Eliminating Group Agency

Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents.

Group Belief

The received view in collective epistemology is that group belief must be understood in inflationary terms, with the most popular version being the joint acceptance account. Very roughly, group belief is the result of members jointly agreeing to accept a proposition as the group’s, even if no member believes it herself. In this chapter, this orthodoxy is challenged by showing that joint acceptance accounts lack the resources to explain how groups can lie and bullshit, and, more generally, it is argued that group belief cannot be determined by processes that are under the direct voluntary control of the members. A new view, the Group Agent Account, is then defended, according to which group belief is determined in part by relations among the bases of the beliefs of members, where these relations arise only at the collective level, but is also partly constituted by the individual beliefs of members.

Collective Belief and the Intentional Strategy

What do we mean when we say that some group believes something? Do we simply mean that all the members of the group believe it, or are we acknowledging the existence of some kind of group agent? According to Margaret Gilbert, talk about group mental states refers to the specific kind of agreements she calls joint commitments — that is, to collectively believe something means to be committed with others to believe it. In my article, I will first present Gilbert’s approach in more detail but will ultimately show that this approach is problematic and will refute it. I will briefly consider the most common solution to the problems Gilbert’s account faces, which lies in replacing collective beliefs with acceptances, but I will show that this solution will not do either. The solution I will then present will be based on Daniel Dennett’s intentional strategy, which is a method of interpreting the things around us and predicting their behaviour by treating them as rational agents with relevant intentions. I will try to show that all the problematic cases of collective belief can be explained by applying the intentional strategy to the groups in question.

The Puzzle of Plural Obligation

This chapter deals with plural obligation. Here, the idea of Prime Requirement, upon which the idea of Prime Justice depends, is committed to there being such a thing as a moral requirement of some kind over multiple agents even where they are not a group agent, and even apart from whether any of those agents is thereby under any moral obligation. For that reason, the puzzle of plural obligation is an important challenge. The chapter emphasizes that the problem does not arise particularly from the idea of Prime Justice, or from its being a high, or nonconcessive, or unrealistic standard, but is entirely independent of those features. The problem arises for the very idea of social justice: if requirements of justice—be they idealistic or concessive—require members of society to do or refrain from certain things, the puzzle of plural obligation raises its head, since their all acting that way is not something that any agent can perform.

Redundant Group Agency

According to group-agent realism, treating groups as agents with their own intentional states, irreducible to those of the group members, helps us explain and predict the groups’ behavior. This paper challenges this view. When groups judge logically interconnected propositions, group members often have incentives to misrepresent their beliefs concerning propositions they care less about in order to increase the probability of their groups adopting their view of propositions they consider more important. Aggregating such untruthful judgments may lead to the group forming false beliefs. Treating groups as agents will then not help us explain or predict their behavior.

Mandevillian Intelligence

Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive shortcomings, limitations, and biases play a positive functional role in yielding various forms of collective cognitive success. When this idea is transposed to the epistemological domain, mandevillian intelligence emerges as the idea that individual forms of intellectual vice may, on occasion, support the epistemic performance of some form of multi-agent ensemble, such as a socio-epistemic system, a collective doxastic agent, or an epistemic group agent. As a specific form of collective intelligence, mandevillian intelligence is relevant to a number of debates in social epistemology, especially those that seek to understand how group (or collective) knowledge arises from the interactions between a collection of individual epistemic agents.

The epistemology of group agents

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] "The ultimate foci of this dissertation are group belief and justified group belief. As we will see, many models of both concepts have been proposed, and it is clear in many cases that these models are not intended to capture the same phenomena. Pluralism about group belief and justified group belief, understood generally, may thus be appropriate. My aim in this dissertation is to develop accounts of the beliefs and justified beliefs of group agents, rather than diffuse collections of individuals. Ultimately, we will find that no existing models of group belief or justified group belief correctly model the attitudes held by group agents. There is much work to be done before arguing for these points. Understanding what it is for a group agent to hold a belief requires a greater understanding of group agents and their relations to their members. In this chapter, I review a series of proposals for understanding this relation. I argue that existing accounts of the relationship between group agents and their members are either incorrect or incomplete. Insights from existing approaches point toward a fuller account of the relationship between group agents and their members."--Introduction