Introduction to #groups
A basic distinction is that between #aggregative_groups (for instance, a collection of all red-haired women) VS those that have a structure and a decision-making process – what I shall call #corporate_groups. It is the latter type of group that will be my focus. The paradigm case of a corporate group is a corporation, but governments, educational institutions in so far as they have a structure and a decision-making process.
It will be helpful here to distinguish the issue of #group_agency from another related issue – #shared_agency. Shared agency refers to the ability of individuals to engage in #joint_actions such as moving a table together, painting a house together, or playing a game of chess. Many philosophers working on this issue believe that, in order to understand #joint_actions, we need to understand the ways in which individual agents share intentions
Objection: Now one might object to this investigation at the outset on the grounds that groups do not exist. This objection is often motivated by a commitment to #ontological_individualism:
According to the ontological individualist, groups are composed of individual human beings and do not exist as entities “over and above” these individuals. Most theorists agree with ontological individualism, and I am no exception. Groups are composed of individuals and they act via the actions of individuals. But this doesn't support the idea that groups don't exist. Human beings are composed of cells and are nothing “over and above” their physical make-up, but this doesn't mean they don't exist. Rodin's The Thinker is composed of bronze, but we don't thereby say that it doesn't exist. Likewise, just because groups are composed of individuals and do not exist “over and above” their members does not mean they do not exist.
#Methodological_individualism is the view that groups and their actions can be explained solely in terms of the psychological states and processes of group members and the relations between them. Unlike its ontological sister, methodological individualism is hotly contested.
#Methodological_collectivism argues that there are irreducible group-level properties and processes which need to play a role in the explanation of group phenomena
This book weighs in on the side of methodological individualism
According to many theorists, joint action requires for its explanation shared intentions or “we-intentions.” Whatever intentions are had or shared are in the heads of individuals. This is particularly clear in the work of Michael Bratman and John Searle.
an ambiguity in the literature: Some philosophers are interested in explaining the ways that individuals can share intentional states such as belief and intention. These accounts, then, serve as a foundation for a theory of shared agency (Bratman, 2014). Other philosophers are interested in group agency, the ability of a group itself to engage in purposeful action.... there is more to #group_agency than #shared_agency. When two people take a walk together they are engaged in a form of shared agency, but in doing so they do not form a unified agent to which we attribute beliefs, goals, and intentions. The connection between group agency and shared agency is not always clear in the literature. It is one of my aims here to introduce some clarity. Research on distributed cognition suggests that models of human cognition can be applied to groups and that doing so is explanatorily powerful.
This approach allows us to make sure that our theory of intentional agency is grounded in practice. Our practice reveals that mental states such as belief and intention are not internal states of a system or agent, as the functionalist would have it, but are states of whole systems
Aim of the book: I argue that, if we view mental states as dispositional states of systems rather than internal states of systems, we can make sense of how groups can have mental states. Further, if we embed this dispositionalism within an explanatory theory called interpretivism, we get a more powerful explanation of our practice of making sense of others, both groups and individuals, than that offered by the functionalist approaches.
If certain groups can be intentional agents, the natural question to ask is whether groups can be moral agents. But that certain groups exhibit features of intentional agency is not enough to establish that they can be held morally responsible
whether groups have beliefs The accounts on offer are attempts to identify what is going on “inside” the group, or among and between individuals in the group, in order for our ascriptions of belief to the group to be true. Some of these views, such as the view that beliefs are brain states, seem to preclude the idea that groups can be believers. There are, however, some general things we can say here that are accepted by philosophers regardless of their views about the nature of belief.
Beliefs in general:
1- Beliefs are #propositional_attitudes Consider: *Anya fears that “Hamburgers are served for dinner every Friday night *Finn believes that hamburgers are served for dinner every Friday night
#propositional_attitudes involve a subject, a content (or proposition), and an attitude (belief, intention, fear, hope). In the examples above, the subjects were Finn, Anya, and me. The content of the attitudes that Finn, Anya, and I have are captured by propositions such as “Hamburgers are served for dinner every Friday night.” The attitudes are those of belief, intention, or fear.
2- Beliefs have truth conditions above sentences can be true or false
intentions in general:
Intentions, on the other hand, have success conditions Although it may be true that I have the #intention of serving hamburgers for Finn's birthday, my intention in itself is neither true nor false; rather, it is satisfied or unsatisfied depending on whether I succeed in serving hamburgers on Finn's birthday.
#Belief is thought to be a unique attitude in that it conforms to the world, or tries to conform to the world. When we believe something truly, our mind conforms to the world. Our belief matches the state of affairs out in the world. Intentions, aim at getting the world to fit with our mind: My intention to make hamburgers for Finn's birthday is satisfied or fulfilled only when the world (with me in it) conforms to that intention. Intentions have what John Searle calls a #world-to-mind direction of fit, whereas beliefs have a #mind-to-world direction of fit (Searle, 1983).This is where the consensus on the nature of belief ends.
For example: Some philosophers argue, for instance, that beliefs are brain states, others that beliefs are functional states to be defined in terms of the role they play and that these roles could be realized by other things besides brains (computers, for instance), and yet others that beliefs are best thought of as social statuses which make sense only against the backdrop of various social practices. Finally, there are debates about the content of propositional attitudes. Some philosophers think that the content is determined by factors internal to the subject, and others that the content is determined by factors external to the subject.
Philosophers writing on group belief haven't really concerned themselves with these debates in the philosophy of mind. This is partly because many have adopted #methodological_individualism and think that group belief ascriptions can be explained in terms of individuals' beliefs (or some other attitude), and they have left the nature of individual belief to philosophers of mind. In what follows, we will consider three accounts of the nature of group belief – the #summative_account, the #acceptance_account, and the #commitment_account.