Violence as a social fact Alessandro Salice # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract This paper describes a class of social acts called “violent acts” and distinguishes them from damaging acts. The former are successfully performed if they are apprehended by the victim, while the latter, being not social, are successful only as long as the intended damage is realized. It is argued that violent acts, if successful, generate a social relation which include the aggressor, the victim and, if the concomitant damaging act is satisfied, the damage itself. Keywords Violence act . Social act . Social relation . Social ontology Introduction Violence is a multifaceted concept; the term “violence” can be employed in very different contexts and to point out largely disparate phenomena. This paper argues for the idea that among the variegated phenomena to be qualified as violence, there is also a specific kind of social act or action. In the following I describe these acts and their other features at length, guided by this intuition: if one performs a violent act of such kind, one is inflicting harm on the victim with the concomitant intention that the victim becomes aware of the damage and of its “author.” This feature has one important consequence: if performed successfully, the act generates a (social) relation Phenom Cogn Sci DOI 10.1007/s11097-012-9294-7 Previous versions of this article were presented at the 27th Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria, in August 2004 (for the text of this talk, cf. Salice 2004), at the VI Congress on Collective Intentionality at the University of California, Berkeley, in July 2008 and at the Doktorandenkolloquium of Hans Bernhard Schmid at the University of Vienna in January 2012. I am deeply indebted to Georg Meggle, Hans Bernhard Schmid and, in particular, to Kirk Ludwig for their valuable suggestions. In addition, I would like to thank the following people for their helpful comments: David Schweikard, Luca Tummolini, Genki Uemura and Toru Yaegashi. I also have to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. It goes without saying that I take full responsibility for any mistake that may be reported here. A. Salice (*) Institut für Philosophie, Universität Wien, Universitätsstraße 7, A-1010 Vienna, Austria e-mail: alessandro.salice@univie.ac.at URL: http://social.univie.ac.at/people/alessandro-salice/