Margaret Gilbert
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Margaret Gilbert is a philosopher best known for her work in the philosophy of social sciences, especially the 1989 book On Social Facts. She was born in the United Kingdom and obtained a B. A. degree in Classics and Philosophy from Cambridge University and a B. Phil. and D. Phil. degree in Philosophy from Oxford University. From 1983 until 2006, she taught at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she was Professor of Philosophy. As of Fall 2006, she holds the Abraham I. Melden Chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. She has been a visiting teacher and researcher at many academic institutions including Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, Wolfson College, Oxford, Technische Universität Dresden, King's College London, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences.
Gilbert's other books include Living Together: Rationality, Sociality, and Obligation (1996), Sociality and Responsibility: New Essays in Plural Subject Theory (2000), Marcher Ensemble: Essais sur les Fondations de la Vie Collective (2003), and A Theory of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment, and the Bonds of Society (2006).
In On Social Facts she presented accounts of a number of central social phenomena. These include social conventions, social groups in a central sense of the term, group languages, collective belief, and acting together. She argued that these were all 'plural subject phenomena', with a plural subject' defined in terms a special kind of commitment: a joint commitment and jointly accepted views within a group. "The goal of any join action is seen by the participants as the goal of a plural subject," she writes (164). When people are jointly committed to some action, belief, attitude, or other such attribute they constitute, by definition, a plural subject. She also writes, based on Rousseau, that "One is willing to be the member of a plural subject if one is willing, at last in relation to certain conditions, to put one's own will into a 'pool of wills' dedicated, as one, to a single goal" (18). She compared the plural subject to the singular subject (also singular agency, individualism or individual autonomy), and contended that though singular agency is present in the plural subject, it is a different concept and "In order for individual human beings to form collectivities, they must take on a special character, a 'new' character, in so far as they need not, qua human beings, have that character. Moreover, humans must form a whole or unit of a special kind, a unit of a kind that can...be specified...a plural subject" (431).
In subsequent writings Gilbert has continued the development and application of her plural subject theory. Topics she has addressed include political obligation, collective moral responsibility, agreements and promises, collective emotions, and shared values. She has presented accounts of all of these in terms of joint commitment.
She was married to noted philosopher Saul Kripke and is the sister of famed British historian Sir Martin Gilbert.
[edit] References
Margaret Gilbert. On Social Facts. London, New York: Routledge, 1989.
