over time -- spatio-temporal continuity and social analogs such as nucleated population with shared norms and identities
- an internal structural-functional organization
- some sort of regulative social process that maintains the thing's identity over time, either internal or external
- social cohesion among the individuals who constitute the entity deriving from their social orientation to the entity (labor union, religious community, ethnic group)
- an account of the particular material-social mechanisms through which the identity and persistence of the entity are maintained
- United Auto Workers
- General Motors corporation
- First Presbyterian Church of Dubuque
- Missouri Synod
- Kylie Minogue Facebook fan club
- 18th Street gang of Los Angeles
- Michigan Legislature
- Internal Revenue Service
- University of Wisconsin
- apprentice system for electrical workers
- social practice of Islamic charity
Social entities are composed of socially constituted individuals. So the sinews of composition are important. We can recognize a wide range of ways in which individuals are composed into larger social entities: agglomeration, adherence, mutual recognition, coercion, contractual relationships, marketing, recruitment, incentive systems, ... This is one place where "assemblage" theory seems to be useful (Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory And Social Complexity
.)Part of the confusion in this topic is the distinction between things and kinds of things. We might agree that the Chicago Police Department exists as a social entity. But we may remain uncertain as to whether "police departments" or "state coercive apparatuses" exist as higher-order categories of social things. And perhaps this is a confusion; perhaps the issue of existence applies only to individual entities, not kinds or classes of entities. On this approach, we would stipulate the minimum characteristics of existence we would want to require of individual social entities and then be "nominalistic" about the higher-level categories or concepts into which we classify these singular individuals.
In considering the ontology of the social world it is important to be attentive to the fallacy of reification: the error of thinking that the fact that we can formulate an abstract noun (proletariat, fascism) allows us to infer that it exists as a persistent, recurring social entity. So when we identify a given social entity as an X, we need to regard it as an open question, "What do X's have in common?" We can avoid the fallacy of reification by focusing on the importance of providing microfoundations for the enduring characteristics of social entities. It is the underlying composition of the entity rather than its location within a classificatory system that provides an explanatory foundation for the behavior of the entity.
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