Abstract
This chapter discusses group agents and attitudes attributed to them, and it does it both from a historical and a systematic point of view. The systematic account of the chapter relies on functionally construed group agents and their role in grounding the group members’ activities. The chapter presents an account of collective intention as a group and compares it with some early accounts of group agents and collective intention by Moritz Lazarus, William McDougall, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Alfred Vierkandt. The upshot of this comparison is that there are important similarities between those earlier, somewhat rudimentary accounts and the rather sophisticated current accounts, especially the one developed by the present author (prior to knowledge of the mentioned historical views).
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Notes
- 1.
See Cornford (1912/2004).
- 2.
- 3.
My approach eschews strong ontological supraindividualism, which for example, Otto von Gierke (1934) represents.
- 4.
- 5.
See Hayes (1942/2009), chapters I and II on a resembling classification.
- 6.
Here we have Spencer, Boodin, and some other theoreticians also viewing the society as an evolved organism-like entity (for precise references, see Hayes (1942/2009), Chapter I). Durkheim’s view seems to fit in here.
- 7.
For the early accounts referred in this paragraph in the order of mention, see Lazarus (2003), Tönnies (1887), McDougall (1920), and Vierkandt (1928/1975). Also Wundt (1916) is famous for his Völkerpsychologie approach, but as I will discuss the similar views by Lazarus, I will leave Wundt out of my discussion.
As to current authors’ writing on collective intentionality, see Tuomela (2011) for comments.
- 8.
Emile Durkheim’s (1901/1982) account has often been regarded as postulating a group mind. He makes a distinction between individual and collective representations. The latter are produced and necessitated on people by society—in contrast to individual representations. Durkheim is typically taken to regard the human mind as a collection of individual and collective representations. The collective ones are common to all human beings and form a collective mind. Durkheim takes collective representations to have an existence independent of their manifestations in individuals. They are an external, coercive constraint of people’s thinking. Durkheim even says obscurely that collective consciousness is the highest form of mental life, as it is the consciousness of all consciousnesses.
Durkheim’s controversial views are not close to my very own views, and I will not in this chapter discuss them. See, for example, Hayes (1942/2009) for a traditional, received interpretation of Durkheim’s views. For a modern criticism of Durkheim that I largely agree with, see the strong criticisms by Searle (2006). However, Durkheim, as of course the other philosophers working in the early years of the last century, lacked modern logical and analytical tools and, for example, did not have available a proper theory of propositional attitudes or a theory of norms.
- 9.
For instance, an organization may also own or otherwise involve various material elements and tools, such as buildings, that it needs for fulfilling its functions, but it does not seem plausible to say that it is partly constituted by this kind of hardware.
- 10.
Recently, List and Pettit (2011) have defended this view of organized groups.
- 11.
See Tuomela (2011), Chapter 2, for discussion. Briefly, we-mode activity or functioning involves three aspects: (1) the narrow adverbial aspect (mentioned in the text), (2) the teleological aspect related to benefaction through the contents of the group’s attitudes, and (3) the underlying psychological member-level motive aspect (e.g., altruism or group-centeredness, in the case of fully socialized, group-centered persons, only loyalty seems to qualify).
- 12.
I do not use the terms “we-thinking” and “I-thinking” as technical terms of my theory, because they are somewhat unclear and sometimes misleading. Instead, “we-mode” and “I-mode” are key terms in my account. Note that, for instance, a “we-intention,” which for me is a member’s we-mode participation intention, may yet in virtue of its form (e.g., “I will participate …”) be linguistically viewed as representing I-thinking. However, from the point of view of its conceptual content, it clearly is we-thinking because of being conceptually based on the group, “us.”
- 13.
See Tuomela (2007).
- 14.
See Hakli et al. (2010) for arguments for the functional importance of the distinction between we-mode and pro-group I-mode thinking and theorizing. In that paper, my colleagues and I show in effect that we-mode reasoning leads to a different set of action equilibria than does individualistic action. The latter allows for purely individualistic equilibria that the we-mode account does not allow (a simple Hi-Lo coordination situation qualifies as an example). Thus, collective action in the nonreductive we-mode sense can rationally create more collective order than the individualistic, (pro-group) I-mode approach. As one desideratum for a social institution certainly is that it creates collective order that we have here and argument for the we-mode design of institutions.
- 15.
Such a social agent system, viewed as an entity, in general is not reducible to the individuals’ monadic or (inter)relational properties. This holds true at least if no “positional” structural elements such as positions, offices, and roles are involved on the “jointness level” (“meso level” as distinguished from the proper “macro level” consisting of group structures).
The social agent system is not literally a collective agent (person) because its lacks the ontological features of full-blown human agents—for example, it does not have a body and cannot have “raw feels” and, strictly speaking, a mind. Thus, it lacks the phenomenology of real agents. However, conceptually we may regard it as a functional group agent.
- 16.
See Tuomela (2007), esp. Chapters 1, 6, and 8 for my treatment of the above topics.
- 17.
Collective acceptance of an item such as an ethos can here be taken conceptually to be analogous to a performative (or “declarative”) speech act that has the world-to-mind direction of fit of semantic satisfaction and thus makes the ethos goal-like. It will also have the mind-to-world direction of fit as giving and being—or being analogous to—an assertion. See also Searle (2010) for the declarations. My most recent account is given in Chapter 5 of Tuomela (2011).
- 18.
Here is my account in Tuomela (2007), Chapter 1:
A collective g consisting of some persons is a (core) we-mode social group if and only if
(1) g has accepted a certain ethos, E, as a group for itself and is committed to it. On the level of its members, this entails that at least a substantial number of the members of g have as group members (thus in a broad sense, as position-holders in g) collectively accepted E as g’s (viz., their group’s, “our”) ethos and hence, are collectively committed to it, with the understanding that the ethos is to function so as to provide authoritative reasons for thinking and acting qua a group member.
(2) Every member of g “group-socially” ought to accept E as a group member (and accordingly to be committed to it as a group member), at least in part because the group has accepted E as its ethos.
(3) It is a mutual belief in the group that (1) and (2).
- 19.
Notice that not all members of a we-mode group are required to function in the we-mode; see the previous note.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
See Tuomela (2007), Chapters 1 and 2, for clarification and discussion of these notions and their central role.
- 23.
Cf. the somewhat different account and defense of the importance of joint commitment by Gilbert in her 1989 book and later works. Her approach otherwise bears similarities to mine, although she seems to regard collective agents as ontologically existing (as intentional agents). See note 32.
- 24.
From a logical point of view, we may treat intentions as predicates. Letting “JI” stand for joint intention and “WI” for we-intention, we have roughly this simple equivalence in the case of two agents A and B and an action X: JI(A,B,X) <-> WI(A,X) & WI(B,X) & MB(WI(A,X) & WI(B,X)), where “MB” stands for mutual belief. However, this logical formulation is somewhat misleading (although truth-functionally correct), as it ignores the fact that a we-intention intensionally (in the content of a we-intention) presupposes the existence of the joint intention (see Tuomela 2007, Chapter 4, for a discussion of this circularity problem). An intention attributed to a group G, viz., I(G, X), is to be distinguished from the joint intention of its members in general, although in the case of simple egalitarian groups, the group intends if and only if its members do.
- 25.
- 26.
- 27.
Below I draw on Tuomela (2011).
- 28.
Here, “jointly” is to be understood as signifying we-mode jointness.
- 29.
This new account involves changes as compared to my earlier account (e.g., in Chapter 4 of Tuomela 2007). The account is now more explicitly geared to joint intentions, and the account can be seen basically to satisfy the much-discussed own action condition, control condition, and settle condition. Here, I will not discuss this issue further.
- 30.
When realized, this intention must involve a joint action token. Here, we can represent this linguistically by you and I endorsing the same statement expressing joint intention:
I: We will perform X jointly.
You: We will perform X jointly.
We have here two token mental states of intending with the same content. We can stipulate that a single joint token of the joint intention to do X jointly (i.e., a single token of a metaphorical group agent’s intention) requires this together with a doxastic condition like mutual knowledge about our being in these mental states and with some further conditions that relate us, for example, our dispositions to make relevant inferences and our being collectively committed to satisfying the intention content by participating in our joint performance of X. A joint realizing action token can be stipulated to be what results from a token of joint intending.
- 31.
Some commentators have misunderstood this matter and regarded a participation reason as an I-mode individualistic notion merely because of the linguistic formulation of it as “I intend to perform …”
- 32.
- 33.
A referee of the present volume suggested that I comment on the relationship of my we-mode approach to Margaret Gilbert’s well-known “plural subject theory” and especially I will concisely point out what the major differences are. I began to create my theory of sociality in my 1984 book and have since then continued developing it in several books and numerous papers. Both my theory and Gilbert’s are living things that have undergone smaller or bigger changes during the course of time. Gilbert’s first large work was her 1989 book. Her latest work that I am familiar with is her 2006 book. Our theories are similar in that they reject at least radical conceptual individualism, although both are compatible with ontological individualism. In neither theory are groups and group attitudes individualistically definable (in my account “definable in I-mode terms”). Gilbert’s “plural subject theory” regards groups as plural subjects that are collections of individuals who are jointly committed to some items and tend to think in social contexts in terms of “we.” This is somewhat similar to what I espoused in my 1984 and in 1995 books by taking certain persons who we-intend the same content to form a group, although in Tuomela (1984), I did not directly speak of joint or collective commitment but of shared we-intentions that yet were assumed to entail joint commitments. My focus then was pretty much on we-intentions, a topic that Gilbert has not really worked on (see Tuomela 1995, 2007).
There are several details in Gilbert’s theory that I have criticized elsewhere (see, e.g., my 1995 and 2007 books). The criticisms in general are based on the unclarity of her notions of joint commitment and plural subject. To give an example, she says in her key schema S in her 2000 book basically that for any psychological predicate X, “We X” is true if and only if we are jointly committed to X’ing as a body. This seems to require that joint commitment to X entail X (e.g., we jointly perform act X only if we act as a body). But if that is the case and if “as a body” entails acting jointly, we arrive at the rather circular account saying that we perform X jointly if and only if we perform X jointly, being jointly committed to X’ing jointly. This account of hers also shows that there is no theoretical room for weaker notions, notions that do not require joint commitment.
My recent theorizing has concerned joint action, institutions, and the connections of collective intentionality research to logic, distributive AI, and game theory as well as broader issues like collective activities in large groups, while Gilbert has focused on notions in moral and political philosophy. Since the beginning of this millennium, especially in my 2007 book, I have started viewing we-mode groups, viz., groups that can act and do it on the basis of we-reasoning, as (functional) group agents in a conceptually entified sense, as constructed by group members’ collective acceptance (see also Hakli et al. 2010). This is a conception different from the conception of groups as plural subjects that Gilbert advocates. In contrast to Gilbert, I have a variety of weaker and stronger social notions (both we-mode and I-mode ones) to offer. Thus, I have given accounts of joint and collective I-mode social entities, states, and events and used them in my theorizing. There are several smaller differences concerning details of collective acceptance and agreement (notions central in both theories), but I cannot here go into them.
- 34.
In part, he worked together with Heyman Steinthal.
- 35.
- 36.
To give a feel of Lazarus’s own way of putting it, let me quote his German text (Lazarus 2003, p. 178, in his original spelling): “Das Leben eines jeden individuellen Geistes besteht in einem Kreis von anschauungen, Vorstellungen, Ideen, Motiven, Gesinnungen, Schätzungen, Wünschen, Gefühlsweisen usw. Denken wir uns nun bei irgend einer Genossenschaft (etwa einem Volke) die Substanz einzelnen Personen, den Träger all dieses mannigfaltigen Inhals, der ihn zur Persönlichkeit einigt, hinweg: so erhalten wir die ganze Masse alles geistigen Thuns, welches sich im Volke vollzieht, ohne Rücksicht auf persönliche Vertheilung und Ausübung. Diese Summe alles geistigen Geschehens in einem Volke ohne Rücksicht auf die Subjecte, kann man sagen: ist der objective Geist desselben.”
- 37.
See Schmid (2009), p. 187.
- 38.
- 39.
My presentation of Lazarus’s theory has benefited much from Schmid’s lengthy discussion in his 2009 book. There, several interesting issues are discussed that space does not allow me to comment on here.
- 40.
Here and in the rest of this section, I draw on Tuomela (2011), Chapter 10.
- 41.
McDougall (1920).
- 42.
McDougall also makes a rudimentary I-mode/we-mode distinction (pp. 9–10): “… the thinking and acting as each man, in so far as he thinks and acts as a member of a society, are very different from his thinking and acting as an isolated individual.”
- 43.
There are five conditions of principal importance in raising collective mental life to a higher level than the unorganized crowd can reach (p. 49 f.):
(1) Some degree of continuity in the existence of the group.
(2) In the minds of the mass of members of the group, there shall be formed some adequate idea of the group, of its nature, composition, functions, and capacities and of the relations of the individuals to the group.
(3) (Favorable condition:) Interaction (especially in the form of conflict and rivalry) of the group with other similar groups animated by different ideals and purposes and swayed by different traditions and customs.
(4) The existence of a body of customs and traditions and habits in the minds of the members determining their relations to one another and to the group as a whole.
(5) Organization of the group consisting in the differentiation and specialization of the functions of its constituents—the individuals and classes or groups within the group.
Would one add to the above list the requirement of identification with the group that McDougall imposes on collective willing, we would be dealing with we-mode groups and would be allowed to say in McDougall’s terminology that a we-mode group has a collective mind, although not a collective consciousness.
- 44.
Tönnies’s account then would come rather close to my own 2007 accounts of group intention.
- 45.
Vierkandt (1928/1975).
- 46.
The group is a unit (Einheit) but not a person. Vierkandt (1928/1975), p. 344. (Below, the references are to this book unless otherwise said.)
- 47.
“In subjektiver Hinsicht stehen die Gruppenorgane in Ichverbundenheit (d.h. in Gemeinschaftsbewusstsein) zu der Gruppe als Ganzem; und objektiv ist ihr Verhalten, soweit sie eben als Organe und nicht als Privatpersonen tätig sind, durch die jeweiligen Interessen, Ziele, Überlieferungen und Sorgen der Gruppe wesentlich bestimmt” (p. 328). The italics are mine. The italicized text makes the distinction between functioning as a group member (“organ”) and as a private person. Thus, we have a rudimentary we-mode/I-mode distinction here.
- 48.
“Als Subjekt der Gruppenangelegenheiten wird die Gruppe (“wir”) erlebt. Auch so mit Gruppenwillen: die Gruppengenossen verfolgen ein Ziel, indem sie sich dabei als Gruppe fühlen. Dabei ist freilich zu unterscheiden zwischen dem eigentlichen Träger und dem Organ dieses Willens” (p. 350). Vierkandt says here that in the case of group matters, the members experience the group (“us”) as a subject. The same goes for the group will, the members experience themselves as constituting the group. He makes a distinction between the “organ” of the will and the members who are the ones who really will. This is of course very close to my treatment, which has surprised me.
- 49.
“Gruppenwille bedeutet dabei ein Wille der in alle (oder den massgebenden) Gliedern lebendig ist und von ihnen wiederum als “unser” Wille erlebt wird” (Vierkandt 1949, p. 56). Also cf. the 1928/1975, pp. 352–353. This point just in effect reinforces what was said in the earlier note: The group will is active or lively in the members and is experienced as “our” will.
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Tuomela, R. (2013). Who Is Afraid of Group Agents and Group Minds?. In: Schmitz, M., Kobow, B., Schmid, H. (eds) The Background of Social Reality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5600-7_2
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