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.