Abstract
Many contemporary accounts of social belief are committed to the view that social beliefs can only be held by a plurality of individuals. Gilbert (in Schmitt (ed.) Socializing metaphysics, 2003) characterizes “joint commitments” as the “social atoms” of social belief and other forms of social intentionality, and Tuomela (in The philosophy of sociality: The shared point of view, 2007) maintains that social belief and other forms of social intentionality are bound by a “collectivity condition.” Such theorists thus rule out the possibility of solitary social belief, that is, a social belief held by an individual that is not socially shared by members of a social group. Such theorists also reject Searle’s account of social intentionality as being too individualistic, but I argue that the same kind of solitary social intentions that can arise on Searle’s account can also arise on the accounts offered by Gilbert and Tuomela (and Michael Bratman). This is a consequence of the fact that neither Gilbert nor Tuomela hold that social intentionality is a supra-individual form of intentionality that is different in kind from the intentionality of individuals who comprise and constitute plural subjects and social groups. I also argue for the possibility of solitary social belief by providing a characterization of social beliefs that is independent of their relation to collective action, and provide two illustrative real-life examples. While no doubt rare, the reality of solitary social beliefs is a consequence of the dynamical nature of social beliefs, namely their orientation to the represented, or, in the case of solitary social beliefs, misrepresented beliefs of members of a social group.
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Notes
I have my own doubts about whether the analysis can be straightforwardly extended to social emotions, which seem to require a related but somewhat different treatment.
Searle himself gives such an example, in the case of two people appearing to push a car together. One has the “we intention” to push together, but the other does not. Although Searle imagines a situation in which one person is having a hallucination when he believes that someone else is helping him push the car, the example can be easily adapted to a real life situation in which another is simply feigning cooperation by pretending to push the car (for whatever reason). In such a case Searle maintains that the original agent is mistaken about what he or she is doing: he or she is “not pushing as part of our pushing” (1990, p. 408). Nevertheless it seems that the original person still has the “we intention.”
And against Searle again, it is not obvious that the silent stranger who helps by cooperating in pushing the car necessarily has a “we intention.” He may simply have an individual “I intention” to aid the unfortunate man by helping him to push his car. And even if the stranger did form a “we intention,” the original pusher did not have one, so again it looks like one person can have a “we intention” while the other does not. Of course the original person might then reform his intention as a “we intention,” but there is no obvious reason why he should do so in order to get the job done—he can just keep on pushing as he intended before.
I thank Matthew Rachar for drawing my attention to this literature.
I do not consider Searle in this discussion because it is clear that he does not consider social intentionality to be different in kind from individual intentionality. For Searle, both “we beliefs” expressed with “we” in the subject position and “I beliefs” expressed with “I” in the subject position are the intentional states of individuals.
I have argued elsewhere (Greenwood 2003, 2004) that although Durkheim did affirm this form of ontological holism, he employed it mainly for mainly rhetorical purposes, in his attempt to establish the legitimacy of sociology as a science distinct from biology and individual (associationist) psychology.
This is not to deny that there are significant “vertical” questions as to whether a social group is an autonomous agent (List and Pettit 2011; Pettit 2009) or whether a social group can display a unitary “collective mind’ or “group mind” (Tollefsen et al. 2013; Wilson 2010). I think these are open questions, but they are beyond the scope of the present paper. Neither Gilbert nor Tuomela are much concerned with these questions, and in any case their answers to the “horizontal” questions do not appear to depend in any way on answers to the “vertical” questions.
This is not to deny that when a population with merely common properties comes to form joint commitments to believe as a body or accepts beliefs as group members it becomes a different kind of thing, namely a plural subject or social group. It is just to recognize that the different kind of thing it becomes is nothing more than a population of individuals jointly committed to believe as a body or who accept beliefs as group members.
I make no claim to originality for this account, which is a version of the account of social beliefs developed by early American social psychologists (see Greenwood 2004 and Note 12).
This analysis may appear to be similar to the second clause of Bratman‘s (1999) analysis of social intentionality. According to Bratman (1999, p. 21, again abbreviated), “we intend to X” if and only if:
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1.
(a) I intend that we X. (b) You intend that we X.
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2.
I intend that we X in accordance with and because of 1(a) and 1(b); you intend likewise.
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3.
1 and 2 are common knowledge between us.
Yet the similarity is merely superficial. According to Bratman’s analysis, a social intention is formed as a causal consequence of 1(a) and 1(b). According the above account of socially engaged belief, a social belief is social because (and on condition that) members of a social group are represented as holding that belief. That is, socially engaged belief depends only upon the representation of the beliefs of others, not causally upon the existence of others or their beliefs (although no doubt in many and indeed most instances this representation is a causal product of some form of interaction with the members of a social group).
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1.
It is also possible for an individual to hold one belief socially, for example that the philosophy program ought to introduce an affirmative action policy, and hold a contrary belief (that it should not) individually, either for explicit reasons or through implicit bias. Both beliefs are the personal beliefs of the individual, the one held socially, the other individually.
Unfortunately this fertile theoretical conception of socially engaged beliefs and attitudes was neglected in the post-war period, and eventually displaced in the 1980s by the tradition of research on “social cognition” inspired by the “cognitive revolution” in psychology (Greenwood 2004). In this tradition social cognition is defined as cognition directed towards “social” objects such as persons and social groups (Fiske and Taylor 1982), as opposed to “non-social” objects such as tables, trees and tarantulas, rather than in terms of its orientation to the represented cognition of members of social groups (Greenwood 2014). A similar conception of social cognition is also to be found in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science, which is focused upon “theory-theory” vs. simulation accounts of our ability to attribute mental states to other persons (and some animals) and to explain and predict their behavior (see e.g. Carruthers and Smith 1996).
Yet although many socially engaged beliefs are no doubt directed towards other persons (our spouses and colleagues) and social groups (Muslims and Democrats), they may also be directed towards non-social objects, such as climate change or the existence of God or gravitons, and we may of course have individually engaged beliefs about other persons and social groups (that our colleague is dishonest and that Democrats are committed to socialism) based upon evidence or arguments (whether good or bad). On this matter, contemporary theorists of social intentionality agree: “we beliefs,” joint commitments to believe, and beliefs in the ‘we-mode” are not restricted to beliefs about persons and social groups. Thus Tuomela (2007, p 138), for example, notes that members of a social group might hold the social or collective belief that the earth is flat, and Gilbert and Searle would clearly agree.
“The consciousness of constituting with others a unity is actually all there is to that unity” (Simmel 1908, p. 7).
See Sect. 7 for some concrete examples.
One way of making this point is by noting that in the first definition of social belief that makes reference to a social group—in which social beliefs are defined in terms of the represented beliefs of members of a social group—the term “social group” occurs opaquely not transparently (Greenwood 2003), so that a person could have a social belief even if the represented social group to which her belief was oriented did not in fact exist.
As Durkheim (1912) maintained with respect to socially engaged religious beliefs.
In these examples, the social beliefs of the individuals are not entirely solitary, since although they are not shared by the social group to which the belief is oriented, there are other mistaken individuals who socially share that belief. So a peculiar kind of shadow group is formed, one in which the socially shared beliefs are not oriented to the beliefs of the members of the shadow group who socially share these beliefs, but to the original (mis)represented group. Yet such a shadow group does not itself constitute a social group because the social beliefs of its members are not oriented to the represented beliefs of members of that population.
I do not mean to suggest that it is an a priori truth that the populations of deaf or unemployed persons cannot have socially shared beliefs and form social groups. I just think it is implausible in these cases, but admit that it is an open and empirical question in these and other candidate cases, such as the even less plausible cases of the populations of persons who are afraid of spiders or who were born on January 28, 1956. Certainly it is not the case that having shared properties ensures that populations will have socially shared beliefs, which is always an open and empirical question.
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Acknowledgments
The author thanks the audiences at the third conference of the European Network of Social Ontology, Helsinki, and the European Network for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, for their critical feedback on earlier versions of this paper.
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Greenwood, J.D. Solitary social belief. Synthese 194, 2077–2099 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1037-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1037-9