by Jo-Jo Koo
Dissertation
What does it mean to say that the human individual is socially constituted? I argue that the very capacity to be a... more
What does it mean to say that the human individual is socially constituted? I argue that the very capacity to be a human agent and self must draw on a shared public understanding of the practices, norms, and roles that renders this capacity intelligible in the first place. Contrary to what we commonly assume, interpersonal interactions cannot serve as the basis for an adequate understanding of human sociality. For in order to engage in such interactions, individuals have to be already socially constituted.
In Part I, Ch. 1, of the dissertation, I elaborate and endorse two theses of Philip Pettit’s regarding how we should think about the social constitution of the individual. First, we should not think the latter consists merely in the fact that human beings depend causally, materially, psychologically, institutionally, etc., on one another for their survival and minimal flourishing. Second, establishing that the individual is socially constituted turns on showing how some basic capacity that is central for being human cannot be actualized absent this constitution, not how this individual is somehow subservient as a part or aspect of some larger social whole. Pettit, however, identifies the capacity in question as the capacity to think, which (he argues) is social insofar as it rests on a basis of social interactions. Against that, I argue that the relevant capacity is our very ability to be in the world.
I spell this out in Ch. 2 by drawing on Heidegger’s conception of human social existence in Being and Time. I argue first that the social constitution of the individual can be adequately understood only when it is seen as an inherent aspect of what is required for a human being to be in the world at all. I then explain the crucial function of the shared public normativity on the basis of which the individual makes sense of things in the world, including herself and her relations with others. I show how the individual is socially constituted in that her understanding of this normative intelligibility is at once what makes available and what constrains the attitudes, actions, self-understandings, and projects that she can adopt. Contrary to its initial appearance, this understanding of the social constitution of the individual does not preclude resistance to norms, but is what actually renders this resistance intelligible in the first place. I conclude this chapter by addressing some familiar objections raised by some philosophers in the “continental” tradition (e.g., Sartre, Buber, Theunissen, Rentsch, Levinas) against a Heideggerian conception of human social existence.
In Part II of the dissertation, I consider various forms of the interactionist understanding of human sociality that I argued against, on general grounds, in Part I. In Ch. 3, I sketch and criticize the interactionist accounts of collective intentionality that Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, and John Searle provide. I argue that these accounts are not only problematic by being either explanatorily circular or incomplete, but fundamentally flawed by assuming that individual agency can be intelligible and fully self-sufficient apart from its social constitution in the sense worked out in Part I.
In Ch. 4 I examine how Donald Davidson’s commitment to a form of interactionism shapes his account of successful linguistic communication and the objectivity of thought. I show that shared practices in the Heideggerian sense do not fall into the target range of Davidson’s attack on the idea that communication presupposes shared practices; moreover, shared practices in the Heideggerian sense actually enable the occurrence of such communication in ways that Davidson unjustifiably downplays. I trace his lack of appreciation of the significance of shared practices in this sense to his commitment to an interactionist conception of sociality. This commitment is also at work in his appeal to “triangulation” as a necessary condition for the objectivity of thought. I argue that this appeal, even on its own terms, either does no actual explanatory work or leaves mysterious how triangulation is supposed to be a necessary condition of thought.
In Ch. 5 I consider in greater depth how normativity connects with the social constitution of the individual. I approach this topic by sketching the contrast between individualist and communalist conceptions of rule-following that stem from divergent readings of the later Wittgenstein. I examine in particular the views of Michael Luntley and Meredith Williams, two sophisticated defenders, respectively, of individualism and communalism about the normativity of rule-following. Luntley mounts a devastating attack against standard appeals to the community as the source of normativity. In response, I take what is right about Luntley’s positive account of normativity and, contrary to what he holds, show how it actually coalesces with Williams’s best thinking about the social dimension of normativity. The result is a conception of normativity that not only integrates well with the Heideggerian conception of the social constitution of the individual, but deepens our understanding of the connection between normativity and normalization in this constitution.
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