Culture,essentialism, and agency: are individuals universally believed to be more real entities than groups?

Are human individuals universally seen to be more real entities (or more entitative, to use Campbell's, 1958, term) than social groups? Although the individual may be seen to be more entitative than social groups in the West, it is unclear whether this is the case in other cultures, especially in East Asia. Two aspects of perceived entitativity are distinguished: psychological essentialism (belief in the presence of essence‐like unchangeable properties) and agency (perception that a social entity is an agent), and examined for four social targets (individual, family, friendship group, and society) in three English‐speaking cultures (Australia, UK, and USA), three East Asian cultures (Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea), and two continental European cultures (Belgium and Germany). In all cultures, the individual person was seen to possess essence‐like unchangeable characteristics more than social groups (i.e. essentialized). As for agency, the individual person was seen to be more agentic than groups in Western cultures, but both individuals and groups were conferred an equal level of agency in East Asia. Individuals may be universally more essentialized than friendship groups and societies, but not always seen to be more agentic, than social groups. Implications of the results for conceptions of individualism and collectivism are discussed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Higher-Order Contingentism,Part 1: Closure and Generation

This paper is a study of higher-order contingentism – the view, roughly, that it is contingent what properties and propositions there are. We explore the motivations for this view and various ways in which it might be developed, synthesizing and expanding on work by Kit Fine, Robert Stalnaker, and Timothy Williamson. Special attention is paid to the question of whether the view makes sense by its own lights, or whether articulating the view requires drawing distinctions among possibilities that, according to the view itself, do not exist to be drawn. The paper begins with a non-technical exposition of the main ideas and technical results, which can be read on its own. This exposition is followed by a formal investigation of higher-order contingentism, in which the tools of variable-domain intensional model theory are used to articulate various versions of the view, understood as theories formulated in a higher-order modal language. Our overall assessment is mixed: higher-order contingentism can be fleshed out into an elegant systematic theory, but perhaps only at the cost of abandoning some of its original motivations.