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How to share a mind: Reconsidering the group mind thesis

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Abstract

Standard accounts in social ontology and the group cognition debate have typically focused on how collective modes, types, and contents of intentions or representational states must be construed so as to constitute the jointness of the respective agents, cognizers, and their engagements. However, if we take intentions, beliefs, or mental representations all to instantiate some mental properties, then the more basic issue regarding such collective engagements is what it is for groups of individual minds to share a mind. Somewhat surprisingly, this very issue has not received much attention in the respective debates and when it has, typically the outlook has been skeptical or outright negative. In this paper, I argue that it is epistemologically possible for a group of individuals to literally share a single mental unit. In particular, I will put forward and defend what I shall call the zombie conception of group minds.

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Notes

  1. Note that there is a growing body of experimental philosophy work on folk intuitions about right and wrong usages of the mentalistic idiom when applied to collectives (even including phenomenal and conscious state ascriptions). This research suggests that we ought to considerably restrict our philosophical intuitions about what people really think or ought to think about collective mentality (cf., e.g., Huebner et al. 2010; Waytz and Young 2012).

  2. For the by now classic modern statement of anti-GMT, see Quinton (1975/1976).

  3. See, in this vein, also Stoutland (1997, 2008), Velleman (1997), Tollefsen (2002b, 2002c), Schmitt (2003), Pettit and Schweikard (2006), Sheehy (2006), Schmid (2009).

  4. Some have claimed that socially distributed cognitive processes are best seen as collaborative cognition and at most distributed within individual minds but not across individual minds (Harnad 2005) or that while cognition may be distributed this does not go for knowledge or having a mind (Giere 2007). For a succinct critical review of the group cognition literature, see Rupert (2011), and for a concise discussion of how those two above-mentioned currents relate, see Tollefsen (2006).

  5. Here, I cannot go into specifying the supervenience relation mentioned or its ontological implications. Let me just indicate that I subscribe to construals of “holistic supervenience” between individual- and group-level mental properties, according to which, roughly, the content of group-level mental states is fixed by sets of rationally integrated individual-level states (with the respective contents); for more detailed accounts along these lines, cf. List and Pettit (2011, Chap. 3) and Currie (1984); see also Tuomela (1989).

  6. This clause as to the “bearer” of group-level mental properties accounts for a construal of group minds that is fully compatible with a “nonentity view” according to which groups are no entities of any kind (cf. Tuomela 2007, p. 145).

  7. I take it, however, that my suggested integrationist construal of group mental units is well compatible with Rupert’s “integrated set”-type definition of cognition, according to which “the cognitive status of individual states, then, derives from the relation between those states and the integrated, persisting cognitive system” (Rupert 2009, p. 41; cf. also Rupert 2011, p. 637), pace Rupert’s own intentions, to be sure.

  8. Note that none of this, just as little, incidentally, as immunity to misidentification, implies that subjects are incorrigible, let alone infallible, with regard to the self-ascription of any specific mental properties or referential object of their conscious states.

  9. As Rosenthal (1990) has prominently argued, the same goes for the non-identity of having conscious (mental) states (thus instantiating the property of “intransitive consciousness”) and having mental states simpliciter.

  10. Compare that list with Rupert’s tentative enumeration of significant properties that group minds shall instantiate in order to be regarded as genuinely mental entities: “the representational, computational, rational, perceptual, and architectural properties of minds” (Rupert 2005, p. 178).

  11. Cf. for more detailed refusals of this objection, see Tollefsen (2002c, 2003) and Gilbert (2003, 2004).

  12. Note, however, that there is much support from cognitive science (cf. esp. Huebner 2008) that as to their representational properties, even at a sufficiently fine-grained level, differences are not as significant as often claimed.

  13. Notice that the version of GMT advocated here is considerably stronger than the social manifestation thesis, according to which groups do not literally have mental properties even if some mental properties of individuals are only manifested when those individuals constitute some social collectives (cf. Wilson 2004, 299ff.).

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Acknowledgments

I have presented earlier versions of this paper at the 2012 Conference of the Austrian Society of Philosophy (ÖGP) in Vienna, at the 2012 Meeting of the European Network on Social Ontology in Rome, and at colloquia at the Universities of Vienna and Klagenfurt. I have received valuable comments from the audiences at these events. For their comments on various drafts, I am especially indebted to Tim Burns, Wolfgang Fasching, Sophie Loidolt, Cathal O’Madagain, David Schweikard, Lukas Schwengerer, the editors of this special issue, Alessandro Salice, and Luca Tummolini, as well as two anonymous reviewers.

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    Thomas Szanto

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Szanto, T. How to share a mind: Reconsidering the group mind thesis. Phenom Cogn Sci 13, 99–120 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9323-1

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