What is a group?

Everybody has the same intention, but do they form a group?

Farmer's demonstration in The Hague, Netherlands, 2019

One of the major problems in the philosophy of action is how it is possible that a group acts while actually the acts are performed by the members of the group. That was the theme of my blog last week. This problem can be solved, for instance, by ascribing intentions to groups and treat them as entities that perform actions. This is Tollefsen’s solution. However, what is the entity that we can ascribe intentions to? In other words, what is, what I want to call, an intentional group?

Michael E. Bratman, and actually also Margaret Gilbert, state that entities we can ascribe to collective intentions must be small. However, when is a collectivity is small enough to consider it as an intentional group? Let’s take Bratman. He says: “... my focus will be primarily on the shared intentional activities of small, adult groups in the absence of asymmetric authority relations within those groups, and in which the individuals who are participants remain constant over time. Further, I will bracket complexities introduced by the inclusion of the group within a specific legal institution such as marriage, or incorporation. My interest will be primarily with duets and quartets rather than symphony orchestras with conductors, with small teams of builders rather than large and hierarchical construction companies” (2014, p. 7)

In his analyses, Bratman considers only two-person groups. But why should it be so that what is true for two-person groups is also true for bigger groups like quartets if not for groups bigger than quartets? Bratman doesn’t justify his choice. Actually any upper-limit in group size will be arbitrary. We can change a quartet into a quintet and the philosophical analysis will not basically change. And the same so if we take a sextet, then an octet, then a nonet. The change is gradual and to limit group size in view of the possibility to ascribe a collective intention is difficult to justify.

A second problem is whether a group is still the same group, when a member is replaced, especially if we consider small groups like duos or foursomes. In many groups it’s normal that members are substituted. Think of sports teams, the board of an organisation, debating clubs, etc. Members come and go and often after some time the group has got a completely different composition. Four members of a symphony orchestra have formed a string quartet. Then one of them is ill and is temporarily replaced by another musician. Must we say then that we have a different string quartet, although name and repertoire of the ensemble haven’t changed?

A third question is whether a group needs to be an independent entity not linked to an umbrella organisation. Bratman, and also Gilbert – implicitly –, think so. However, it’s doubtful whether this assumption is realistic. Bratman and Gilbert analyse examples like two people who want to paint a house together or who have agreed to make a walk together. But often groups are not of that kind in the sense that they are merely a few people who voluntarily perform activities together without any responsibility towards a kind of umbrella organization. Take the string quartet just mentioned. Even if the strings can decide themselves where to play and if they always want to play with the same four musicians, probably they must take care of what their boss, the symphony orchestra, requires of them. Or four athletes decide to form a relay team, but they’ll have to reckon with the rules of their club and the athletic union. Or four virologists decide to form a corona vaccine development team. Nevertheless, they can only do so if they belong to a medical institute, since they lack the means to work independently. If we would require that a group is really independent, then many cooperating people with a common intention to perform a certain task would be denied the status of being a group, although they apparently are.

But, fourth, even the differences between individual actions and groups actions are gradual. Let’s say that I want to take the train to Utrecht. I buy a ticket and take the train. This apparently simple individual action supposes much implicit cooperation with other people! Already buying a ticket requires many intentions of other persons in order to make it possible. I buy, for example, the ticket at the ticket machine. Someone (or several people) must have thought out this machine, some must have constructed it, some must have put the ticket machine on the platform, maintain the ticket machine and take care that there is enough paper and ink for tickets to be printed, etc. For being able to buy a simple railway ticket – not to speak of the ride itself – a whole structure of intentions (and actions) is involved and without such a structure buying a ticket is simply impossible. Nobody can make his own train ticket, or it would be seen as a falsification. That such buying a ticket is “groupish” becomes clear if we compare it with my spading my garden. I take a scoop, go to my garden and start to turn the soil over. There is no other person involved than myself.

These are a few questions that I want to raise when we consider intentional groups. The upshot is that although groups exist and although we can ascribe intentions to groups, it’s impossible to define what a group is. Agents, groups and big complicated organizations if not societies or humanity as a whole are actually ranges on a continuum with the former and the latter as extremes. In this sense groups do not exist.

Sources

- Bratman, Michael E., Shared Agency. A Planning Theory of Acting Together. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

- Gilbert, Margaret, On Social Facts. London, etc.: Routledge, 1989.

- Weg, Henk bij de, “Collective Intentionality and Individual Action”, http://www.bijdeweg.nl/The%20possibility%20of%20group%20intentions.pdf

How groups act

Group mind

One of the major problems in the philosophy of action is how it is possible that a group acts while actually the acts are performed by the individuals that belong to the group. That is, the bodily movements that are interpreted as actions are done by these individuals, and the intentions that make that the body movements are interpreted as actions belong to the acting individuals. How could it be otherwise? Intentions are mental phenomena that are developed in the mind. However, a group hasn’t a mind and so it cannot have intentions. And without an intention there is no action. Ergo group actions do not exist, and one step further is to say that there are no groups.

This reasoning seems sound, but nevertheless I think that, with the exception of some other-worldly philosophers, nobody will defend this Thatcherian view. (see http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2019/01/there-is-no-such-thing-as-society.html for my rejection of this view). Any person who has his/her head screwed on the right way, will see that everyone behaves as if groups exist. And if such an other-worldly philosopher walks through the corridors of a university s/he will meet colleagues from other faculties who study groups or at least do as if they are real in their theories and investigations. Sociologists, historians, lawyers, etc., they all study the activities of groups. Is it then that they see ghosts, or is it the other-worldly philosopher who suffers from delusions? For, to give some examples, how it is possible then that a football team wins a match if there are no groups? For even if it is the centre forward who kicked the ball in the goal of the opponent, if he didn’t have ten other – or at least six other – team mates, there wouldn’t have been a regular match. Or, other cases, I cannot sing a duet alone, and it is almost daily practice that companies are sentenced in court and that it is the company that has to pay the fine and not the individual members of the management.

So groups are real phenomena. Even so, the problem remains then how to explain group actions if it is the individual members of the group who act. Many philosophers, sociologists and other scholars and scientists have tried to answer this question. For instance, I am charmed by the structuration theory developed by the sociologist Anthony Giddens that tries to tackle this problem. However, here I want to discuss the approach proposed by Deborah Tollefsen in her Groups as Agents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), which I find also interesting.

But first this. In her Persons and Bodies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Lynne Rudder Baker defends the so-called “constitution view”. If we take Michelangelo’s famous statue David, actually we have only a pierce of marble. Nonetheless we call it a statue that represents David. It is not only that the marble represents a person, we say also that it has a head, arms etc, even though we have only a piece of marble in front of us. Moreover, it’s not the marble that has a head, arms, etc, but it is David (the statue) who has. Baker explains this by saying that the marble worked by Michelangelo constitutes David.

This is also more or less implicit-explicit in Tollefsen’s approach. According to Tollefsen – and I agree – we don’t ascribe intentions to the brain, even though the thinking process takes place there. No, we ascribe intentions to the whole person, and that’s what we do when we try to interpret, understand or explain the actions and or behaviour performed by individuals. When we want to understand why an individual acts in a certain way, we don’t look in the brain in order to know what his or her intentions are but we derive them from the actions and the situation in which the individual acts. Knowing what a person does is “attributing intentional states” to her. We ask “What are the constitutive features of our practice that account for its explanatory power? That is, what assumptions do we need to make about an agent in order to interpret her behavior successfully? If interpretation is successful, then the assumptions we make about an agent in the process of interpreting her are justified.” In order to know why someone acts, we don’t examine her (or his) brain states, so to the body, but we consider the person that has been constituted by this body and see whether we can ascribe relevant intentions to this person.

Following Dennett, this approach can also be applied to groups, so Tollefsen. Dennett developed the “intentional stance”. “When we adopt the intentional stance toward an entity, we attempt to explain and predict its behavior by treating it as if it were a rational agent whose actions are governed by its beliefs, intentions, and desires”, so Tollefsen, interpreting Dennett. But if this is correct, then we can apply the intentional stance also to groups. Groups are constituted by the individuals that make up a group. Moreover, when we ascribe an intention to an agent, we don’t look for the way it is formed in his or her brain, but we ascribe the intention to the person as a whole. In the same way, even though a group hasn’t a kind of brain (and mind) as an equivalent to a person’s brain (or mind), nonetheless we can ascribe intentions to a group and treat it as if it has. We simply must consider the group as constituted by its members and treat it as a whole.

Note: The quotes are from Tollefsen p. 98. However, the interpretation of her text is mine, and is much wider than what Tollefsen writes here or elsewhere in her book.

Neowise

 I have seen Naples. I have seen Lenin (his dead body). However, one wish remained still unfulfilled: to see a comet. And now also this wish has been fulfilled, for a few days ago I took this picture of the comet Neowise near Utrecht, Netherlands. It's a bad picture, indeed (for my as such good camera is not the youngest any longer), but it clearly shows a comet.

Hobbes and Spinoza

Monument for Johan de Witt (to the right) and his 

brother Cornelis, Dordrecht, the Netherlands

Actually a blog of thousand words is too short to do justice to Spinoza’s theory of the state. But you can see it as a very short introduction and maybe it will make that you want to read more about it. It’s worth to do so, for Spinoza was the first major philosopher since antiquity who was an advocate of a democratic system.

Like Hobbes’s state theory also the one developed by Spinoza has been influenced by the political circumstances of the country he lived in. The Dutch Republic was not a real state but a kind of confederation that can be compared with the present European Union. It originated in 1579 as an alliance of provinces against the repressive regime of the King of Spain, who was also Lord of the Netherlands. The revolt that followed led to the independent Republic of the United Netherlands. The provinces were first held together by a common foreign policy and a common defence, but gradually they became more integrated. The Republic was governed by a council of representatives of the united provinces that met in The Hague. In 1672 the Republic was attacked by four countries, including France and England. Although it survived, the result was much unrest. Its most important political leader Johan de Witt, who in practice functioned as a kind of Prime Minister, was murdered by a mob, and William III, prince of Orange, was installed as the new Stadtholder (the function had been empty since 1650). In a time that questions like republicanism or monarchy, and the influence of the aristocracy, civilians and the people in general were much discussed, Spinoza wrote two political texts: the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise. I want to concentrate my remarks on the latter, even if it hasn’t been completed.

The political unity Spinoza had in mind was the city state. This was just as in the Dutch Republic where actually all important political decisions that influenced the life of the citizens were taken by the town councils. Like for Hobbes, also for Spinoza a political unity is a kind of contract – or “statute” as Spinoza calls it – between people and highest authority. The aim of the statute is peace and safety for everybody. It is the authority that determines what is good and bad, justice and injustice, etc. and that determines the laws and rules that the citizens must obey. It’s also this authority that interprets the law and determines when it is in the interest of all to break the law.

On the face of it, this is not really different from what Hobbes says. What distinguishes Spinoza from Hobbes is the way he elaborates these background ideas. According to Spinoza, they can be realized in three types of state: a monarchy, an aristocracy or a democracy. In the first kind of state there is only one ruler, the king. However, this is only a matter of theory for in practice there is never just one ruler: the king needs advisors, delegates a part of his power to generals and friends, etc. So, what looks like an absolute monarchy is actually a kind of aristocracy but then an aristocracy of the worst kind. Moreover, a monarchy has many other defects, which I’ll pass over, but it’s clear that a monarchy is a not a good political system according to Spinoza.

In an aristocracy it is not one person that rules the state but several do. They have been chosen from the people but the difference with a democracy is that the right to rule belongs to a selected part of the population while in a democracy basically everybody has this right. Spinoza calls this selected group the patricians and certainly here he thinks of the practice in the cities in the Dutch Republic, where the governments were in the hands of patricians. An aristocracy is better than a monarchy, since there is not a king (who is the only authority) who can die, but an aristocratic council that can exist forever. Moreover, the charge of power is often too big for only one ruler, while a council, if it has enough members, can divide the charges and rule together. Moreover, the aristocratic authority is not dependent on one person who can be too young, too old, be unstable and fickle, etc. However, also an aristocracy has its defects and an important defect is nepotism: Although the patricians in power are officially chosen, actually they try to be succeeded by their children and relatives (as was the practice in the Dutch Republic). But since the decisions by an aristocratic council are taken in the interest of the patricians, so only in the interest of a part of the population, in practice it can never have absolute authority, even if it has a formal authority. It must always fear the population as a whole (see what happened to Johan de Witt). This makes that in an aristocracy the patricians must make concessions to the population.

Now it would be interesting to know Spinoza’s view on what he sees as the best political system: democracy. This is the system in which all citizens of a country basically have the right to get political representative functions and have public offices. Spinoza begins with a wide definition of who are citizens in a country, but, alas, before the description starts what a democracy really involves, the manuscript of the Political Treatise breaks off.

Unlike Hobbes, who thinks that only a person who has all authority in his hands can protect the peace and safety of the subjects of a state, Spinoza thinks that the more authority is spread over the population (in the sense that all can participate in it), the more peace and safety is guaranteed. This makes him one of the first advocates of the modern idea of democracy.

Leviathan: Hobbes’s theory of the state

Thomas Hobbes’s main work Leviathan is a book about the state. Until now I have written in my recent blogs about other aspects of the Leviathan, but this time I want to write on Hobbes’s view on the state. It is especially treated in Part II, titled “Of Commonwealth” with some important introductory sections in the last chapters of Part I (“Of Man”).

A man is a wolf to another man, so Hobbes. We have seen this in my last blog. The consequence is that society is a war of all against all, or at least it is a situation of armed peace with real fighting never far away. According to Hobbes, there are three reasons for the conflicts between men: competition in order to gain profits; confidence in order to live safe; and glory. This state of war is the natural state of man. Injustice doesn’t exist: We cannot talk about what is good and bad or right and not right in such a situation, for where a common power that keeps man under control doesn’t exist, there is no law, and where there is no law, there is no injustice. However, people fear death and they want to live a pleasant life. Therefore they want peace. By reasoning this way, Hobbes gets at his first law of nature: We must seek peace and strive for it. However, this is only possible – and that is the second law of nature – if man is willing to give up as much of his rights and liberty as is necessary to get this peace, provided that others are willing to do the same. These two rules are the core of Hobbes’s Law of Nature.

So, people want safety and peace and for this they have to take the safety and peace of others into account. This problem can only be solved if there is a common power and a kind of state, so Hobbes. This can happen only, if men conclude a treaty by which they hand over their rights to a sovereign or to a leading council. The function of this authority is to give the people safety, so that they can build up a good life with which they are satisfied. When people have concluded such a treaty, they have given birth to the great LEVIATHAN. The authority they have installed this way contains the essence of the state, or “commonwealth”, as Hobbes actually says. This essence is “one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the authority, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all as he shall think expedient for their peace and common defence.” This authority is called the sovereign and all the others are called subjects. (see the end of chapter xvii of Hobbes’s Leviathan) In this state it is the sovereign who makes the laws that the subjects must obey. There is one restriction: A subject keeps his right to protect his or her own life; the sovereign is not allowed to take the lives of the subjects.

This is the core of Hobbes’s theory of the state. What remains in Part II of his Leviathan is mere elaboration. It is clear that Hobbes is an advocate of an authoritarian state, governed by an autocratic ruler, or otherwise by an autocratic council. Although Hobbes doesn’t say so, implicit in the Leviathan is that he prefers the former, the one-man autocracy. Once the sovereign has been chosen, the influence of the subjects is almost nil. Of course, the sovereign has his advisers and he has to take care of the safety of the subjects and must take care that they can promote their welfare. He must also respect their lives and a few other rights. But basically the sovereign rules alone. There is no place for a kind of democracy or a kind of state without a central authority, like the Republic of the Netherlands in his days (several times in the Leviathan Hobbes refers to the Republic). This makes his state theory different, for example, from the state theory developed by Spinoza not long after Hobbes wrote down his one. Spinoza discussed several types of state in his Political Treatise. He clearly preferred a kind of democracy, although he wondered to what extent it could be realized. Not so Hobbes. A democratic state even didn’t come in his mind, although there had already been examples of such types of state. The most famous democracy was, of course, Athens in the 5th and 4th century B.C. Apparently, Hobbes didn’t see it as a realistic option. History proved him to be wrong – the history of England and the UK in the first place did.