Group Conflict as Social Contradiction - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 45

For example, take a strategic setting described by game theory, such as a market.
We claim that it is a category mistake to ascribe attitudes to the outcome of the
interaction of agents, e.g. “the market believes, decides, intends, ...to p .” The point
is that such ascription may be metaphorically effective, however it is not grounded
in a definition of any agent who is entitled to carry the social or collective belief,
decision, intention. Namely, the market is not constructed as an agent.
On the other hand, there are cases in which it is meaningful, and sometimes even
necessary, to ascribe attitudes to parliaments, representative assemblies, corpora-
tions, organizations. For example, ascribing attitudes to the group is required, in
case we want to ascribe responsibility to the group itself.
The point is that, whenever we want to ascribe attitudes to a group, we need to
show that the group is some type of agent. We are going to define this specific type
of group that we label social agentive group . We will show that this notion of social
group is required in order to understand the type of conflict of SCT paradoxes.
A social agentive group depends on a set of individuals N and on an aggregation
procedure in the sense of Sect. 2.3 . The social agentive group is defined by those
agents that agree to be subject to a particular aggregation procedure. The fact that
such individuals acknowledge an aggregation procedure means simply that they
agree on the rule to settle their conflicts. For example, the group of representatives
in a parliament and the majority rule: a single representative may disagree with a
collective decision, however she/he implicitly has to acknowledge it and be subject
to the consequences of that decision. Note that any set of individuals and any of the
aggregation procedures in the sense of Sect. 2.3 define a social agentive group. We
view the agreement on the aggregation procedure as baptizing a new type of object,
namely a new agent, the social agentive group, SAG.g/ . 4
We need to introduce the following categories. Let AGG be the class of
aggregation procedures, GRP the class of groups (i.e., sets of individuals), IND
the class of individual agents. We represent the membership of an individual i in a
group N by means of the relation MEMB.i;N/ . Moreover, we introduce ACK.i;f /
to represent the acknowledgment relation that holds between an individual i and an
aggregation procedure f . 5 Firstly, we define a social agentive group as a subclass
of agentive social objects ASO defined in Masolo et al. ( 2004 ) and Bottazzi and
Ferrario ( 2009 ). That is, a social agentive group is a social object that is assumed to
have agency: SAG.x/ ! ASO.x/ .
4 We are assuming that the social agentive group is a distinct object with respect to the group as a
set of individuals. The reason is that we want to attribute to the social agentive group properties
of a different kind with respect to those that we can attribute to the group. In this sense, the social
agentive group is a qua object.
5 Here we present the definitions in a semi-formal fashion. Our analysis can be incorporated in the
ontological treatment of DOLCE (Masolo et al. 2003 ). Note that, although the definition seems to
be in second order logic, it is possible to flatten the hierarchy of concepts by typing them. This is
the so-called reification strategy of DOLCE . We leave a precise presentation of DOLCE for future
work.