AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Social metaphysicians have largely neglected to address what happens when a group loses all of its members. While Hanschmann (2023) argues that social groups can never be memberless, I argue that social entities like clubs, bands and sports teams can be temporarily memberless. Epstein (2015) points out that we have good reasons to accept that entities like the U.S. Supreme Court may persist, in some form, when they lose all their members for a short time and regain new members at a later date. I suggest that there are two plausible ways to account for temporary memberlessness: 1. We could say that social groups can persist without members or, 2. We could say that something persists through a period of memberlessness, but that it is not a social group. The second option may be attractive to those who endorse the social integrate model of social groups, which distinguishes between social groups as member-having entities and institutions more broadly. I argue that the best approach is to treat the property of 'being a social group' as a temporary property that institutions can have.