This Unity of Life and Action: Revisiting the Realist Theory of Group Personality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent revival of interest in British political pluralism has not been met with similar interest in reviving the realist theory of group personality, a central tenet of the pluralist argument, which considered (at least some) associations to be actual subjects with autonomous wills. This theory stands opposed to the contract theory of group personality whereby groups are reducible to the aggregate will of their members expressed through a network of reciprocal contracts between them, and to the fiat theory whereby corporations are legal fictions whose very existence depends on the will of the state. Against both of these alternatives, I seek to reconstruct a viable version of the realist theory of group personality. Drawing on Philip Pettit’s work on intentionality and collective persons, and on contemporary theories of collective identity and corporate constitutionalism, I affirm that (at least some) groups have a capacity for agency at least equivalent to that of natural persons which should be similarly recognized in law. This is underscored by a historical analysis of ‘natural’ personality, which shows it to be no less artificial as juridical personality, and by a reflection on the collective self-understanding of precisely those groups that concerned the British pluralists. I conclude by suggesting some currently existing legal mechanisms by which the realist theory may be given institutional form.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".