Introduction

Many social and collective properties and notions are man-made in a collective sense. In particular, this holds true of social institutions of the general kind, such as natural languages, legal systems, and economic notions (e.g. money, market). Similarly, such social institutions as the school, church, government, leadership, and authority are collectively created and maintained. The resulting collectivity features (ontologically: ideas in people's minds and their collective activities) characterize the man-maintained parts of the social world.

In this chapter we will study “collectivity” in the sense that a feature of the social world can be regarded as collective as opposed to being private or personal. We argue in this chapter that collectivity is created through collective acceptance. We have elsewhere (in Balzer and Tuomela 1997b; Tuomela and Balzer 1999) offered a conceptually precise and partially formalized “Collective Acceptance” account of collectivity in a “constructivist” group phenomenon. The first two sections of the chapter will be concerned with the presentation of that account. The basic contribution of this chapter concerns the nature of collective attitudes and collective goals in particular (section 3). It turns out that our account of collective acceptance and collective goals throws some light on collective and public goods, which are notions of interest to an economist. However, our main interests in this chapter are not so much in the philosophical and conceptual problems related to economics but rather in the philosophy of social notions and social ontology.