Abstract
Discoveries about attitude aggregation have prompted the re-emergence of non-reductionism, the theory that group agency is irreducible to individual agency. This paper rejects the revival of non-reductionism and, in so doing, challenges the preference for a unified account, according to which, agency, in all its manifestations, is rational. First, I offer a clarifying reconstruction of the new argument against reductionism (due to Christian List and Philip Pettit). Second, I show that a hitherto silent premise, namely, that an identified group intention need not be determined by member attitudes according to a rule, e.g., majority, is false. Third, I show that, on rejecting this premise, the aggregation results lead instead to the conclusion that, in contrast to individual agency, group agency is non-rational.
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Notes
Henceforth, ‘non-reductionism’, will refer solely to non-reductionism about non-unanimous group agency.
Moreover, a limitation to the SVP just described is that, over three or more alternatives, the majority attitudinal relation may be intransitive (alternative x is preferred to y, y is preferred to z, and z to x) (Condorcet 1785). Hence, the rule might fail to resolve a set of initially inconsistent attitudes into a set of rational attitudes because it yields an intransitive further attitude over the revisional alternatives: intention >belief about justification1; belief about justification1>belief about justification2; belief about justification2>intention.
There is a forerunner to List and Pettit’s mature argument which fails to deliver a repudiation of reductionism:
First premise: there is no intention without a minimum of rationality on the part of the relevant agent. Second premise: collectives can display that minimum of rationality only insofar as they collectivise reason, as I shall put it. Conclusion: only groups that collectivise reason can properly have intentions (Pettit 2001, 241).
Pettit’s second premise (2001) corresponds to S1. But it is different in two respects. It is stronger in that it asserts that rational group intentions could not be rule-determined. (It is unclear how this assertion may be derived from the discursive dilemma, i.e., from the insight that rules are liable to determine inconsistencies.) Crucially, it is also weaker than S1: it does not refer to actual group intentions. Pettit’s conclusion (2001) is accordingly weaker than List and Pettit’s (2011) conclusion that not all identified group intentions are rule-determined (S3). Unlike S3, it does not state that groups do have intentions that are not rule-determined. Instead, it leaves open the possibility that we ought to consider groups to lack intentions whenever the alternative is to posit intentions that are not rule-determined. Pettit’s original syllogism thus fails to establish that group attitudes, ‘are not a systematic function of the attitudes of members’ (LP 10). Pettit 2001 notably proceeds, nevertheless, to endorse S3: [M]any collectivities will [collectivize reason] [250 (emphasis added)].
Deborah Tollefsen extends Durkheim’s analogy explicitly by employing Daniel Dennett’s notion of descriptive ‘efficiency’:
[T]here is an [intentional] description of human behaviour that is more efficient than a description that cites microphysical properties… [Equally] there are patterns that are missed if one attempts to explain the social world by appealing only to individual intentional states [Tollefsen 2002, 43 (citing Dennett 1991)].
As a practical matter, of course, parasitical knowledge is indispensable. Non-testimonial behaviour may provide a basis for ascribing attitudes such as anger or arousal, but not a decision to prohibit the sale of a drug or to offer a particular contract. Neuroscience is equally unable to discern such attitudes. Social scientific generalization, in turn, relies on parasitical knowledge of the attitudes of the sample population.
Emergentism fails to, ‘keep[] down the number of fundamentally different kinds of entity’ (Lewis 1973, 87).
If the rule is subject to a defeating condition, e.g., that, if rule-specified attitudes are irrational, then no attitude is properly determined, then knowledge of this condition is evidently also necessary.
This is consistent with List and Pettit’s primary premise that, if all identified group intentions are rational, then not all identified group intentions are rule-determined (S1). Grant that an identified group intention need not be rule-determined (SIV). If so, one might, in principle, identify a rational group intention that is not rule-determined even while mistakenly thinking that one had relied on a rule.
Exemplified in the US Supreme Court case of National Mutual Insurance Co. v. Tidewater Transfer Co. (1949) 337 United States Reports 582, of which, dissenting Justice Felix Frankfurter observed, ‘conflicting minorities in combination bring to pass a result’ (665).
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Acknowledgements
For comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I am grateful to Shane Glackin and an anonymous referee. This work was developed with the financial support of a Fulbright Scholar Award and a New York University School of Law Hauser Research Scholarship.
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Flanagan, B. What do aggregation results really reveal about group agency?. Philos Stud 175, 261–276 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0866-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0866-9