Workshop 1: Group Belief and Action, 9 July 2015
University of Southampton, Highfield Campus, Building 07, Room 3027.
The focus of this first workshop will be on the nature of collective belief and action. Corporations and groups seem to come into existence through the collective agency and beliefs of their members. Similar underlying mechanisms seem to underwrite the existence of other social and cultural artefacts, explaining, for example, how it is that a piece of paper can be a bank note, the signing of a document can be legally binding, and a piece of music can be performed by the myriad artists who make up an orchestra. How should we understand these underlying mechanisms? What is the right account of collective belief and action? Can facts about collective belief and action be straightforwardly reduced to facts about what individual members believe and do? The workshop will feature talks on these questions, with the hope of shedding light on broader questions about the ontology of social and cultural objects.
The full schedule is here and abstracts of papers are below.
Speakers and Abstracts
Georgi Gardiner (Rutgers) 'The Functions of Group Belief Ascriptions'
Summativism about group belief holds that whether a group believes p largely depends on whether its members believe p. Almost any summativist position entails the widely-held “minimally summativist condition”, which holds that a group believes that p only if some member(s) of the group believe that p. Non-summativism, by contrast, denies the minimally summativist condition and holds that an individual member believing p is not necessary for group belief that p.
In this paper I approach this question by considering the functions played by group belief ascriptions. Group belief ascriptions allow us to praise and blame groups, and to predict and explain their behaviour and inferences. I argue that these functions favour non-summativism about group belief.
In closing I address a recent criticism of non-summativism from Jennifer Lackey. Lackey argues that non-summativism cannot adequately account for the phenomena of group lies and group bullshit. I suggest a response on behalf of non-summativism. I then argue that Lackey’s proposal of employing the minimally summativist condition itself faces difficulties accounting for group lies and group bullshit.
Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern) 'Group Belief: Lessons from Lies and Bullshit'
Groups and other sorts of collective entities are frequently said to believe things. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to understanding the nature of group belief. On the one hand, there is summativism, according to which group belief is understood as nothing more than the “summation” of the beliefs of the group’s individual members. On the other hand, there is non-summativism, where groups are regarded as entities with “minds of their own” and group belief is conceived of as supervening on actions that take place at the collective level, such as the joint acceptance of a proposition. Despite the initial plausibility of the summative approach, it is now received wisdom in collective epistemology that group belief must be understood in non-summative terms. In this paper, however, I challenge this orthodoxy by raising entirely new, and what I regard as decisive, objections to this approach to group belief. I then go on to develop and defend a new view, which I call relational summativism: group belief is largely a matter of the individual beliefs of a group’s members, but it is also importantly determined by relations among the bases of these individual beliefs, where these relations arise only at the group level. In this way, the resulting view differs in significant ways from both traditional summativism and non-summativism.
Christian List (LSE) 'What is it like to be a group agent?'
It is, by now, relatively widely accepted that there can be group agents. Examples include commercial corporations, collegial courts, non-governmental organizations, even states in their entirety. But should we also accept that there is such a thing as group consciousness? Is there anything it is like to be a group agent? In this talk, I will do three things. First, I will give an overview of some of the key issues in this debate. Second, I will sketch a tentative argument for the view that group agents lack phenomenal consciousness, contrary to a recent intriguing suggestion by Schwitzgebel (2014). Third, I will draw attention to an important implication of this view, which concerns the normative status of group agents.
Thomas Smith (Manchester) 'Walking together: joint action or not?'
Walking together is Gilbert's example of joint action, and generally agreed to be a paradigm case. But the neo-Davidsonian account of joint action defended by Ludwig claims otherwise. Or at least, it does, on an assumption defended by Mourelatos and revived recently by Steward. The assumption is that because 'walk' does not semantically encode a telos (unlike, say, 'paint a house' or 'walk to the summit') then that some agent walks (or some agents walk) does not entail that there was some one walk(ing), only that there was some amount of walking. More generally, atelic verb phrases, as well as progressive verb phrases (as in 'we were walking to the summit') the predication of which does not entail that any telos was reached, admit of mass-noun but not count-noun nominalization. If that's right, Ludwig's account entails that agents never walk together (although they may, say, walk to the summit together). Furthermore, on a natural extension of Ludwig's account to the mass-quantified case, it entails that, trivially, any two walkers walk together. For as masses sum, walking in which you participate as an agent, and walking in which I participate as an agent trivially makes up walking in which each of us participates as an agent. (A similar problem arises for verb phrases nominalizable as plural noun phrases e.g. 'wrote a number of songs').
I consider two ways to restore pride of place to Gilbert's case. First, the claim that 'together' and 'jointly' should not be understood in the neo-Davidsonian way but as meaning collaboratively, cooperatively, or companionably. This claim, I argue, is uncharitable to the joint action literature, rendering its topic hopelessly vague and context-sensitive. Second, that we reject the neo-Davidsonian relation of participation as an agent and instead take as primitive the function 'agent of'. For while it is trivial that if I am walking and you are walking then there is some walking in which each of us participates as an agent, it is not trivial that there is some walking of which each of us is an agent.
I recommend this second strategy.
University of Southampton, Highfield Campus, Building 07, Room 3027.
The focus of this first workshop will be on the nature of collective belief and action. Corporations and groups seem to come into existence through the collective agency and beliefs of their members. Similar underlying mechanisms seem to underwrite the existence of other social and cultural artefacts, explaining, for example, how it is that a piece of paper can be a bank note, the signing of a document can be legally binding, and a piece of music can be performed by the myriad artists who make up an orchestra. How should we understand these underlying mechanisms? What is the right account of collective belief and action? Can facts about collective belief and action be straightforwardly reduced to facts about what individual members believe and do? The workshop will feature talks on these questions, with the hope of shedding light on broader questions about the ontology of social and cultural objects.
The full schedule is here and abstracts of papers are below.
Speakers and Abstracts
Georgi Gardiner (Rutgers) 'The Functions of Group Belief Ascriptions'
Summativism about group belief holds that whether a group believes p largely depends on whether its members believe p. Almost any summativist position entails the widely-held “minimally summativist condition”, which holds that a group believes that p only if some member(s) of the group believe that p. Non-summativism, by contrast, denies the minimally summativist condition and holds that an individual member believing p is not necessary for group belief that p.
In this paper I approach this question by considering the functions played by group belief ascriptions. Group belief ascriptions allow us to praise and blame groups, and to predict and explain their behaviour and inferences. I argue that these functions favour non-summativism about group belief.
In closing I address a recent criticism of non-summativism from Jennifer Lackey. Lackey argues that non-summativism cannot adequately account for the phenomena of group lies and group bullshit. I suggest a response on behalf of non-summativism. I then argue that Lackey’s proposal of employing the minimally summativist condition itself faces difficulties accounting for group lies and group bullshit.
Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern) 'Group Belief: Lessons from Lies and Bullshit'
Groups and other sorts of collective entities are frequently said to believe things. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to understanding the nature of group belief. On the one hand, there is summativism, according to which group belief is understood as nothing more than the “summation” of the beliefs of the group’s individual members. On the other hand, there is non-summativism, where groups are regarded as entities with “minds of their own” and group belief is conceived of as supervening on actions that take place at the collective level, such as the joint acceptance of a proposition. Despite the initial plausibility of the summative approach, it is now received wisdom in collective epistemology that group belief must be understood in non-summative terms. In this paper, however, I challenge this orthodoxy by raising entirely new, and what I regard as decisive, objections to this approach to group belief. I then go on to develop and defend a new view, which I call relational summativism: group belief is largely a matter of the individual beliefs of a group’s members, but it is also importantly determined by relations among the bases of these individual beliefs, where these relations arise only at the group level. In this way, the resulting view differs in significant ways from both traditional summativism and non-summativism.
Christian List (LSE) 'What is it like to be a group agent?'
It is, by now, relatively widely accepted that there can be group agents. Examples include commercial corporations, collegial courts, non-governmental organizations, even states in their entirety. But should we also accept that there is such a thing as group consciousness? Is there anything it is like to be a group agent? In this talk, I will do three things. First, I will give an overview of some of the key issues in this debate. Second, I will sketch a tentative argument for the view that group agents lack phenomenal consciousness, contrary to a recent intriguing suggestion by Schwitzgebel (2014). Third, I will draw attention to an important implication of this view, which concerns the normative status of group agents.
Thomas Smith (Manchester) 'Walking together: joint action or not?'
Walking together is Gilbert's example of joint action, and generally agreed to be a paradigm case. But the neo-Davidsonian account of joint action defended by Ludwig claims otherwise. Or at least, it does, on an assumption defended by Mourelatos and revived recently by Steward. The assumption is that because 'walk' does not semantically encode a telos (unlike, say, 'paint a house' or 'walk to the summit') then that some agent walks (or some agents walk) does not entail that there was some one walk(ing), only that there was some amount of walking. More generally, atelic verb phrases, as well as progressive verb phrases (as in 'we were walking to the summit') the predication of which does not entail that any telos was reached, admit of mass-noun but not count-noun nominalization. If that's right, Ludwig's account entails that agents never walk together (although they may, say, walk to the summit together). Furthermore, on a natural extension of Ludwig's account to the mass-quantified case, it entails that, trivially, any two walkers walk together. For as masses sum, walking in which you participate as an agent, and walking in which I participate as an agent trivially makes up walking in which each of us participates as an agent. (A similar problem arises for verb phrases nominalizable as plural noun phrases e.g. 'wrote a number of songs').
I consider two ways to restore pride of place to Gilbert's case. First, the claim that 'together' and 'jointly' should not be understood in the neo-Davidsonian way but as meaning collaboratively, cooperatively, or companionably. This claim, I argue, is uncharitable to the joint action literature, rendering its topic hopelessly vague and context-sensitive. Second, that we reject the neo-Davidsonian relation of participation as an agent and instead take as primitive the function 'agent of'. For while it is trivial that if I am walking and you are walking then there is some walking in which each of us participates as an agent, it is not trivial that there is some walking of which each of us is an agent.
I recommend this second strategy.