Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

The Constitution of Institutions
Frank Hindriks, Groningen, The Netherlands
Institutions depend on human beings for their existence.
They are human constructs that would not be there if it
were not for us. The challenge is to unpack this. Are they
mere social constructs, or do they have a reality beyond
our social categorizations? Institutions involve human
beings and their (inter)actions. Can they simply be reduced
to these? Or do they have a reality that goes beyond
them? I shall suggest that institutions present us with a
number of puzzles that justify a serious investigation into
these issues.
A US president has the power to veto laws not due
to any superior physical or mental abilities, but because he
is granted this power by the American people. Apparently,
the powers of presidents do not depend on their intrinsic
features only. Examples such as this one pose problems
for a straightforward reduction of institutions to human
beings and their (inter)actions. Taking constitution to be a
(non-reductive) relation of unity without identity, I argue
that such puzzles dissolve once institutions are taken to be
constituted by human beings, their mental states, their
interactions, and their surroundings.
1. Against Identity and Mereology
Presumably institutional properties supervene on physical
ones. Supervenience, however, is a fairly innocent relation.
Both reductive and non-reductive materialists about
the mental accept that mental properties in some sense
supervene on physical ones. In order to provide an adequate
ontology of institutions, then, relations other than
supervenience have to be considered. The first one that I
consider is identity, which is a relation between entities
rather than between properties. I shall argue that institutions
are not identical to the entities they consist of or are
composed of (where these latter notions are used in a
metaphysically innocent sense). For the purposes of this
paper I focus on the case of organizations leaving other
kinds of institutions for another occasion.
Consider the United Nations (UN). The UN consists
of countries, which are its members that are united by the
Charter of the UN. Is the UN identical to the set of its
members? Presumably not. The UN can enlarge its
membership, while sets cannot. A set that has more
members than another set is numerically distinct from that
other set. The UN remains the same entity when it
acquires a new member.
What about organizations that have only one
member? Are they identical to their members? A limited
liability company (LLC) can consist of only one individual.
Even if it does, however, an LLC is not identical to that
person. An individual can create and later dissolve an LLC
that has only one member, herself. Someone who does so
existed before the LLC did, and she outlives it. So the
persistence conditions of organizations differ from the
entities they are made of. In other words, there is a
difference regarding what accounts for their identity over
time. 1
1 Cf. Ruben (1985) and Uzquiano (2004).
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Are organizations mereological sums of their
members? At least on some conceptions of them,
mereological sums they do not have any (causal)
properties their parts do not have (Lewis 1986). However,
the Security Council of the UN has the power to adopt
resolutions, but none of its members does. The UN can
have a code of conduct and ensure compliance to it
without any of its members doing so (recall that its
members are countries). Similar claims hold for other
organizations. An LLC can sue another company without
any of its members doing so. And a choir can sing a
cantata without any of its members doing so. The upshot is
that organizations can have causal properties none of their
members have.
One can, of course, conceive of mereological
relations in a more substantial way. The part-whole relation
might be an ontological relation between parts and wholes
each of which exist. Suppose it is also granted that wholes
can have causal properties none of its parts have in
isolation. Even then it would be inappropriate to conceive
of the relation between organizations and their members
as a mereological relation. This is because the part-whole
relation is transitive while the membership relation as it
applies to organizations is not. Countries consist of people,
the UN consists of countries, but the UN does not consist
of (exactly those) people: as a Dutch citizen, I am a
member of the Netherlands; I am not, however, a member
of the UN.
To sum up, the relation between organizations and
(collections of) human beings is not identity, nor is it a
mereological relation. They differ in persistence conditions
and causal properties. Furthermore, the relation between
them is non-transitive. In the next section, I shall argue
that, in order to accommodate these features, the relation
between organizations and (the collections of) their
members should be conceived of as constitution.
2. Constitution
Constitution is a relation of unity without identity. It obtains,
for instance, between a statue and the lump of clay of
which it is made. These are united in that they consist of
the same material. They are not identical to one another:
the lump of clay can even when the statue does not; the
statue can survive gradual replacement of the clay of
which it consists resulting in a situation in which the statue
still exists even though it contains none of the material of
which it consisted originally. These two features can be
captured in terms of a condition of material coincidence (1)
and a modal condition (2), a condition that captures possibilities
such as the non-existence of a statue in the presence
of a lump of clay.
In order to account for the fact that a particular lump
of clay does constitute a statue further conditions have to
be added. A notion of favourable conditions can serve a
useful purpose here. Statues owe their status of art object
to their surroundings. At a general level, they bear some
relation to an art-world (Baker 1997). They might, for
instance, have been commissioned as art objects. This is
one of the conditions that are favourable for an object to
constitute a statue. Such conditions explain why particular
objects are statues. They account for this in that they can