Plural Subjects

O homem ricoeuriano vive com e para os outros, constitui a sua subjetividade no encontro necessário com a alteridade. Nas obras, nas instituições, nos monumentos da cultura está o plural como fundamento da existência individual, constituída num infindável processo de interpretações.
Minha história está emaranhada com as histórias do outro, mas as histórias estão também tecidas e juntas fazem uma teia cujo desenho é possível ver com o distanciamento adequado. Essa maranha de histórias, esse tecido, é o que chamamos “nós”. Nós brasileiros, nós ricoeurianos, nós democratas, nós humanos. Nós que falamos, agimos e somos responsáveis. Nenhuma história é sozinha: cada um dos fios de cada uma das histórias está composto por fios comuns, de maneira que a história do outro também faz a minha história, e ambos compartilhamos de outras histórias comuns.
Mas, apesar da proximidade, da junção necessária do outro com o si, da presença da alteridade na constituição da consciência, Ricoeur não faz uma “filosofia do nós”. Não vemos em Ricoeur a primeira pessoa dar o salto do singular para o plural, e talvez existam motivos fortes para que o filósofo se abstenha de dar esse salto. Não são esses motivos que iremos explorar nesse estudo de vocação preliminar e exploratória.
Nosso interesse pela noção de “nós” na filosofia ricoeuriana se insere no marco mais amplo de um estudo sobre a comunicação. Entendemos que não há comunicação possível sem o estabelecimento prévio de um nós, mas que o nós se constitui, junto com a consciência individual, no jogo da comunicação. A comunicação tem uma função central no estabelecimento desse sujeito plural, solidário da consciência individual, sua contraparte necessária.
Começamos nossa análise pelo diálogo, mas é na dança que encontramos um horizonte novo para pensar neste sujeito coletivo numa pesquisa que, em fase incipiente, se mostra tanto prenhe de potencialidades quanto de desafios e dificuldades.

Recent years have seen a resurgence in work on Edith Stein’s theory of empathy (Jardine 2015; Moran 2004; Szanto 2015; Taipale 2015; Vendrell Ferran 2015; Zahavi 2010) and of community and collective intentionality (Burns 2015; Caminada 2015; Calcagno 2014). Notably absent, however, is an account of the relationship between empathy and community. This chapter begins the work of making this relationship explicit. This can be of at least two-fold service to future research. First, it will show the conceptual richness and complexity of Stein’s theory of empathy, demonstrating that it cannot be confined to the theory-of-mind debate between simulation theorists, theory-theorists, and advocates of a direct perception model. Second, it may also serve to orient future research into collective intentionality by elucidating her original theory of communal experience. After establishing Steinian accounts of empathy and communal experience, I argue that empathy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for community.

The case of remembering poses a particular challenge to theories of situated cognition, and its successful treatment within
this framework will require a more dramatic integration of levels, fields, and methods than has yet been achieved. The challenge arises from the fact that memory often takes us out of the current situation: in remembering episodes or experiences in my personal
past, for example, I am mentally transported away from the social and physical setting in which I am currently embedded. Our ability
to make psychological contact with events and experiences in the past was one motivation, in classical cognitive science and cognitive psychology, for postulating inner mental representations to hold information across the temporal gap. Theorists of situated cognition thus have to show how such an apparently representation-hungry and decoupled high-level cognitive process may nonetheless be fruitfully understood as embodied, contextualized, and distributed.

Standard accounts in social ontology and the group cognition debate have typically focused on how collective modes, types and contents of intentions or representational states must be con-strued so as to constitute the jointness of the respective agents, cognizers and their engagements. However, if we take intentions, beliefs or mental representations all to instantiate some mental properties, then the more basic issue regarding such collective engagements is what it is for groups of individual minds to share a mind. Somewhat surprisingly, this very issue has not re-ceived much attention in the respective debates and when it has, typically the outlook has been skeptical or outright negative. In this paper I argue that it is epistemologically possible for a group of individuals to literally share a single mental unit. In particular, I will put forward and defend what I shall call the zombie conception of group minds.

In this course, we survey contemporary treatments of collective intentionality. Situated amidst discussions of agency and intentionality in a social context, collective intentionality broadly refers to the kind of intentionality that allows people to experience, act, or think about something together, or as a group. Collective intentionality is manifested in a variety of phenomena. For example, joint attention is a basic form of intersubjective awareness of the world as perceptually available in the pursuit of shared engagements. Shared intentions allow people to carry out collaborative activities and tasks in a coordinated and cooperative manner. Collective acceptance is a key mechanism for the creation and maintenance of symbolic realities such as language, institutions, and power relations. Collective beliefs provide a common ground of normative commitments to regulate shared deliberative and evaluative practices. The power of collective emotions to fuel social conflicts, or to unite people, is evident from the history of mass gatherings, public rituals, and political movements. It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which collective intentionality permeates the social and cultural fabric of our lives. But what exactly does it mean to ascribe intentionality to people 'as a group' – provided that collective intentionality is not just a shorthand for the ‘summative’ or ‘aggregate’ intentionality of individuals?

The distinctive focus of the philosophical analysis of collective intentionality rests on the conceptual, metaphysical, psychological, and normative features which underlie the 'joint' or 'shared' character of experiences, actions, and attitudes, and the related question of how these features help constitute the social world. The resurgence of interest in collective intentionality began in the late 1980s, and substantially expanded in the 1990s, thanks mostly to the pioneering work of John Searle, Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman, and Raimo Tuomela. Today, collective intentionality is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary area of philosophical research which draws on, and has left its mark on, social ontology and epistemology, phenomenology, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, political science, economics, legal theory, and cultural and evolutionary anthropology. Our goal in this course is to compare and contrast leading theories of collective intentionality by delving into specific debates over the nature of joint attention, collective intentions and beliefs, collective acceptance and shared evaluative attitudes, collective emotions, collective knowledge and rationality, as well as collective agency and responsibility.

Journalists, journalism scholars and philosophers have long noted a dearth of engagement between journalism and philosophy, particularly in the Anglophone world. Yet, they have much to gain from each other as professional communities and as disciplines of thought and practice. This paper attempts to initiate the long-overdue conversation between journalism and philosophy by proposing that they are both forms of power in society. They arise from the same dimension of the human condition and they address complementary needs that arise from that dimension, which is why journalism and philosophy are so tantalizingly similar and yet frustratingly different.

[Published version now available (open access).] In this paper I want to introduce and defend what I call the "subject mode account" of collective intentionality. I propose to understand collectives from joint attention dyads over small informal groups of various types to organizations, institutions and political entities such as nation states, in terms of their self-awareness. On the subject mode account, the self-consciousness of such collectives is constitutive for their being. More precisely, their self-representation as subjects of joint theoretical and practical positions towards the world – rather than as objects of such positions – makes them what they are. Members of such collectives represent each other as co-subjects of such positions and thus represent the world from the point of view of the collective.

Social metaphysics is the study of the existence and nature of sociality—of social actions, relations, roles, rules, norms, conventions, practices, customs, and collectives. The systematic investigation of these issues is unified by a common theme: how are individual human beings and their properties related to the social realm? Individualist positions hold that social entities and relations can somehow be reduced to individuals and their properties. Collectivist positions argue against this reduction, typically on the grounds that individuals and their properties are somehow constituted by their membership in the social realm. Charting the logical geography of these positions will be our key to the contemporary Analytic debate. The dialectical structure of our seminar is to assume an audience prejudiced in favor of individualism, then to bring forth and investigate a variety of considerations against individualism, and finally to see where we end up. We shall watch this dialectic unfold in three areas of inquiry: first, the more general question of what exactly it would mean to reduce social entities and relations to individuals and their properties; second, the question of whether we have to resort to collective intentionality for a complete account of joint action; and third, the explanatory significance of recent appeals to socially distributed cognition in the social, behavioral, and psychological sciences.

It is commonplace to speak of social groups as if they were capable of the same sorts of activities as individuals. We say, “Germany won the World Cup;” “The United States invaded Iraq;” and “The world mourned the passing of Nelson Mandela.” In so doing, we attribute agency, belief, and emotional states to groups themselves. In recent years, much literature devoted to analyzing these statements, and others like them, and their implications has emerged. While some are downright dismissive of the idea of a group agent, others have argued that there are genuinely social agents (List and Pettit 2011, Stoutland 2008). Others focus on how commitments, beliefs, or actions must be understood in order to be “shared” (Searle 1990, Bratman 1999, Martell 2010). And, some attention has been paid to what it can mean, assuming that the aforementioned commitments etc. are understood as mental states, for individual minds to share in a mind (Szanto 2013).
Within this literature, a meta-debate has arisen which receives surprisingly little attention. This is the debate over “intentionalism” (Gilbert 1989, Sheehy 2002). Intentionalism is the thesis that “individual human beings must see themselves in a particular way in order to constitute a collectivity” (Gilbert 1989: 12). However, Paul Sheehy has criticized this position, claiming that individuals could be related in such a way as to constitute a collective without their realizing it (2002: 383). The purpose of this article is to contribute to the intentionalism debate. I will argue, drawing from Edith Stein’s phenomenology of social groups, that intentionalism, as Gilbert defines it, is false. However, Sheehy’s argument against it is unsuccessful because of his own implicit intentionalism. I begin by establishing Gilbert’s position, Sheehy’s counter-position, and its shortcomings. I then explicate Stein’s phenomenology of social groups, arguing that it shows that plural subjects who do not meet intentionalist requirements can exist. Since this is the case, intentionalism is false. Because the intentionalism debate takes it for granted that there are irreducibly social agents, I do not argue for this claim.

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).

One of the currently most discussed themes in the philosophy of action is whether there is some kind of collective intention that explains what groups do independent of what the individuals who make up the group intend and do. One of the main obstacles to solve this problem is that on the one hand collective intentionality is no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive pattern of individual intentionality (the Irreducibility Claim), while on the other hand collective intentionality is in the heads of the participating individuals, so to speak, and so it is owned by each of the separate individuals who make up the group (the Individual Ownership Claim). The claims are contradictory and until now no satisfactory solution how to reconcile them has been found. In this article I argue that the constitution view, like the one developed by Lynne R. Baker, can provide a way to sidestep the contradiction. Just as a statue as such is constituted by the marble it is made of but has characteristics that are different from the marble (a statue has a head and legs, while the marble hasn't; while the marble is stony and the statue as such isn't), I argue that a group is constituted by its members and that a group on the one hand and its members on the other hand have different characteristics. This is possible because group and members are on different levels. Then there is no longer a contradiction between the Irreducibility Claim and the Individual Ownership Claim, for the former claim concerns the group level and the latter claim concerns the level of the group members. This explains that a group can have intentions that are no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive patterns of the intentions of its members and that group intentions can be different from if not contradictory to what the individual members taken together intend.

The place of evidence regarding joint commitment and plural action is mostly reserved for documents and explicit linguistic expressions. This paper considers the problem of evidence in cases of engaged (jointly committed) social acts where there is no explicit expression or binding document, yet can still be ascribed to a plural subject. The argument rests on the double meaning of the term factum as fact (factum brutum) and deed (factum practica), as well as contemporary debates about the topic of fact of reason in Kant. The text seeks to show that in certain cases, the execution of an act or the obligation produced by it can be considered evidence of a plural subject. Thus, these facts deserve a special position in relation to scientific evidence.

The philosophy of collectivity is still often driven by fear of group minds. Defenders of content accounts like Michael Bratman attempt to analyze away all occurrences of “we” as a subject of intentions, proposing that at least small-scale collectivity can be entirely explained in terms of attitudes of the form “I intend that we J”. Proponents of mode accounts like John Searle reject this and embrace group mindedness as irreducible, but are also dismissive of collective subjects out of fear of group minds. In his recent  book, Kirk Ludwig makes valid criticisms of the mode account and of Margaret Gilbert’s version of a plural subject account and develops a very rich and improved version of the content account. However, I will argue that  this analysis is still inadequate and subject to counterexamples, and that it  throws out the baby of the group mindedness essential to understanding joint intention with the bathwater of group minds. I conclude by sketching an account of groups as subjects of intentions that responds to Ludwig’s criticisms of Searle and Gilbert. It explains how group mindedness ties the group members together so that they can jointly be the subjects of intentions and other attitudes. A group has minds, not a mind. A subject of we-intentions is essentially plural, while both the notion of a group mind and the content account try to reduce it to something singular. Joint commitment is one form of group mindedness that ties subjects together into collectives, but  there are also others such as e.g. joint attention, joint skills, or joint habits.

(I am currently editing a version of this presentation for publication. It should be forthcoming in 2015).
A meta-debate has arisen in recent literature on the possibility and nature of plural subjects. This is the debate over “intentionalism” (Gilbert 1989, Sheehy 2002). Intentionalism consists of the claim that in order for a social group to exist, the subjects who comprise the group must both stand in the appropriate relations to one another and have mutual knowledge of said relations (Sheehy 2002). To put this another way, members of a group must see themselves as members in order for a group to form. Paul Sheehy has tried to argue against the intentionalism he finds in Margaret Gilbert’s work. However, in this paper, I will argue that Sheehy’s account is also implicitly intentionalist. I then turn to Edith Stein’s phenomenology of sociality to present a theory of social groups that avoids intentionalism (Stein 2000).
The paper has three parts. First, I outline an intentionalist theory of social groups drawn primarily from the works of Gilbert. Second, I review Sheehy’s argument against Gilbertian intentionalism and show that his alternative is itself an intentionalist account (Sheehy 2002). His primary counterexample fails to overcome intentionalism because he is insufficiently rigorous in identifying both the group and the group action in question. Third, I turn to Stein’s Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities for an alternative account of social groups that I argue avoids intentionalism. The key to avoiding intentionalism is her distinction, between two types of social formations, community (Gemeinschaft) and association (Gesellschaft). It turns out that associations are intentionalist, but they are impossible without at least some measure of community. Community is thus more primitive than association, and community may form organically and non-intentionally.