We often joke about how irrelevant philosophy is. But, here we find -- on a national stage -- a philosophical position from "social ontology." Can groups of people have intentions? Can a group action create 'meaning' for a document? https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1316003676918513664

We often talk about people having an intention. That they mean something when they talk. Even these individualistic notions can be tricky to make sense of. What if you say something vague without really thinking through what you meant?

Do you intend a consequence that you foresaw but didn't like? (I know that giving a student a bad grade will hurt their feelings, did I intend to hurt their feelings?) Do you intend something that you didn't foresee but should have foreseen? Etc.

Let's set those problems for individual intentions to the side for the minute and suppose that we can have a coherent idea of what an individual means or intends when she does something.

Can a group of people, like those who ratified the constitution, have an "intent?"

This is harder to make sense of. Many parts of the constitution are compromises, things that no one wanted exactly, but where a way to satisfy conflicting demands. What's the intent?

Even those parts that weren't officially compromises, may have been interpreted differently by different authors. They may have understood the words as implying different things or agreed to them for different purposes.

As we move from the original document to the amendments things get even more complicated. Who are the authors? The people who wrote the words? Congress who first passed the bill? The state legislators who had to ratify it? The populous? Etc.

Not only are we unsure if a given group has an intent, now we are not even sure who counts as the relevant group? And you can be sure that different groups will lead to different judgments of intent.

Maybe someone can deal with all these problems, but I've yet to see it. The originalist constitutional position takes a strong philosophical stance: one can make sense of these notions. However, none of them have really offered a satisfactory method for doing so.

(For those interested, Margret Gilbert's classic "On Social Facts" is a nice introduction to these issues. I don't agree with her position in that book, but it provides a good starting point for social ontology."