Joint Mental States and Quasi Agential Groups (original) (raw)
From extended mind to collective mind
Cognitive Systems Research, 2006
Although the notion of collective intentionality has received considerable attention over the past decade, accounts of collective belief and intention remain individualistic. Most accounts analyze group intentional states in terms of a complex set of individual intentional states and, thus, it is individuals not groups that have intentional states. In this paper, I attempt to undermine one of the motivations for refusing to acknowledge groups as the bearers of mental states. The resistance to collective mental states is motivated by the view that mental states are located in minds and minds are in heads. Since groups do not have heads or brains, they cannot have minds or mental states. There is a significant and important thesis in cognitive science, however, which suggests that the mind is not bounded by skin and bones. If ''the mind ain't in the head'', then this removes a major barrier to the idea of collective minds.
Groups as Agents with Mental Attitudes
2004
We discuss a model of cooperation among autonomous agents, based on the attribution of mental attitudes to groups: these attitudes represent the shared beliefs and objectives and the wish to reduce the costs for the members. When agents take a decision they have to recursively model what their partners are expected to do under the assumption that they are cooperative, and they have to adopt the goals and desires attributed to the group: otherwise, they are considered by the other members uncooperative and thus liable.
Grounding Social Action and Phenomena in Mental Representations
We will present a basic ontology of social action by examining the most important forms, with special focus on pro-social forms, in particular Goal Delegation and Goal Adoption. They are the basic ingredients of exchange, cooperation, group action, and organization. We will ground this in the mental representations (beliefs and goals) of the agent in a social (inter)action: the individual social mind. We need such an analytical account of social action to provide a good scientific conceptual apparatus for social theory. We will try to show why we need mind-reading and cognitive agents (and therefore why we have to characterize cognitive levels of coordination and social action); why we need goals about the mind of the other (in interaction and in collaboration), or ‘adhesion’ and social commitment to the other; why cognition, communication and agreement are not enough for modelling and implementing cooperation; why emergent pre- cognitive structures and constraints should be formalized, and why emergent cooperation is needed also among planning and deliberative social actors.
Against Group Cognitive States
English users are not fazed by such sentences as "Microsoft intends to develop a new operating system" and "England wants to retain the pound as its unit of currency." We produce and consume such claims frequently and with ease. One might nevertheless wonder about their literal truth. Does Microsoft -the corporation itself -literally intend to develop a new operating system? Does England -as a single body -genuinely want to retain the pound as its unit of currency. More generally, it is a substantive philosophical and empirical question whether groups of individuals (who themselves instantiate mental states) instantiate mental states properly so called.
A Beginner’s Guide to Group Minds
Theiner, G. (2014). A Beginner’s Guide to Group Minds. In J. Kallestrup & M. Sprevak (Eds.), New Waves in Philosophy of Mind (pp. 301-322). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
"Conventional wisdom in the philosophy of mind holds that (1) minds are exclusively possessed by individuals, and that (2) no constitutive part of a mind can have a mind of its own. For example, the paradigmatic minds of human beings are in the purview of individual organisms, associated closely with their brains, and no parts of the brain that are constitutive of a human mind are considered as capable of having a mind. Let us refer to the conjunction of (1) and (2) as standard individualism about minds (SIAM). Put succinctly, SIAM says that all minds are singular minds. This conflicts with the group mind thesis (GMT), understood as the claim that there are collective types of minds that comprise two or more singular minds among their constitutive parts. The related concept of group cognition refers to psychological states, processes, or capacities that are attributes of such collective minds. In recent years, the once-discredited concept of group cognition has shown definite signs of a comeback in the social sciences, some regions of cognitive science, and among philosophers concerned with collective agency. However, there are important differences among their respective views of why some psychological property should count as a group level phenomenon. If we want to understand these differences, it is critical that we develop a shared ‘lingua franca’ that we can use to taxonomize different variants of group cognition. It is the goal of my paper to contribute to this larger enterprise. The paper is organized as follows. First, I elaborate on the distinction between singular and group minds, and draw a distinction between hive cognition, collective cognition, and socially distributed cognition. Then I briefly clarify the concept of mind that we can plausibly take to be at play in the present debate. In the rest of the paper, I sketch an analysis of the emergent character of socially distributed cognition that is free from the metaphysical shackles of vitalism. I close with a few remarks on the idea that there are multiple levels of cognition."
Group minds and the problem of the first belief
ABSTRACT. This article presents theories of group belief with a problem. It is conceptually and psychologically impossible for there to be a believer with just one belief. For conceptual reasons, a single belief could not have any content without the background of other beliefs. Or even if it could, it would for psychological reasons be impossible for the believer to know or understand the content of its sole belief. With certain plausible assumptions, however, groups would at some point of time have to have only one belief so far. (Especially the assumption of discontinuity between the group’s and its members’ commitments leads to this.). If it is conceptually or psychologically impossible for the group to acquire its first belief, it can never come to acquire any beliefs at all. The article ends by discussing various ways out. KEY WORDS: Group belief, Philip Pettit, belief formation, holism, content of beliefs, problem of the first belief Balkan Journal of Philosophy Volume 6, Issue 1, 2014 Social Ontology Arto Laitinen Pages 43-48
Many philosophers share the strong intuition that mental or cognitive properties should be attributed at exactly one level of organization: the individual organism. In particular, individual human beings are considered to be the paradigmatic subjects of mental properties. However, many highly prized activities in our species are accomplished only when we think and act together in groups. Can a group constitute a cognitive system—a mind—in its own right? The so-called “group mind” thesis was a popular fixture in the intellectual landscape of the late 19th and early 20th century (Wilson, 2004). It crystallized the idea of a group as a collective agent, and its gestalt as an emergent whole that is more than the sum of its parts. To its own detriment, many traditional formulations of this idea remained highly speculative and often bordered on the occult. As a result, the “group mind” concept quickly fell out of favor with the rise of behaviorism in psychology, since it remained unclear where the “group mind” was supposed to reside, and how we could measure it (Wegner, 1986). One way to summarize the precarious ontological status of group minds is in the form of the following dilemma. If the group mind is nothing over and above the collection of individual minds and their interactions, an appeal to group minds appears to be redundant. However, if the group mind is something over and above all these things, it appears to imply a collective version of mind-body dualism. This raises the familiar question of how the group mind exercises its causal influence on group members. Some bizarre answers were suggested in response to this problem, such as the putative mediation of a genetic “ectoplasm” (Jung, 1922) or telepathic communication (McDougall, 1920). In sum, neither horn of the dilemma makes the idea of group minds seem very attractive. However, roughly fifty years after the “cognitive revolution” in psychology, the idea that groups can have cognitive properties of their own has gained new ascendancy in a wide range of disciplines concerned with group behavior. Rather than engaging in abstract arguments about the possibility of “group minds,” contemporary appeals to group cognition have typically tied their claims to particular kinds of psychological predicates. For instance, social psychologists studying memory, problem-solving, and decision-making in small groups have based their work on a view of groups as adaptive information-processing systems in their own right (Wegner et al., 1985; Cicourel, 1990; Larsen & Christensen, 1993; Hinsz et al., 1997; Propp, 1999; Stasser, 1999; Mohammed & Dumville, 2001; Lewis, 2003; Goldstone & Gureckis, 2009). Organizational scientists have studied the memory and learning processes of firms and organizations (Sandelands & Stablein, 1987; Walsh & Ungson, 1991; Argote, 1999). Sociologists, anthropologists, and historians have found it useful to express generalizations about social groups in terms of their collective memory (Burke, 1989; Le Goff, 1992). Economists and political scientists continue to explore the relationships between individual and group rationality in the arena of judgment aggregation (Pettit, 2003; List, 2003, 2010). Evolutionary biologists have revived the idea that groups can evolve into adaptive units of cognition as a result of group-selection (D.S. Wilson, 1997, 2002; D.S. Wilson, van Vugt, & O’Gorman, 2008). Recent studies of animal behavior have revealed a number of collective decision-making mechanisms that are shared across a wide range of group types such as swarming ants, schooling fish, flocking birds, and also humans (Hölldobler & E.O. Wilson, 1990; Seeley, 1995; Bonabeau, Dorigo, & Theraulaz, 1999; Couzin, 2009). The framework of distributed cognition has been used to study the dynamics of collaborative work practices which are socially, technologically, and temporally distributed, and whose coordination is mediated by rich situational, material, and organizational constraints. (Hutchins, 1995a, 1995b; Hollan, Hutchins, & Kirsh, 2000). The framework of distributed cognition has recently been embraced by some philosophers of science as a unifying framework to overcome the present hiatus between “rationalist” and “social-constructionist” approaches to scientific cognition (Giere, 2002, 2005; Giere & Moffat, 2003; Nersessian, 2006). The term “crowdsourcing” has been coined to describe ways of leveraging Web 2.0 technologies for the purposes of mass collaboration (Howe, 2006; Shirky, 2008). Finally, philosophers seeking a conceptual analysis of collective intentionality—such as collective beliefs, intentions, and responsibilities—have tied their accounts to the recognition of groups as intentional subjects in their own right (Gilbert, 1989; Velleman, 1997; Schmitt, 2003; Tollefsen, 2004; List, 2010).