Collective Problematization and Institutions
A Study in the Social Epistemology of Problem Domains and Group Action
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Humboldt Fellowship at the University of Bayreuth, Germany 2026 - 28
(in collaboration with Prof. Olivier Roy)
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Institutions, whether conceived as top-down formal rules or spontaneously generated patterns of behavior, can be seen as enabling the social pursuit of problem solving (e.g., Hindriks & Guala 2019). For example, money is part of an institutional system that makes it much easier to coordinate exchanges compared to barter.
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However, the existence of problems themselves, e.g., specific situations in which two or more agents need to coordinate their behavior, whether in the exchange of some goods or something else, is usually assumed - as if problems were just "out there" in the world, waiting for someone to pick them up. Meanwhile, this assumption has already been challenged for the case of individual agency in the field of cognitive science, especially within the paradigms called "embodied cognition" and "niche construction theory".
Building on these insights in cognitive science, the project asks the following question in the fields of social epistemology and social ontology: How are problems constituted by collective actions, and how is it possible for a collective to establish a shared domain of problems?
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Philosophy of Collective Action, Social Ontology and Institutional Theory
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This is a philosophical project based on a certain generalization of Kenneth Arrow's remark (originally referring to firms) that an agent was once considered "a point, or at any rate a black box" (1999, p. vii). That is, its internal workings were not addressed theoretically. However, agents "are palpably not points. They have an internal structure" (ibid.), and this structure - consisting of different cognitive capacities, knowledge, preferences, normative attitudes - affects the way agents cooperate or compete in the social domain.
These internal structures have already been explored by a variety of collaborating disciplines, including cognitive science or behavioral economics. The same is true for collective action itself, thanks to important advances in the study of institutions (see e.g. Guala 2016), collective action and collective intentionality (e.g. Bratman 1999, Ludwig 2007, List & Petit 2011), or the social dimension of knowledge (e.g. Goldberg 2011).
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However, since all collective action takes place in a particular domain or environment, there must also be structures in that domain that enable agents to identify and (if necessary) coordinate their strategies. This means not only physical infrastructure, but also a space filled with collectively recognized goals, opportunities, challenges, or threats. From this perspective, one thing is still largely a "black box" in Arrow's sense, in need of a more thorough conceptual analysis; the black box the agent is in; that is, a domain in which all decisions, behaviors, or rules are possible due to collectively recognized problems. In short - the problem domain. The project fills this gap.
Institutional theory, broadly construed, provides some conceptual resources for addressing the aforementioned puzzle. Ostrom's (1990, 2005) work on the concept of commons is particularly relevant here. Problem domains can be seen as similar to what Ostrom calls "knowledge commons". The concept abstracts from resources such as fisheries, forests, or grasslands, which are standard examples of commons, and conceptualizes knowledge along the same lines as a resource of information that is collectively created and owned by a particular society or group, such as textbook knowledge in physics or digital knowledge commons such as Wikipedia. The link between knowledge commons and problem domains is based on the fact that collective recognition of a need, opportunity, or threat requires shared knowledge (and shared ignorance; see below). At present, however, this conceptual link has not been properly worked out in social ontology and social epistemology.
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Cognitive Science and Embodied Cognition
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Cognitive scientists working within the embodied cognition paradigm have already recognized that agents and their environments determine each other, so that it makes little sense to refer to the latter without specifying whose environment it is, and it makes little sense to refer to an agent or subject without specifying the environment in which it operates. This also applies to problem domains. What counts (or can count) as a challenge, an opportunity or danger, depends in part on the cognitive capacities of a particular agent (an individual, but perhaps more interestingly, a species or a collective). For example, in the seminal work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), it is stated that “species bring forth and specifies its own domain of problems to be solved (…)” and “this domain does not exist ‘out there’ in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination” (Varela et al 1991: 198; see also di Paolo et al 2017; Newen et al 2018).
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Another way to flesh out this idea is to use the concepts of niche and niche construction (e.g. Odling-Smee 2024) and to argue that all cognitive beings “transform problem spaces in ways that aid (or sometimes impede) thinking and reasoning about some target domain” (Clark 2005: 256–257; see also Bertolotti & Magnani 2017; Werner 2020). Therefore, the co-determination of an agent and its problem domain can be understood as a specific niche construction.
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While some of these insights have been discussed in philosophy (e.g. Petracca & Gallagher 2020; Rust 2023), they have not yet been brought to bear on questions in the philosophy of collective action or social ontology. In particular, the collective constitution of the problem domain remains largely unexplored in these areas of philosophy.
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Research Outline
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The main research question is therefore the following: how is it possible for collectives to establish a shared domain of goals, opportunities; to agree upon needs or dangers? The key point of this project is that this question can be answered by developing the concept of problematization.
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The capacity for problematization, as it will be proposed, stands behind the emergence of a collective problem domain. While there is a consensus in the cognitive and social sciences that dealing with new and uncertain conditions is a challenge for cognition and social organization, the focus here is on something quite opposite – “dealing” with the familiar. Informally, problematization is the ability to take a familiar event or phenomenon as if it were new; to take an entity that supposedly carries no information as a vehicle of information. This leads, first, to genuinely new questions, which are articulations of problems, and to new possibilities for action.
What underpins the notion of problematization is the idea, elaborated in the paradigm of embodied cognition and niche construction, that there is no environment that simply awaits agents (humans or other animals); on the contrary, each such domain is enacted (Varela et al. 1991) in a specific guise or constructed in a specific way, depending on the cognitive capacities of different agents. What I propose to add to this story is twofold:
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First, I propose that part of the process of enactment, or niche construction, is the ability to create new incentives for action, so to speak, in a niche that otherwise seems perfectly familiar and predictable. This is what I call problematization. Crucially, there is no theory of problematization in the literature.
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Second, problematization cannot be just an individual endeavor. On the contrary, according to the hypothesis to be developed, problematization is a collective action made possible by the complex structure of social relations within a collective, including - crucially - epistemic dependencies between the members of that collective, which decide what the collective knows and what it doesn't know.
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Additional conceptual tools are therefore needed to account for the collective capacity to problematize. The project will use the concepts of (a) epistemic dependence (primarily in terms of questions; see below), (b) pooled knowledge, and (c) pooled ignorance (also articulated in terms of questions).
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The standard definition of epistemic dependence (e.g. Goldberg 2011) refers to cases where a variation within the beliefs held by one person (or a community, if we agree on collective beliefs) "makes for" a relevant variation within the beliefs of another person, who can be considered epistemically dependent in such circumstances. Here, however, if the goal is to account for collective problematization, a relevant dependence with respect to questions is more appropriate (see Werner 2023), insofar as questions articulate (and are products of) acts of problematization. This means cases when the community not only impacts the content of someone's beliefs with respect to a particular problem, but when the impact pertains to the very problem to be addressed. Put simply, it's not just about shaping someone's views on this or that issue; it's about shaping someone's very agenda – what issue is at stake. Thus what makes an act of problematization collective is, in the first place, the fact that it's put into a system of epistemic dependencies.
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However, collective problematization makes use of already available resources of information or knowledge, so that each step of this specific process of niche (problem domain) construction rests of on previous steps. In this context the project shall make use of the concept of pooled knowledge (Roy & Schwenkenbecher 2021), which is attributable to a group but not (or not necessarily) to all individuals belonging to that group. According to the hypothesis to be set forth, the pooled knowledge possessed by a group makes room for the latter to recognize what it lacks in the said epistemic resource, so that in addition to the pooled knowledge there is also what I propose to call "pooled ignorance".
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Problematization thought of as a process of (cognitive) niche construction can therefore be tentatively understood as a process of identifying pooled ignorance on the base of pooled knowledge by a collective organized, among other factors, by the structure of epistemic dependencies concerning the questions the members ask.
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In the final phase, the project will draw on and at the same time contribute to various accounts of institutional diversity (Ostrom 2005) and institutional resilience (Ostrom 1990; Holling 2001; Folke 2006; Aligica 2013). In both of these issues Ostrom’s concept of knowledge commons plays a crucial role. The project shall rearticulate it in terms of pooled knowledge, but also pooled ignorance whose recognition thanks to problematization gives Ostrom’s idea a more dynamic character. In this context, the project will also clarify the role of experts and expert knowledge (e.g., Douglas 2021) and epistemic authority (Fricker 2007), both widely discussed in contemporary social epistemology, here considered in relation to the question of what division of labor facilitates the establishment of a shared problem domain and its development by means of problematization.