Information Technologies and the Collective Subject of Law

Sukharev Mikhail Valentinovich ORCID: 0000-0003-3190-9893 PhD in Economics Senior Scientific Associate, Institute of Economics, Department of Multidisciplinary Scientific Research, Karelian Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences 185030, Russia, Republic of Karelia, Petrozavodsk, A.Nevsky Ave., 50, office 313 suharev@narod.ru Other publications by this author

Theoretical foundations of the problem. The problem of the collective subject in legal science is still far from its universally recognized solution. Various sources use the terms "legal entity", "organization", "labor collective", "community" and so on ^[1]. For some, the legal status is relatively clearly defined (legal entity), for others - not. Ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities and peoples are also distinguished ^[2]. For a theoretical study of the problem of the collective subject as a subject of law, it is necessary to refer to the data of other sciences: sociology, psychology, philosophy using an interdisciplinary approach and dialectical method.

The novelty of the proposed research consists, firstly, in comparing the results of the study of a collective subject by various sciences: philosophy, sociology and psychology as applied to legal science, and, secondly, in raising the question of how digital communication and information processing systems affect collective subjects of legal relations.

The problem of the collective subject has been investigated by a number of scientists: Philosophers B. Barnes, I.T. Kasavin, E.A. Mamchur, A.V. Brushlinsky, G.P. Shchedrovitsky, etc., psychologists V.M. Bekhterev, Zhuravlev A.L. Poznyakov V.P. Rubinstein S.L., etc., sociologists O. Kont, D. Bloor, P. Bergen, T. Lukman, B. Tribulek, etc., lawyers D.N. Bakhrah, V.Ya. Boytsov, S.N. Bratus, A.L. Zhuravlev, O.S. Ioffe, N.A. Malkova, N.I.Matuzov, etc.

I.T. Kasavin gives such a definition of the collective subject of cognition (KSP): "The conceptual framework for considering KSP is derived from the working concept of the subject as such. The subject will be understood as an active principle that has consciousness and positions itself as different from the environment (object and other conditions). Accordingly, the CSP will be, firstly, a separate segment of the social whole in the form of a social group with a specific status and interests, which is attributed, secondly, to a certain type of knowledge (activity) and, thirdly, to some social institution with its characteristic forms of communication" ^[3].

All these signs (the creation of social groups, activity, distinguishing oneself from others, special interests, internal communication and even specific knowledge) are valid for all types of collective entities, both legal entities and informal, such as sports fans.

A number of researchers associate the concept of a collective subject with general knowledge and cognitive processes in a community of people. Indeed, a collective subject must make decisions that are uniform for the constituent community of people. Actually, in the legal sense, it is for these decisions and actions based on them that this collective entity is responsible. But in order to make decisions, the community must rely on the (legitimate) knowledge, values and ideas generally recognized by its members, otherwise they will not be able to make (and implement) a common decision.

Of course, in large communities, different groups of people, relying on different knowledge systems, can advocate for different solutions. But they should have more general principles (institutions) for resolving disagreements, such as discussions, voting, administration, court, for resolving contradictions and making a decision common to all.

So, in his book "Knowledge as Culture: a New Sociology of Knowledge" ^{[4, pp. 1-3, 24, 33]}, Doyle McCarthy writes: "... everything that people experience is selected, ordered and "evaluated" by intellectual and moral judgments and linguistic practices of the social world. Only through language, categories of thinking, norms, etc., experiences acquire a conscious and communicated form. ... groups, classes, institutions and even entire nations of the world compete in shaping public opinion and managing it; they perform an active function of knowledge in public life, since they generate and direct public opinion and actions. ... If ideologies are practices, then they are strategic practices related to the power and consequences of both positions and claims of groups. One of the common strategies of an ideologue is to claim a special, superior place and function in relation to other people's ideas and practices, for example, a claim to a theoretical, rational or spiritual position and, on this basis, the right to act as the final judge and arbiter over others." All this is true for collective subjects who are subjects of law.

An important role is played by "implicit knowledge", "implicit cognitive rules", which depend on the principles contained in the "background knowledge", which includes moral values, as well as ontological, metaphysical and epistemological principles that set the background of our interpretation of reality ^{[5, p. 46]}.

H. Reich writes: Groups with a strong common identity can form surprisingly easily and over time further strengthen the common identity due to the simple fact of being in the same group. Group identity enhances intra-group favoritism, as well as stereotyping of the external group: due to the accentuation effect, similarities (in thinking, appearance, adherence to intra-group norms and values) within the group are emphasized, and differences are downplayed to strengthen group identity. The possible similarities of the members of the outer group with the attributes of the inner group are similarly downplayed. Thanks to these mechanisms, the self-esteem of individual group members increases, since they consider themselves to correspond to characteristic intra-group norms and values, since these characteristics are usually viewed as more positive and desirable compared to negative and undesirable characteristics that are perceived as defining the external group (groups). A typical example is nationalism and stereotypes of nationalist outgroups ^[6].

Digital information technologies have been actively developing in recent decades, and the spread of social networks is especially active. This is a radical change in the ways of communication in human society, which can be compared only with the appearance of writing ^{[7, p. 240]} and which changes the ways of existence of collective subjects. M.A. Ivanova writes due to the fact that the development of the Internet creates legal problems: Of particular interest is the study of the problems of transformation of legal culture in the conditions of the development of a network society ^[8]. One of the important subjects of law are public associations ^[9].

To clarify the question of how digitalization affects the collective subject, it is necessary to refer to the provisions of philosophy and psychology.

First of all, a collective subject is impossible without knowledge of a common language ^{[10, p.65]}, without which communication, discussion of common problems, decision-making and maintenance of common rules of behavior and even values are impossible. This is true for very different types of collective subjects: from armies and army formations to sciences and sports fans. Many communities (from physicists to athletes) use their own special language, specific words and concepts.

Psychologists believe that a subject becomes a subject in the process of his activity, communication and other types of activity ^{[11, p.9]}. "... in the future, along with the concepts of "group", "collective", "collective (group) subject", new concepts will appear in social psychology, denoting a particular quality (in the sense of a qualitatively different state) ... such as: "community", "community", "collective unconscious", "corporation", "clique", "grouping", etc. ... One can agree with the opinion of A.V. Brushlinsky that in fact the subject can be a community of any scale, including the whole of humanity (there same, p. 52).

Finnish researcher R. Tuomela drew attention to the fact that a person has two types of thinking: "I am thinking" and "we are thinking", and a person easily switches from one to the other when he says: "I want ..." or "we (athletes, Muscovites, scientists ...) want. He wrote: The ancient Romans introduced the idea of corporate responsibility into law, speaking of organized collectives ... the corporate group was opposed to societas, a collective based on interactions between individuals who are not so closely related to each other and are not members of an intentional group entity" ^[12].

A collective subject can be considered as an ideomaterial system (IMS), an important part of which is a set of ideas shared by its participants. Each individual person can be a member of several ICS at the same time, for example, a physicist, a believer of a particular denomination and a chess player ^[13]. For physicists, the ideological complex is the science of physics itself, a set of meta-scientific ideas (principles of advancing theoretical concepts, experimental verification, scientific discussion), the organizational structure of science (conferences, academic councils, degrees), the values of cognition, scientific rigor, and others. For believers, it is religion itself, a complex of religious texts, the organizational structure of the church, a set of values. Chess players have rules of the game, chess theory and history, principles of competition. At the same time, each person gives part of his time (ultimately, life) to these collective subjects.

To what extent do information technologies influence the emergence, design and functioning of a collective entity? A large number of scientific papers, due to the importance of the topic, have been published recently in the field of sociology of science.

The fact is that it is in science that large teams are formed, consisting of specialists in various fields of science and technology. One example is the Large Hadron Collider, where physicists – specialists in elementary particles, specialists in vacuum systems, specialists in superconductors, radiation detectors, and, of course, information technology - interact. But without the participation of all these specialists, without their unique knowledge, in the system reflecting the device of a huge (27 kilometers of tunnels and complex instruments) experimental installation, it is impossible to design or operate such a collider. For example, a scientific article published in one of the world's leading journals, Physical Review Letters, had 5,154 co-authors.

The two groups at the Large Hadron Collider that participated in the discovery of the Higgs boson (CMS and ATLAS) include about 3,000 participants with carefully developed, score-based authorship rules and those who have the right to speak on behalf of the group. The list of authors of the LIGO consortium publication reporting on the first detection of gravitational waves emitted by two merging black holes included about a thousand people from 133 organizations. CERN sometimes employs more than 13,000 people, but only about 2,200 of them are CERN employees; the rest are subcontractors, students, and visiting specialists.

Of course, in the XXI century, they all work in the virtual space, using various means of communication, databases and knowledge, decision support systems, etc., as well as creating collaborations to solve individual tasks ^[14].

Undoubtedly, scientific activity has its own specifics, but the general philosophical, psychological, technological and other principles of the functioning of collective subjects in science can be transferred with some caution to other fields of knowledge, including legal and economic.

Therefore, we present a number of research results of collective subjects emerging in modern science.

In the process of scientific work, scientists participate in multilateral conversations that take place in university corridors, at seminars, conferences and in libraries. Currently, an increasing part of the discussions takes place on the Internet, which makes it possible to automatically analyze the discourse, identify keywords and groups of words related to certain topics.

The change in these sets and the groups of researchers using them turns out to be a reflection of the dynamics of research, sometimes invisible even to the participants of the scientific discussion themselves.

Researchers in the sociology of science began to track these connections, using the authorship of articles, links and acknowledgements to understand how authors and resources unite around research problems into teams, networks and organizations ^[15].

With all the originality of cognitive processes in the scientific community, similar processes are going on in the communities of entrepreneurs, and in various network youth groups, and in groups of social activists.

Information systems, processing digitized publication data, create projections of social, geographical and financial networks on the network of published statements and identify correlations, repetitions of terms and phrases resulting from the exchange of ideas. Correlations between personal relationships and scientific interpretations are revealed, defining participants and boundaries of collective subjects formed to solve scientific problems (ibid.).

The article ^[16] proposes a new approach based on the theory of autopoetic systems. An autopoetic system is defined as an organization connected by a network of production processes of elements. Initially, this theory was proposed in biology and then applied to sociology, the author suggests applying it to understand the nature of creativity. The creative system is an autopoietic system, the element of which is a "discovery" that occurs only when there has been a synthesis of three choices: "ideas", "associations" and "consequences". On this basis, the relationship between creative, mental and social systems is discussed.

Problems grow as the size of groups of people interacting in solving common tasks grows. Research suggests that group cohesion, which exceeds groups of a hundred members, becomes weaker with the appearance of semi-autonomous cliques and subgroups. This may be due to the postulated limit on the number of meaningful social interactions that people can maintain, given the size of their brain. Teams are built on the strengths and abilities of their members. Alpha-type personalities pursuing their own ideas are often successful, but the success of groups depends more on team players with a high level of cooperation and mutual assistance in an environment that releases their energy and creativity ^[17].

The spread of electronic libraries and search engines, global indexes (Scopus, WoS, PubMed, arXiv) allows for research of scientific cooperation networks based on bibliographic data of articles, including information about authors and links between articles (citation), which allows you to track the progress of the cognitive process in a study that unites researchers from different countries, not formally connected to each other. Exciting new opportunities are emerging to understand how the process of scientific production is organized and develops over time. This requires not only mapping the intellectual contribution and the scientists who make it, but also studying how information circulates between scientists and how they interact with each other. Information technologies make it possible to see in real time how scientists exchange, discover and create new knowledge, to understand the mechanisms underlying knowledge generation. One way to study how scientists exchange information is to create networks of co-authorship. When analyzing these networks, it can be reasonably assumed that the authors collaborating on the article know each other (at least in relatively small collaborations) and have shared their experience to conduct joint research and co-author the article. In addition, citation analysis is a tool for studying the inheritance of ideas and concepts between previous and new works, which creates "cascades of influence". Both in co-authorship networks and in citation networks, scientific collaboration is usually described in terms of very large networks, usually consisting of tens of thousands of nodes that lend themselves to statistical description and rigorous analysis involving and combining social sciences and network theory ^[18].

An interesting example of the study of a developing network collective subject with the help of information technology can be seen in the article L. Dich ^[19].

The paper studied the formation of a network community of Asian Americans. An 18-month digital ethnographic study was conducted on the validity of the claims that Asian Americans create a public identity as part of their "claim to America." Information technologies for the study of network communities, including inductive and discourse analysis, were used.

One of the conclusions: people must be able to realize their identity as part of a collective experience before they can act on the basis of this identity for public or political purposes. As a result of processing the received information , the following table was obtained:

Table 1

The results of a study of a community (collective subject) of Asian Americans. Source: ^[17].

 The formation of a collective subject, its identity, the perception of itself as somewhat similar to other subjects and in some ways different from them, is associated with the (often unconscious) creation of ontologies ^[20]. In computer science, ontologization is the creation of a conceptual schema of data structures. Although the community creates language content largely spontaneously, nevertheless, it is ultimately thematized and filled with generally accepted ideas and concepts. A computerized way to identify these topics, concepts, and representations is to build ontologies based on the analysis of communications in social networks ^[21].

Conclusions: information technologies create a new communication environment, which causes important changes in the ways of creating collective subjects. Philosophy, psychology and sociology provide a number of common (regardless of their nature) characteristics of collective subjects: communication based on a common language and system of concepts, a system of values, a decision-making system, ways of recognizing facts and theoretical propositions as true or false. Digital systems significantly affect all these processes. New types of collective subjects are emerging, for example, network communities of software developers, creators of encyclopedias, ideological trends. Their legal status is often poorly defined. However, these virtual collectives sometimes unite a large number of people and force them to commit serious offenses. This is especially true of youth network communities that create an environment with strong collective motivation, sometimes with a criminal orientation, and at the same time remain outside the legal field. On the other hand, many of these communities are engaged in the development of various useful activities. Therefore, the study of the mechanisms of functioning and the creation of legal institutions for the regulation of such collective entities is becoming increasingly important and relevant.

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