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Précis of The Ant Trap

Article  in  Journal of Social Ontology · January 2016

DOI: 10.1515/jso-2016-0001

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 Journal of Social Ontology 2016; 2(1): 125–134

Book Symposium Open Access

Brian Epstein
Précis of The Ant Trap
Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences

DOI 10.1515/jso-2016-0001

Abstract: This article summarizes The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the
Social Sciences. The book develops a new model for social ontology, applies it to
groups and collective intentionality, and criticizes various forms of individualism.
Part One of the book presents two traditional approaches to social ontology and
unifies them into the “grounding–anchoring model” for the building of the social
world. Part Two shows that individualism is mistaken even for basic facts about
groups of people, challenges prevailing views of group intention and action, and
illustrates how to approach facts about groups in general.

Keywords: Social ontology; Metaphysics; Anchoring; Collective intention;

­Individualism; Groups; Agency; Social science.

1 Introduction
If we want to improve the social sciences, it is crucial that we understand the
objects and phenomena we study. Social ontology matters to social science: this
is the conviction with which the book is written. The aim of The Ant Trap is to
debunk longstanding and widespread errors in the study of social ontology, and
to rebuild their foundations with a more modern and comprehensive model.
Oddly, it is sometimes overlooked that social ontology is a subfield of meta-
physics. In the last 40 years, there have been enormous strides in metaphysics,
but so far the social ontology literature has paid them little attention. I regard this
as a serious error. In fact, the tools being developed in metaphysics are of great
utility in untangling problems in social ontology. And there are equally important

Brian Epstein, Department of Philosophy, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA,

e-mail: brian.epstein@tufts.edu

©2016, Brian Epstein, published by De Gruyter.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

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126      Brian Epstein

benefits flowing in the other direction as well. The field of metaphysics overall
can profit enormously from a serious treatment of social ontology.
Much of the metaphysics literature can seem obscure and impenetrable, and
the social ontology literature is so broad and diverse that it can be hard to get a
handle on it. An important purpose of the book is to get practitioners talking on
both sides – to present crucial parts of metaphysics for people who study society,
and to present the problems of the nature of the social world in an organized way,
so that theorists can see how various investigations fit together and approach
them systematically.
The overall project of the book is to develop a new model for social ontology
and apply it to central problems. The principal constructive aims are:
1. To clarify a variety of distinct projects in social ontology that have been con-
fused with one another. In particular, to clear up how to fit together varieties
of individualism, theories of the building blocks of the social world, theories
of convention, collective intentionality, and so on.
2. To unify these into a model for the building of the social world. This is the
“grounding–anchoring” model, which provides a general framework for
social ontology.
3. To show how to go about investigating the grounds for social facts. I focus
on an important simple case: groups of people. What facts about groups are
there, and what do they depend on?
4. To develop a new and systematic treatment of group action and group inten-
tion (also called shared intention or collective intention). I argue against
prevailing theories, in which group intention is exhaustively determined by
the attitudes of group members. And replace it with a more general and less
stylized approach.
5. To criticize individualism in social ontology, and show that prevailing theo-
ries take an excessively “anthropocentric” approach to the social world.
6. To introduce and refine tools in metaphysics and social ontology. In addi-
tion to grounding and anchoring, I discuss social facts, frames, dependence,
ontological individualism, constitution, criteria of identity, and other tools
that prove to be of enormous help in both fields.

My deep hope in the book is to help contribute to reworking the field of social
ontology on new and better foundations. I find that the prevailing models in the
field are tapped out, built on faulty assumptions and misleading simplifications.
Young theorists in particular should not assume that the best way of modeling
social phenomena is to model individual people interacting with one another. Or
that John Searle’s theory of social construction is the best option out there. Or that
we should understand collective intentions in terms of Margaret Gilbert’s joint

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commitments or Michael Bratman’s interlocking attitudes of group members. Or

that social facts can be broken down into a homogeneous set of building blocks,
such as individual mental states as economists often assume, or into practices,
as sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens do. Social ontology is
important enough that it warrants a rigorous and serious treatment. When we do
that, we find that much of the gospel we were raised on does not hold up, and
that there are alternatives that the prevailing theories do not conceive of.
The Ant Trap is divided in two parts. Part One is titled “Foundations, Old and
New.” The aim of this part is to present the two distinct treatments of the building
of the social world, show that they are distinct, and develop a unified model for
the building of the social world, the grounding–anchoring model.
Part Two is “Groups and the Failure of Individualism.” This part of the book
focuses on grounding facts about groups of people. The aims of Part Two are (1) to
show that individualism is mistaken even for basic facts about groups of people;
(2) to demonstrate that group intention and action can depend on more than their
members, and to challenge prevailing views; and (3) to illustrate how to approach
the grounds of social facts in general.
Though the book is not terribly long, it covers a lot of ground. I have found
that readers and commentators often focus exclusively on the first part, and in
particular on the idea of “anchoring.” It is true that the grounding–anchoring
model is one of the centerpieces of the book, but I hope it does not completely
overshadow the second half. For people working on collective intention, judg-
ment, and attitudes, Part Two may be even more relevant than Part One is.

2 Part One: Foundations, Old and New

Part One of the book reworks social ontology and its foundations more gener-
ally. Chapters 1–4 present the background of the prevailing approaches to social
ontology, starting with a little history and leading up to the present consensus.
Chapters 5–9 develop a unified model for social ontology – the grounding and
anchoring model – and use it to clarify problems and views in social ontology.

2.1 Two Prevailing Approaches

Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the debate between individualism and holism and the
social sciences. Theorists have long worried about “spirits” in social explana-
tions, and have wanted to put the metaphysics of the social world on a solid
footing. The chapters discuss the evolution of the debate in the late twentieth

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century. A good deal of the debate has been muddied by the confusion of ques-
tions about methodology and explanation in the social sciences with questions
about ontology. The contemporary consensus is that explanatory individualism
is questionable: it is not clear that social explanations can or should be given in
terms of individuals. But that ontological individualism (typically understood as
a thesis about the supervenience of social properties on individualistic ones) is
straightforwardly true.
Chapter 3 raises doubts about this consensus. Ontological individualism is
a stronger thesis than many people have realized. To illustrate this, the chapter
examines the failure of a similar thesis in cell biology and how it misled practition-
ers. And then it shows that the same lessons apply to social theory. The chapter
does not conclusively argue against ontological individualism (that comes later),
but clarifies its connection to the practice of social science and gives intuitive
reasons for doubting it.
Chapter 4 turns to a completely different approach to social ontology, and a
competing consensus about how the social world is built. That is what some have
called the “standard model of social ontology,” of which John Searle is the most
prominent representative. The idea is that the social world is a kind of projection
of our thoughts, or attitudes, onto the world. We, as a community, make the social
world by thinking of it in a particular way. The chapter describes Searle’s theory
of institutional facts, constitutive rules, and the assignment of status through col-
lective acceptance. It also describes Hume’s theory of social convention, another
example of this model. The chapter describes the tension between the “standard
model” and the consensus view on ontological individualism.
Thus we have two competing models for the building of the social world. The
two models take different social entities as paradigmatic. The “ontological indi-
vidualist” uses examples like crowds, bazaars, and flows of commuters. That is,
social objects that are composed of people. The “standard model” uses examples
like dollars and parking spaces. That is, social objects that seem to involve assign-
ing a status onto a physical object. How are these related?

2.2 Anchoring and Grounding

Chapter 5 is a quick primer on basic metaphysical tools that will be useful for
social ontology. It presents facts and propositions, possibility, properties and
relations, and social facts and social kinds. Then it introduces the idea of ground-
ing. The chapter’s aim is to give a reasonably precise way to make and assess
claims about the nature of the social world. Apart from minor exceptions, it sticks
to the standard interpretation of the standard tools.

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Chapter 6 presents anchoring and the grounding–anchoring model of how

social facts are built. It explains how the two competing traditions about the
nature of the social world can be unified. At the core of the model is the idea
that there are different ways of “setting up” how social facts are grounded. We
need to distinguish the facts that set up these ways of grounding from the facts
that do the grounding. For example, there are certain conditions for a piece of
meat to be kosher. If it comes from a pig, for instance, it is not kosher. Then there
are the facts that set up, or “anchor,” those conditions. Perhaps these conditions
are a product of agreement by religious authorities; perhaps a product of social
acceptance; perhaps a product of social practices; or perhaps a product of divine
command. Whatever these anchors are, they are the things that put in place the
conditions for grounding a fact of the form x is kosher.
The basic elements of the model are represented graphically in Figure 1. A
frame is a universe of possible worlds, and frame principles articulate how social
facts are grounded in the frame. For instance, in our frame, there are frame prin-
ciples articulating how a fact of the form x is kosher are grounded.
Within a frame are worlds – the actual world, and the other possible worlds.
The frame principles apply to all worlds in the frame: we can look around actual
and possible worlds to investigate whether various social facts obtain in those
worlds. In any particular world, a social fact might or might not obtain, depend-
ing on whether there are appropriate grounds in that world. For instance, there
might be a pig in some place in a given world. That grounds the fact that there is
an unkosher animal in that place in that world.
Frame principles are very general, and do not have to take any canonical
form. (In Chapter 11, I talk about the wide variety of forms frame principles take.)
In a sense, the idea of a frame principle can be seen as a generalization of John
Searle’s notion of a “constitutive rule.” And his theory of collective acceptance
can be seen as a particular theory of anchoring. Searle argues that all constitutive

Fig. 1: The grounding–anchoring model.

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130      Brian Epstein

rules have a single simple form (X counts as Y in C), and that a constitutive rule
is always and only anchored by collective acceptance of the rule itself. But these
limited conceptions of the form of constitutive rules and how they are put in place
are radically inadequate.
Chapter 7 uses theories of law and legality to illuminate the grounding–
anchoring model. In particular, it explains how laws are best understood as a
kind of frame principle. This helps both clarify the model and also the nature of
law. The main focus of the chapter is H.L.A. Hart’s theory of law, and his distinc-
tion between primary rules and secondary rules. Each of these can be understood
as a kind of frame principle, with frames nested inside of other frames. Interest-
ingly, we can then use the model to clarify some longstanding debates between
Hart and Ronald Dworkin regarding the nature of law.
In Chapter 8, I clarify two distinct claims about the relation of individuals to
the social world, which are often conflated. One claim is ontological individualism:
this is a claim about how social facts can be grounded. A distinct claim is “anchor
individualism”: this is a claim about how frame principles can be anchored.
Both ontological individualism and anchor individualism are false. Formu-
lating them precisely (and charitably) is an important step to showing this. I
argue that ontological individualism is false. Anchor individualism is also false,
but arguing that is beyond the scope of the book; it will require a more thorough
examination of the varieties of anchoring.
Chapter 9 wraps up the discussion of grounding and anchoring by address-
ing a common worry: why is not anchoring just a species of grounding? Instead
of separating the anchors and grounds for a social fact, maybe social facts are
grounded by a conjunction of what I call the anchors and what I call the grounds.
In this chapter, I give a series of arguments against this “conjunctivist” view. The
key problem with conjunctivism is that it gets the grounding conditions wrong for
social facts. And the central piece of evidence that conjunctivists use – a kind of
argument about counterfactuals – turns out to be no evidence at all. Anchoring is
a distinct metaphysical relation.

3 P
 art Two: Groups and the Failure of
Individualism
This part of the book focuses on grounding facts about groups of people. It argues
that individualism is mistaken even for basic facts about groups of people, chal-
lenges the dominant views of group intention and action, and discusses how
to investigate grounding in general. Chapters 10–13 talk about groups and facts

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 Précis of The Ant Trap      131

about them in general, showing how we can work though the grounds for certain
facts about groups, and then Chapters 14–18 deal with group intentions and
group agency.

3.1 Groups and How to Ground Facts About Them

What is a group? There is a growing literature nowadays trying to identify the

mathematical object that groups are: are they sets? Classes? Collections? Struc-
tures? I find these unhelpful. There are many mathematical models of a group,
but I see no reason to identify a group with this sort of object. Instead, in Chapter
10 I begin with a broad and generic characterization of groups: they are entities
constituted by and only by people. A benefit of this characterization is that it
allows us to make sense of important features of groups – in particular, that they
can change their memberships, and that there can be distinct groups that have
identical memberships. To make sense of this, I discuss how to understand con-
stitution, and also refine some views in the literature.
Chapter 11 begins the main topic of this part. What kinds of facts about groups
are there, and how are they grounded? What are some techniques for investigat-
ing these? Answering these questions helps us approach group intention and
action: after all, facts about group intention and action are among the facts about
a group. But this chapter leads off with a simpler case. I consider facts about one
particular group: the Supreme Court. I illustrate how to work through a few exam-
ples, including facts about the existence, membership, and powers of the Court.
With these examples, it is easy to see that (1) there is a long list of facts relevant
to social theory, not just the limited range often treated in social ontology, and (2)
facts about groups are typically grounded by a variety of heterogeneous facts, not
just by facts about the group members or even facts about people at all.
Chapter 12 has two complementary goals. One is to make sense of something
puzzling: how can it make sense for a group to persist, and especially through
times when it has no members? (This could, for instance, happen with the
Supreme Court if all the members resigned at once and then were replaced.) How
can we identify a group over time, if not through its members? The second goal is
to clarify and generalize an important tool of metaphysics: the idea of a criterion
of identity. Metaphysicians often use criteria of identity to talk about persistence.
But it turns out that in their standard formulation, they cannot handle cases like
this. In this chapter, I develop a general notion, which I call a “cross-identifying
criterion,” and apply it to groups.
A key reason I discuss criteria of identity here is that we need it for Chapter
13. That chapter is like an advanced version of Chapter 11. Instead of showing how

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we look into the grounds of simple facts, it moves to some thornier facts we might
encounter in building models in the social sciences. For instance, we often want
to track facts about a particular group over time, or across different possibilities.
Or there may be several groups of a given kind, like a number of teams of some
sort, where we need to track the properties of each even as members come and go.
Using the tools from the previous chapter, in Chapter 13 I show how to attack the
grounding of these more complex facts.

3.2 Group Intentions and Actions

With this experience working with facts about groups, in Chapter 14 I turn to
group intentions and actions. It is almost universally held among people who
study group attitudes that they are exhaustively determined by the attitudes of
the members of the group. This is either tacitly assumed or explicitly argued by
Michael Bratman, Christian List, Philip Pettit, and many others. The aim of this
chapter is start undercutting this assumption. When we look at group properties
in general, there are a great many ways they are determined. Sometimes it does
require that members have a property of a certain kind in order for the group to
have properties of that kind. But a great many properties do not work this way.
With some properties of a group, the members are actually completely irrelevant.
This chapter describes several different patterns of how group properties are
related to member properties.
Chapter 15 then attacks group action head on. It argues that the actions
taken by a group can depend on much more than the actions taken by the group
members. This is shown with three different kinds of examples. First are cases
involving groups with hierarchies, divisions of labor, or structures of power,
where different members make unequal contributions to group action. If the posi-
tions in the hierarchy depend on facts about non-members, this implies that the
actions taken by the group may likewise depend on non-members. Second are
cases involving direct constraints on group action, such as conditions on when
the group is in session, its jurisdiction, and its powers. And the third cases involve
membership constraints in political systems.
This last set of cases has practical implications for a topic in political science:
the phenomenon of electoral control. In certain situations, it is not the legislators,
but the electorate, who ontologically determine the actions of the legislature. This
observation has the potential to open a new route to modeling legislative action.
In some ways, group action is the easy case. Group intention is a little subtler,
in order to show that it is often determined by more than the attitudes of the
members. This is the argument of Chapter 16. It starts from the idea that the

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model for the practical activity of groups is the practical activity of individuals.
The functional roles that group intention plays for groups are analogous to the
roles that individual intention plays for people. And intention is part of a system
of practical activity, involving intention, planning, deliberation, and action. This
means that the factors that determine group action are tied to those that deter-
mine group intention. Extending the cases from Chapter 15, I show that factors
entirely external to the members can be among the ontological grounds of the
intentions of a group.
Together, these arguments show that we need to develop a new approach to
modeling group intention and other attitudes. Prevailing models focus only on
group members, and argue about infinite nuances regarding just which proper-
ties of members aggregate in which ways into group attitudes. But for all their
nuance, these models ignore whole swaths of factors that may be far more impor-
tant for determining the attitudes of real-world groups.
The last two chapters of the book discuss the main theories of social groups in
the literature. What is it for a group to be an agent? One approach takes genuine
social groups to be “social integrates”; that is, for the members to have certain
attitudes, beliefs, or commitments toward one another and toward the group as
a whole. Representatives of this view include Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman,
and Philip Pettit. Chapter 17 presents these respective theories, and shows that
they are built on unfortunate and arbitrary limitations. In many cases, social inte-
gration is neither necessary nor sufficient for group agency.
A second approach to group agents is the “status model.” Representatives
of this include John Searle, Raimo Tuomela, and Frank Hindriks. On this view,
a group can be an agent in virtue of having a particular status projected on it.
Chapter 18 presents these theories, and argues that it does not make sense to
see agency as projected onto a group. For a group to be an agent, it must realize
a system of practical activity. Not all the work of doing this must fall on the
shoulders of group members: a group can be an agent even without much social
integration, if there are other structures in place to do the work. But status assign-
ments do not do anything to make a group into an agent.
Behind both of these approaches is the same mistaken individualistic
assumption: if a group takes action, or has an attitude, that must be fully imple-
mented via its members. So the social integrate model puts all responsibility for
group agency on the members. The status model recognizes that many groups
(like corporate boards) can be agents while failing to meet anything like the
requirements set out by the social integrate theorists. So they infer that the only
way such groups can be agents is by having it projected upon them. Yet these
seem like the two available alternatives only because they overlook all the other
factors surrounding groups – infrastructures, external constraints, membership

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 134      Brian Epstein

requirements, existence conditions, assignment of positions of power, and so

on – which do not depend on the members and yet play key roles in their per-
formance of practical activities. Once we abandon the dogma that facts about
groups are exhaustively determined by facts about their members, groups and
their attitudes take on a whole new look.

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