Convenors:
• Prof. Adam Dyrda (Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, convenor)
• Dr Maciej Juzaszek (University of Wrocław, Poland)
• Dr Cuizhu Wang (Jagiellonian University in Krakow)
• Bartosz Biskup, PhD candidate (Jagiellonian University in Krakow)

We welcome all speakers aiming to stress the connection between ethics of belief and social ontology. The assumption of the workshop is that beliefs supplemented with certain attitudes (such as collective attitudes, intentions, recognition, commitments, representational states etc.) contribute to the existence and functioning of social/legal institutions. The attendees will discuss the specificity of such beliefs and attitudes, thanks to which our institutional world exists (persists and changes) and thanks to which those institutions act (if they do at all) in legal and moral contexts. They will also discuss the conditions (descriptive/psychological or normative/ethical/epistemological) under which such beliefs and attitudes are generated and justified. We welcome both armchair analyses as well as empirical studies rooted in developed operational accounts of institutional beliefs. The focus is on how the relevant shared beliefs and attitudes are and should be produced (whereas most social ontologists rather assume that they are contingent, brute facts that ground institutional facts; notable exceptions are Lackey 2021, Silva Jr. 2019, Schwenkenbecker 2021, Matthias 2011).
It is widely recognized in contemporary ethics that not only deeds but also beliefs are subjects of normative evaluation and that we can therefore speak about the ethics of belief. Although many notable figures in the history of philosophy held views regarding the qualities that rational or justified beliefs should possess, the ethics of belief was not systematically developed until the 20th century, at first in the context of religious studies but eventually in epistemology. The popular subjects of inquiry of epistemologists and moral philosophers have been everyday religious or scientific beliefs. Beliefs of or about institutions (about the existence of institutions in particular) have been discussed scarcely, if at all. This is probably because the branch of ontology devoted to social institutions and artefacts began to emerge only in the mid-20th century. The developments within the field of social ontology, especially those that ascribe a fundamental role to institutional beliefs and propositional attitudes, suggest that ethical reflection on such beliefs should be given special attention. This attention may take on many forms. On the one hand, it is often claimed that institutional kinds are constitutively dependent on the content of the collective beliefs of some community (e.g. Searle 1995; Thomasson 2007; Tuomela 2002; within the field of legal philosophy: Marmor 2011, Crowe 2014 or Burazin 2015). The standard assumption is that these institutions are explicitly represented in such beliefs, though this might not always be the case (compare mind-dependent but concept-independent social kinds like recession, inflation, racism, or only partially concept-dependent kinds like war, money or law in general; Khalidi 2019). In such cases relevant “institution-making” beliefs are indirect, they pertain to contextual features rather than a social kind in question. Since “kind-ness” or “kindcreation” in social or institutional contexts is interest-relative, one may argue that similar considerations of indirectness pertain to institutional beliefs (e.g., beliefs about institutions; or beliefs held regarding institutions), both in cases of lowly and highly conventionalized (formalized) institutional kinds. It is striking that there has been no comprehensive study of the ethical status of such beliefs (and other related attitudes). Despite the recent popularity of social ontology, descriptive questions concerning the ontological status of social reality (including institutional, i.e. legal, kinds) are predominant, and related normative questions are rarely asked.

On the other hand, many theorists distinguish between foundational beliefs (FO-beliefs, of individual agents or group agents, that constitute the institutional world; given certain conditions) and beliefs of institutionalized groups (OF-beliefs, beliefs of institutions qua group agents). We obviously attribute such beliefs to organizations in everyday language and it is increasingly common among social ontologists to consider such attributions as accurately representing the social world – institutions actually do believe things and use such beliefs to form intentions and act. Here, the main objective would be to identify and discuss the dynamics between FO- and OF-beliefs and related attitudes (along with their justifications) or analyze the unique nature, justification, and ethics of OF-beliefs and their relevance to the moral and legal responsibility of the institutions that hold them. As stressed above, one important focus in this workshop is on how the relevant shared beliefs and attitudes are and should be produced, rather than – as is usually done within social ontology – simply assuming that they are contingent, brute facts that ground institutional facts.