Groups as Agents

Deborah Perron Tollefsen

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745684871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

In the social sciences and in everyday speech we often talk about groups as if they behaved in the same way as individuals, thinking and acting as a singular being. We say for example that "Google intends to develop an automated car", "the U.S. Government believes that Syria has used chemical weapons on its people", or that "the NRA wants to protect the rights of gun owners". We also often ascribe legal and moral responsibility to groups. But could groups literally intend things? Is there such a thing as a collective mind? If so, should groups be held morally responsible? Such questions are of vital importance to our understanding of the social world.

In this lively, engaging introduction Deborah Tollefsen offers a careful survey of contemporary philosophers? answers to these questions, and argues for the unorthodox view that certain groups should, indeed, be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable. Tollefsen explores the nature of belief, action and intention, and shows the reader how a belief in group agency can be reconciled with our understanding of individual agency and accountability.

Groups as Agents will be a vital resource for scholars as well as for students of philosophy and the social sciences encountering the topic for the first time.

1
Group Belief

This chapter surveys recent attempts to answer the specific question of whether groups have beliefs. The accounts on offer are attempts to identify what is going on “inside” the group, or among and between individuals in the group, in order for our ascriptions of belief to the group to be true. Whatever the merits of these accounts, a pressing question remains: What is it about the phenomenon in question that makes it a case of belief?

1 Defining Belief

Before we move on to consider these accounts, it might be helpful to say a bit more about the concept of a belief. There are various theories of what a belief is, and I will discuss many of these in chapter 4 when I turn to the philosophy of mind and the nature of cognition and mental states. Some of these views, such as the view that beliefs are brain states, seem to preclude the idea that groups can be believers. There are, however, some general things we can say here that are accepted by philosophers regardless of their views about the nature of belief.

Beliefs are propositional attitudes. Consider the following belief ascribed to my son Finn. Finn believes that hamburgers are served for dinner every Friday night. In believing this, my son takes a certain attitude, the attitude of believing, toward a proposition – the proposition “Hamburgers are served for dinner every Friday night.” Now he could take a different attitude toward this proposition. He could, for instance, hope that hamburgers are served for dinner every night (indeed, he does take this very attitude). Or he could retain the same attitude but direct it toward a different proposition. He probably has all sorts of other beliefs involving hamburgers. He believes, for instance, that hamburgers are the best food in the world and that they should be served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Finn's sister also has attitudes towards propositions about hamburgers. Anya fears that “Hamburgers are served for dinner every Friday night.” I intend that “Hamburgers be served on Finn's birthday.”

This foray into the minds of my children highlights the following: propositional attitudes involve a subject, a content (or proposition), and an attitude (belief, intention, fear, hope). In the examples above, the subjects were Finn, Anya, and me. The content of the attitudes that Finn, Anya, and I have are captured by propositions such as “Hamburgers are served for dinner every Friday night.” The attitudes are those of belief, intention, or fear.

Beliefs have truth conditions – conditions under which the belief is true or false. Finn's belief that hamburgers will be served every Friday for dinner is false (much to his dismay). His belief that hamburgers are made (largely) of ground meat is true. Intentions, on the other hand, have success conditions. Although it may be true that I have the intention of serving hamburgers for Finn's birthday, my intention in itself is neither true nor false; rather, it is satisfied or unsatisfied depending on whether I succeed in serving hamburgers on Finn's birthday.

Belief is thought to be a unique attitude in that it conforms to the world, or tries to conform to the world. When we believe something truly, our mind conforms to the world. Our belief matches the state of affairs out in the world. False beliefs, though they fail to do so, attempt to conform to the world. Intentions, on the other hand, aim at getting the world to fit with our mind. My intention to make hamburgers for Finn's birthday is satisfied or fulfilled only when the world (with me in it) conforms to that intention. Intentions have what John Searle calls a world-to-mind direction of fit, whereas beliefs have a mind-to-world direction of fit (Searle, 1983).

This is where the consensus on the nature of belief ends. Debates rage about the subject of propositional attitudes. For instance, philosophers debate whether animals have propositional attitudes. There are also debates about the nature of belief. Some philosophers argue, for instance, that beliefs are brain states, others that beliefs are functional states to be defined in terms of the role they play and that these roles could be realized by other things besides brains (computers, for instance), and yet others that beliefs are best thought of as social statuses which make sense only against the backdrop of various social practices. Finally, there are debates about the content of propositional attitudes. Some philosophers think that the content is determined by factors internal to the subject, and others that the content is determined by factors external to the subject.

Philosophers writing on group belief haven't really concerned themselves with these debates in the philosophy of mind. This is partly because many have adopted methodological individualism and think that group belief ascriptions can be explained in terms of individuals' beliefs (or some other attitude), and they have left the nature of individual belief to philosophers of mind. In what follows, we will consider three accounts of the nature of group belief – the summative account, the acceptance account, and the commitment account. We will return to the nature of belief at the end of the chapter, where I will suggest some reasons for thinking that those interested in group belief ought to look more closely at debates in the philosophy of mind concerning the nature of mental states.

2 Some Recent Accounts of Group Belief

(a) Summative Accounts

According to the summative view of group belief ascriptions, when we attribute a belief to a group we are really just saying that all or most of the group members believe this. The truth of these ascriptions, then, rests on whether or not all or most of the members believe whatever we have attributed to the group. This is the view espoused by Anthony Quinton in “Social objects” (1976):

To ascribe mental predicates to a group is always an indirect way of ascribing such predicates to its members. With such mental states as belief and attitudes, the ascriptions are of what I have called a summative kind. To say that the industrial working class is determined to resist anti-trade union laws is to say that all or most industrial workers are so minded. (1976, p. 17)

We might formalize the summative account in the following way, where “p” stand for a proposition:

Group G believes that p if and only if all or most of the members of G believe that p.

For instance, consider the following attribution made in the context of a department meeting: “The Assessment Committee believes that our students are able to identify patterns of valid and fallacious reasoning.” According to the summative view, in order for this attribution to be true, all or most of the members of the committee must believe that the students in the program are able to identify patterns of valid and fallacious reasoning. But imagine a case where each individual believes that p but no member knows that other members have such a belief. Perhaps each person keeps it a secret that they believe that p. Would it be appropriate in this case to attribute a group belief? These sorts of cases have suggested that the summative account needs to be augmented with a condition that specifies that members know of the existence of others' beliefs. In technical terms, there must be “common knowledge” among the members. The notion of common knowledge has been analyzed in a variety of ways, and we don't have space here to peruse all of its variations.¹ The idea is that members of the group must be aware that the belief is shared and that this awareness itself is manifest to all. If we add common knowledge to the summative account, then we have something like the following:

Group G believes that p if and only if all or most of the members of G believe that p, under conditions of common knowledge.

Now there are certain cases that the summative account seems to fit. Consider the following ascription:

Americans believe that Mojitos are delicious.

Such an ascription is purely distributive. That is, it aims to distribute the belief that Mojitos are delicious to all or most Americans. The summative account seems to make sense of this sort of ascription quite well. But there are other cases where ascriptions are non-distributive. The belief is attributed to the group as a whole. Attributions of beliefs to groups such as committees, boards, corporations, and teams are often such cases.

There are a number of reasons to be skeptical about the adequacy of summative accounts to handle these sorts of ascriptions. For one, it seems a bit too strong to require that all or most of the members of a group believe that p in order for there to be a group belief that p (or for our ascription of a group belief to be true). Imagine a hiring committee of ten people that issues the following statement through its committee chair:

We believe candidate X is the most qualified candidate.

Suppose only two members believe that candidate X is the most qualified. The rest of the committee either doesn't believe it or doesn't have a view of the matter at all – perhaps they didn't do any work and just went along with whatever candidate the two diligent committee members supported. All the committee's actions up to that point and going forward suggest that it believes candidate X to be the best candidate, and yet not all of the members believe this to be so. Therefore, requiring that most or all of the members believe something in order for group belief ascriptions to be true seems too strong.

Could a group believe that p if no member of the group believed that p? Intuitions are not as strong here. Many people would reject the idea that a group believes that p even in cases where no member of the group believes it. At least someone in the group has to believe it. Let's consider an example by returning to one of the passages with which I began the introduction:

The conservatives called for the RNC to pass a resolution reaffirming its support for the 2012 platform. Among other things, the platform called for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The committee reaffirmed its 2012 platform's “core values” on Friday, including the portion indicating that the committee believes “that marriage, the union of one man and one woman, must be upheld as the national standard.” (Sullivan, 2013)

In this passage a conservative committee is attributed the belief that marriage, as the union of one man and one woman, must be upheld as the national standard. Suppose we found out that no member of this committee actually believes that heterosexual marriage must be upheld as the national standard. We can suppose that some of them believe the opposite but are afraid to lose their position in the party and that some of them believe that heterosexual marriage should be the standard in their own lives but don't believe it should be the national standard. If we found this out, would we claim that the attribution is false? Would we insist that the conservative committee does not believe that heterosexual marriage must be upheld as the national standard?

It seems to me that the question of whether the committee believes this or not depends a great deal (but perhaps not exclusively) on how the committee acts and what it does. Suppose, despite the individual members' personal beliefs, the committee continues to issue statements that express and reaffirm this “core value.” Members make decisions and deliberate on the basis of this core value. For instance, the committee declines to offer financial support to organizations not committed to this core value. It adds the core value to policy statements, implements education policies around it, and, when in public, members affirm that heterosexual marriage should be upheld as the national standard. Given this sort of situation, it isn't at all clear that we would resist attributing the belief to the group. Such an attribution makes sense of the way the group behaves. Now one might balk at such an example and insist that the group will behave this way precisely because at least one person believes the proposition attributed to the group, and he or she is perhaps pulling the strings. This may in fact happen, but the point of the example is to show that it is conceptually possible for there to be a case where no individual believes that p but the attribution of a group belief that p is appropriate.

But even if we insist that at least one member must believe that p in order for the group to believe that p, summative accounts fail to provide sufficient conditions for group belief. Margaret Gilbert provides the following example to motivate this criticism:

Assume there are two committees – say, the Library Committee and the Food Committee of a residential college – with the same members. It seems quite possible to say, without contradiction, that (a) most members of the Library Committee personally believe that college members have to consume too m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Key Concepts in Philosophy Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1: Group Belief
• 2: Group Intention
• 3: Group Agency
• 4: Group Cognition
• 5: Interpreting Groups
• 6: The Moral Responsibility of Groups
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement