From Individual Intentionality to the Big Other: An Emergentist Model of Social Ontology

This paper proposes an emergentist model of social ontology that resolves a long-standing explanatory stalemate between methodological individualism and holism. Rather than treating social order as either an aggregate of isolated intentions or a mysterious collective subject, it argues that individual intentionality can, under conditions of interaction, coordination, and institutionalization, generate a normative structure that becomes causally efficacious at the social level. This structure—identified here as the Big Other—operates through constitutive emergence, formal causation, and feedback-driven norm maintenance. The model explains how norms persist, guide practice, and sometimes shift abruptly at tipping points, while remaining compatible with physical causal closure. By showing how social forms can be both emergent and explanatory, the paper offers a naturalized framework that bridges methodological individualism and holism.