Abstract
According to the Group Mind Hypothesis, a group can have beliefs over and above the beliefs of the individual members of the group. Some maintain that there can be group mentality of this kind in the absence of any group-level phenomenal consciousness. We present a challenge to the latter view. First, we argue that a state is not a belief unless the owner of the state is disposed to access the state’s content in a corresponding conscious judgment. Thus, if there is no such thing as group consciousness, then we cannot literally ascribe beliefs to groups. Secondly, we respond to an objection that appeals to the distinction between ‘access consciousness’ and ‘phenomenal consciousness’. According to the objection, the notion of consciousness appealed to in our argument must be access consciousness, whereas our argument is only effective if it is about phenomenal consciousness. In response, we question both parts of the objection. Our argument can still be effective provided there are reasons to believe a system or creature cannot have access consciousness if it lacks phenomenal consciousness altogether. Moreover, our argument for the necessary accessibility to consciousness of beliefs does concern phenomenal consciousness.
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Notes
This hypothesis is far from new. For a concise historical overview, see Tuomela (2013).
In other contexts, of course, the important issue might not be whether groups can have beliefs or desires, strictly speaking, but whether they can instantiate intentional states that are to some extent functionally equivalent with the propositional attitudes. For instance, this may be the case in discussions of the extent to which groups can be held accountable for their actions. For a recent argument that it is sufficient for collectives to be moral agents that they can have functional equivalents of guilt and other reactive attitudes, see Björnsson and Hess (2016).
A less radical view might affirm that groups can have some sort of mental intentional states—e.g., something analogous to the subdoxastic states discussed in Sect. 3—but deny that, or leave it open whether, they can have propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires. This may be an attractive fall-back option for GMH-defenders, and nothing in our paper calls it into question. See our conclusion (Sect. 6) for a few more thoughts on this.
At the same time, Huebner thinks defenders of GMH would do well to focus on more modest sorts of mentality, emphasizing that ‘cases of maximal collective mentality are likely to be incredible rare’ (2014, p. 216).
See Huebner (2014, pp. 120–123) for a response to Searle.
This distinction goes back to Cohen (1989). Whereas a belief that p, for Cohen, is ‘a disposition to feel it true that p’, to accept that p ‘is to have or adopt a policy of deeming, positing, or postulating that p’ (ibid., 368). Although there seems to be an obvious connection between Cohen’s claim about belief and the argument we will present in Sect. 3, we do not have space to go into this.
See Lewis (1988) for critical discussion.
On a more orthodox view, belief comes in both occurrent and ‘dispositional’ or standing-state varieties. Chalmers (1996, p. 20), for example, is happy to speak of occurrent beliefs, and he grants phenomenality to beliefs—albeit a ‘relatively faint’ phenomenality.
Note that defenders of GMWC seem to accept such a minimally representational take on belief. For List and Pettit, a belief is an intentional state that represents a certain proposition as being true (2011, p. 21). For Huebner, ‘every type of genuine cognition’, including such high-level cognitive phenomena as beliefs, ‘requires internal states and processes, which can represent the world as being a particular way, and which have the function of conveying salient information in a manner that can guide behavior’ (2014, p. 190). Gilbert thinks of beliefs as ‘cognitive states’, ‘whose specification requires reference to a proposition’ (2014a, p. 134). Tollefsen (2002), despite ostensibly endorsing Dennett’s (1981/1997) interpretationist approach, repeatedly states that ‘organizations really do have intentional states’ (2002, p. 397; cf. 396, 406). If we take such claims at face value, Tollefsen seems to accept (some kind of) realism about beliefs, and she seems to accept that beliefs are intentional states that organizations (and individuals) may instantiate.
For discussion of various ways of cashing out this metaphor, see Humberstone (1992).
Our way of presenting mind-to-world direction of fit owes much to Siegel (2010, Ch. 2).
The idea that ‘belief aims at truth’ was introduced by Bernard Williams (1973). But it seems there is no consensus on how the metaphor of ‘aiming’ is to be cashed out. The idea that ‘beliefs aim at truth’ is sometimes taken to amount to the same as the idea that beliefs have a ‘mind-to-world’ direction of fit (Chan 2013b, p. 2; Glüer and Wikforss 2013, p. 80). Others take the ‘aims’ metaphor to highlight a putative self-reflexive feature of belief: ‘getting things right is what a belief presents itself as doing’ (Railton 1994, p. 74; our emphasis). For Velleman (2000b), belief is distinguished from other Representational states by a literal aim on the part of the believer—viz. ‘the aim of getting the truth-value of [a] proposition right’ (2000b, p. 252). Yet others, including later incarnations of Velleman (Wedgwood 2002; Boghossian 2003; Shah and Velleman 2005), think the “aims” vocabulary should be interpreted as involving a normative claim, such as the claim that ‘for every proposition p that one actually considers, one should believe that p if and only if p is true’ (Wedgwood 2002, p. 291; our emphasis).
On an orthodox view, judgments will count as conscious, occurrent beliefs, whereas on the view defended by Crane they are a different sort of thing altogether. We do not (to repeat) take a stand in this debate. Note, by the way, that although there is an ongoing debate about whether or not cognitive episodes have phenomenal character, the majority view is that there is something it is like to consciously think that p (see Bayne and Montague 2011). The main bone of contention is whether the phenomenology of conscious thought is a phenomenology proper to the thought process as such, as opposed to one that belongs to accompanying sensory activity (imagery, subvocal speech, etc.).
We also think it highly plausible—although we do not have space to argue for this claim—that animals and pre-linguistic infants may think wordless thoughts. For discussion, see Bermudez (2003).
Note that we are not claiming that to be a believer one needs to have the (meta-cognitive) capacity to classify the content p as the content of a belief, as opposed to a desire, a fear, etc. We accept that animals and pre-linguistic infants and toddlers can have beliefs, even though presumably they cannot classify any of their beliefs as beliefs. What we do claim is this: For an animal to believe that there is food in some location is for it to have a disposition such that, given the right stimulus conditions, it will seem to the animal that there is food in that location.
Mandelbaum (2014) apparently thinks one cannot entertain a proposition without believing it. In fact, if someone reads a sentence out loud to you, you will believe it, even if you have been expressly told that it is false: ‘If I tell you that I am about to read a list of sentences, all of which are false, and then I read the sentences, it seems plausible that you would not automatically believe these sentences…. In what follows I argue that this plausible assumption is false’ (2014, pp. 55–56). We do not have space to defend philosophical orthodoxy here, but we will say this: Sadly, in our experience, most journal referees, at any rate, are perfectly able to read and understand sentences without believing the propositions asserted. [For resistance to what we go on to say about known illusions, see Quilty-Dunn (2015)].
Strictly speaking, there is no ‘behaving as if one believes that p’ independently of one’s desires. There is no limit to the ways someone who thinks there is beer in the fridge might be inclined to behave. Only given a desire (e.g. to drink beer) do we narrow down the field somewhat. But only somewhat. For someone who believes that there is beer in the fridge and desires a beer may still not be inclined to behave in any way that would disclose his belief (or desire), say if his religious beliefs prohibit the consumption of alcohol. This is a familiar lesson from the demise of logical behaviourism (see Putnam 1975).
Note that the argument has nothing to do with reportability, let alone the willingness to report. We accept that locked-in syndrome patients may have beliefs they are not able to report, and that some of us may have silly or prejudiced beliefs we would be loath to report. All we insist is that for these to be cases of belief, their subjects must be disposed to reactivate the contents of those states.
A critic might, however, question the scope of this entailment. Perhaps Endorsement can take other forms in the case of systems that are incapable of making conscious judgements, such as, e.g., collectives. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.) Yet, first of all, if Endorsement is not thought of in terms of dispositions to consciously judge, then the question is what it is then supposed to be. And as we show in the first part of the Argument from Endorsement, it is hard to see what might constitute a plausible reply to this question. More seriously, as we will show in Sect. 4, the suggestion under discussion appears to be a more specific version of a general line of argument raised by Gilbert, which runs into a dilemma (see footnote 32 below).
There is plausibly some degree of overlap between Stich’s notion of a subdoxastic state and Tamar Gendler’s (2008a, b) notion of ‘alief’, although many of Gendler’s examples of alief include a phenomenal dimension. Also, while aliefs are paradigmatically affective, there is nothing particularly affective about subdoxastic states. But since Gendler is open to the possibility of aliefs without ‘an obvious affective component’ (Gendler 2008b, p. 644), it is possible that subdoxastic states form a subclass of (inaccessible) aliefs. However, it is beyond the scope of this paper to attempt to sort out the exact relation between aliefs and Stich’s class of subdoxastic states.
Stich (1978, p. 502) claims that this specific suggestion is empirically implausible. But clearly he accepts that subdoxastic states with such content are possible.
There are of course circumstances under which she will judge that p, but they will involve learning—and thus coming to believe—things she does not already believe, and so coming to have new dispositions.
Stich suggests what appears to be an additional reason why subdoxastic states cannot be beliefs. The subdoxastic state that represents q is largely isolated from the naïve person’s beliefs in a way those beliefs are not isolated from each other. Beliefs, Stich says, are ‘inferentially integrated’—that is, ‘embedded in an elaborate network of potential inferential connections to other beliefs’ (Stich 1978, p. 507). However, it is doubtful whether this really amounts to an additional reason for denying that subdoxastic states are beliefs. It is hard to see any reason in principle why subpersonal states of the sort highlighted by Stich could not be embedded in more or less elaborate networks of potential inferential connections. If, as most cognitive scientists believe, there are unconscious inferential processes, it seems natural to think ‘subdoxastic states’ may partake in them. Obviously, all conscious inferential paths will be closed, but this observation simply leads us back to the fact that subdoxastic states are not the sorts of states whose contents subjects will be disposed to reactivate in conscious judgement.
Huddleston (2012) calls such beliefs retained against our better judgment ‘epistemically naughty’. Some of Tamar Gendler’s alleged cases of alief might also turn out to fit this pattern. Certainly, the anxious Grand Canyon Skywalk visitor believes, all things considered, that the platform is safe. If she did not, she would not set foot on it in the first place. But perhaps she also takes the situation to be unsafe, not merely in the sense that there is a Representational state in her that represents the situation as being unsafe, but in the sense that she herself endorses that representation.
Relatedly, it is worth noting that Endorsement is not an all-or-nothing affair. Endorsement comes in degrees. Perhaps you are absolutely certain that Paris is the largest metropolis in France, and rather less confident that Marseille is the second largest. Such different degrees of Endorsement may be reflected in your betting behavior.
List and Pettit (2011) explicitly reason in this fashion in their initial argument for the possibility of group agents, when they identify conditions for agency (2011, p. 20) and then proceed to argue that, because some groups may meet these conditions, they thus qualify as agents (ibid., 32). Huebner (2014, p. 14), Theiner et al. (2010) and Velleman (2000a) argue in a similar fashion, and Gilbert (2014a) and Tollefsen (2002) highlight analogies between individual and collective beliefs in their arguments for realism about the latter.
Gilbert offers the following response to objections to GMH that ‘bring up some feature alleged to be essential to belief and … argue that, since so-called collective beliefs lack that feature they are not beliefs’: ‘One who wishes to maintain that collective belief is indeed belief can argue that, on the contrary, if collective beliefs lack the allegedly essential feature of belief, that throws doubt on the claim that this feature is indeed essential to belief’ (Gilbert 2014b, p. 178). But if we are right, what we have here is not a simple standoff between the critic’s modus ponens and Gilbert’s modus tollens. Maintaining that collective beliefs really are beliefs has serious repercussions for the human-individual case.
The dilemma sketched here also arises for the more specific version of Gilbert’s line of argument that we touched on in Sect. 3. Suppose Endorsement in a group case is a matter, not of dispositions to judge, but of dispositions to act in particular ways (for instance, issue statements, take legal action, and the like). Then, given the parity considerations broached above, having those dispositions is (ceteris paribus) sufficient for Endorsement in the case of an individual person. Then the military commander discussed in Sect. 3, whose actions and dispositions to act were, by hypothesis, based on a supposition, not a belief, should count as endorsing the content of that supposition, and hence believing it.
Chalmers distinguishes between ‘(phenomenal) consciousness’ and ‘awareness’ (1996, Ch. 6), but suggests that ‘access consciousness corresponds roughly to … awareness, although my definition gives less of a role to rationality’ (1996, p. 228). Since nothing in our argument turns on the role of rationality in A-consciousness, we can treat the two distinctions as equivalent.
See Huebner (2014, p. 117) for a reply (to Searle) along these lines.
Chalmers (1997, p. 421) explicitly construes A-consciousness as dispositional. Block (2007, p. 279) suggests, however, that it was a ‘category mistake’ to define A-consciousness in dispositional terms, and he instead proposes to define it in terms of a state (or its content) being ‘globally broadcast’.
On Crane’s view (cf. Sect. 2), reactivated beliefs would be another example of states that are A-conscious but not P-conscious. Dormant beliefs, of course, are neither A, nor P.
Someone might think we have already implicitly conceded this point, since we remain neutral on Crane’s view that there is no consciously believing that p and nothing it is like to believe that p. Someone might conclude from this that when we argue that beliefs must be accessible to consciousness, the relevant notion of consciousness must be A, rather than P. For if P consciousness were required, it might seem as if we should be committed to rejecting Crane’s view. But this is too quick. We suggested that consciously accessing a belief was paradigmatically a matter of reactivating it in conscious judgement. And, as explained, on most views, episodes of occurrent judgment are phenomenally (as well as access) conscious (see Bayne and Montague 2011).
See Crane (2013) for some thoughts pointing in the same direction.
This is a fictional case. In real blindsight, the content of the relevant visual states is not globally broadcast in the sense required for A consciousness, though it is of course of some limited use to the patient (e.g. in visual forced-choice tasks).
In fact, this is not quite right. Not only must the state’s content be accessible, its ‘mode’ must also be in the picture somehow. You cannot use the content of a state—say, that there is beer in the fridge—in reasoning, acting etc. unless you have some grasp of whether beer-in-the-fridge is an actual state of the world, or a desirable possible future state, etc.
Note that we are not claiming that P-consciousness is sufficient. If some state T with the content p is phenomenally conscious, it is like something for a person to be in that state. But in itself, that may not constitute conscious access to the content p (cf. Block 2007, pp. 174–175).
Nathan (1982) criticizes Mellor along these lines.
Using Searle’s (1983, Ch. 1) notation. Bel = Belief.
We write ‘X’ instead of ‘Bel’ since there is no need to assume that the relevant intentional mode is belief.
We are grateful to Deborah Tollefsen, to Joel Walmsley, and to former and current colleagues at the Centre for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, for helpful discussion. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Olle Blomberg for his detailed, helpful comments on an early draft, and to four anonymous referees whose constructive criticisms helped us to improve the paper.
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Overgaard, S., Salice, A. Consciousness, belief, and the group mind hypothesis. Synthese 198, 1597–1621 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02152-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02152-6