Could groups ever be an understanding subject (an epistemic agent ascribed with understanding) or should we keep our focus exclusively on the individuals that make up the group? The way this paper will shape an answer to this question is by starting from a case we are most willing to accept as group understanding, then mark out the crucial differences with an unconvincing case, and, ultimately, explain why these differences matter. In order to concoct the cases, however, (...) we need to elucidate what it means to be attributed with understanding and what makes up an epistemic agent. I shall argue that it is abilities, above all, that guide our attributions of understanding. While it is true that understanding must go beyond single acts, this is not going beyond as in going behind them (to private occurrences which are impossible to discern and don’t themselves contribute anything of value), but beyond as in considering what people could and would do: their discernable and valuable abilities. To conceptualize whom the abilities belong to, I will specify what it means to be an epistemic agent. I shall argue that it is being a successful target of the epistemic stance. The epistemic stance (heavily inspired by Dennett’s intentional stance) forms an instrumental abstraction by attributing epistemic properties (i.e., beliefs, epistemic aims, problem-solving tactics) to an entity to explain or predict its behavior. Macro-systematicity (a higher-level pattern which a theory can exploit) is what makes the epistemic stance’s abstraction an explanatory powerful one (regardless of how that macro-systematicity is realized) and emergence (the lack of a straightforward mapping-relation between the micro and the macro) is what makes its power unique to a particular level of explanation. To end, I suggest two kinds of mapping-relations and walk through the shift from reducibility to emergence. (shrink)

In making sense of the world, we typically cooperate, join forces, and draw on one another’s competence and expertise. A group or community in which there is a well-functioning division of cognitive-epistemic labor can achieve levels of understanding that a single agent who relies exclusively on her own capacities would probably never achieve. However, is understanding also collective? I.e., is understanding something that can be possessed by a group or community rather than by individuals? In this (...) paper, I develop an account of understanding phenomena according to which understanding a phenomenon requires reasonably endorsing an adequate and intelligible epistemic mediator that accounts for this phenomenon. I then show that understanding, conceived along these lines, can be attributed to collective entities. An important result of my arguments will be that a collective entity’s understanding cannot (always) be reduced to the sum of the understandings of the individuals belonging to it. This is because a collective entity can sometimes be rightfully claimed to understand a phenomenon while none of its individual members understands it. (shrink)

Francesco Guala has written an important book proposing a new account of social institutions and criticizing existing ones. We focus on Guala’s critique of collective acceptance theories of institutions, widely discussed in the literature of collective intentionality. Guala argues that at least some of the collective acceptance theories commit their proponents to antinaturalist methodology of social science. What is at stake here is what kind of philosophizing is relevant for the social sciences. We argue that a Searlean (...) version of collective acceptance theory can be defended against Guala’s critique and question the sufficiency of Guala’s account of the ontology of the social world. (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of collective intentionality and shows its relevance when we seek to understand public management. Social ontology – particularly its leading concept, collective intentionality – provides critical insights into public organisations. The paper sets out the some of the epistemological limitations of cultural theories and takes as its example of these the group-grid theory of Douglas and Hood. It then draws upon Brentano, Husserl and Searle to show the ontological character of public management. Modern (...) public institutions – such as advisory organisations and service delivery agencies, including schools and universities – are expressions of human collective intentionality. The central concept within these institutions, as a phenomenology reveals, is cooperation. Public institutions are natural structures that emerge from our evolutionary ancestry as cooperative animals and enduringly display all the features of that ancestry. (shrink)

The theory of collective agency and intentionality is a flourishing field of research, and our understanding of these phenomena has arguably increased greatly in recent years. Extant theories, however, are still ill-equipped to explain certain aspects of collective intentionality. In this article we draw attention to two such underappreciated aspects: the failure of the intentional states of collectives to supervene on the intentional states of their members, and the role of non-human factors in collective agency and (...) intentionality. We propose a theory of collective intentionality which builds on the ‘interpretationist’ tradition in metasemantics and the philosophy of mind as initiated by David Lewis and recently developed further by Robbie Williams. The collective-level analogue of interpretationism turns out to look different in some ways from the individual-level theory, but is well-suited to accommodating phenomena such as hybrid collective intentionality. Complemented with Kit Fine’s theory of variable embodiment, such a theory also provides a diachronic account of intentional collectives. (shrink)

Whether collective agency is a coherent concept depends on the theory of agency that we choose to adopt. We argue that the enactive theory of agency developed by Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde (2009) provides a principled way of grounding agency in biological organisms. However the importance of biological embodiment for the enactive approach might lead one to be skeptical as to whether artificial systems or collectives of individuals could instantiate genuine agency. To explore this issue we contrast the (...) concept of collective agency with multi-agent systems and multi-system agents, and argue that genuinely collective agents instantiate agency at both the collective level and at the level of the component parts. Developing the enactive model, we propose understanding agency – both at the level of the individual and of the collective – as spectra that are constituted by dimensions that vary across time. Finally, we consider whether collectives that are not merely metaphorically ‘agents’ but rather are genuinely agentive also instantiate subjectivity at the collective level. We propose that investigations using the perceptual crossing paradigm suggest that a shared lived perspective can indeed emerge but this should not be conflated with a collective first-person perspective, for which material integration in a living body may be required. (shrink)

Many contemporary forms of oppression are not primarily the result of formally organized collective action nor are they an unintended outcome of a combination of individual actions. This raises the question of collective responsibility. I argue that we can only determine who is responsible for oppression if we understand oppression as a matter of social practices that create obstacles for social change. This social practice view of oppression enables two insights: First, that there is an unproblematic sense in (...) which groups can bear irreducible collective responsibility for oppression. Second, that there are derived forms of individual responsibility for members of dominant groups. (shrink)

Discussions of diversity tend to paint a mixed picture of the practical and epistemic value of diversity. While there are expansive and detailed accounts of the value of cognitive diversity, explorations of identity diversity typically focus on its value as a source or cause of cognitive diversity. The resulting picture on which identity diversity only possesses a derivative practical and epistemic value is unsatisfactory and fails to account for some of its central epistemic benefits. In response, I propose that (...) class='Hi'>collective virtue epistemology offers theoretical models that can further our understanding of the benefits of diversity. And I offer a case study to illustrate how this approach could be used to explore the logic of the identity diversity bonus. (shrink)

It is commonplace to attribute obligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where the group is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to have obligations of their own, and that group obligations can be understood in terms of (...) moral demands on individual group members. It has also been suggested that members of groups can share responsibility for an outcome in virtue of being causally or socially connected to that outcome. This paper discusses the agency problem and argues that the most promising attempts at solutions understand group obligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents. (shrink)

Resentment, as it is currently understood in the philosophical literature, is individual. That is, it is anger about a moral injury done to oneself. But in some cases, resentment responds to systemic harms and injustices rather than direct moral injuries. The purpose of this paper is to move beyond individualistic conceptions of resentment to develop an account of collective resentment that better captures the character and effects of the emotion in these cases. I use the example of indigenous and (...) settler Canadians’ reciprocal resentments in response to the Indian Residential Schools and continuing political disagreements as an example of a context in which understanding collective resentment is important. (shrink)

Because moral understanding involves a distinctly first-personal grasp of moral matters, there is a temptation to think of its value primarily in terms of achievements that reflect well on its possessor: the moral worth of one's action or the virtue of one's character. These explanations, I argue, do not do full justice to the importance of moral understanding in our moral lives. Of equal importance is the value of moral understanding in our relations with other moral agents. (...) In particular, I argue that an understanding of moral matters is of central importance within relations of solidarity. In addition to highlighting an overlooked aspect of moral understanding's value, this view also has important implications for what solidarity requires of those who stand in that relationship. (shrink)

Collective apologies on behalf of governments to historically mistreated minorities have become more common. It is unclear, however, how we should respond to these apologies and other practices that invoke collective responsibility for oppression (chapter 1). I review the current literature on collective responsibility to better understand the obstacles facing an account of collective responsibility for oppression (chapter 2). I then argue that we can make sense of these practices by holding powerful organized collectives (chapter 3) (...) and privileged disorganized collectives (chapter 4) responsible for oppression. These practices then can be what I call “morally legitimate” if they are confessions of self-blame, and this self-blame contains an element of collective-self protest (chapter 5). (shrink)

The present essay is a compact form of the results obtained during many decades of research into the primeval foundations of the collective fields of force, both social and of consciousness. Since everything is determined by their origins, and the collective forces arise from the mind, we had to explore the ultimate origins of mind. We have come to recognize the law of interactions as the law and necessity which determine the primeval origins of mind. It also determines (...) the substance and essence of the Universe and the modes of its existence and functioning. The present essay is a concise form of results obtained during many decades of research in the primeval foundations of collective, both social and consciousness fields. I point out that a yet unknown type of forces existed in the Golden Age, which I termed as collective force. In the Golden Age mankind lived in communities which had a full unity. The communal life developed its collective forms, of which the most significant are the development of human speech, of language, share of work and the development of the communal fests. The law determining the primeval origins of mind is the cosmic law of interactions. It defines the substance of the Universe and the ways of its existence and activity. A detailed analysis is presented on the nature of the lay of interaction here. One consequence of this fundamental principle is the general prevalence of the principle of mutuality, which plays a basic role in the understanding of the unfolding and degeneration of consciousness. The principle of mutuality determines the changes of every levels of life. The laws of the generation of consciousness in the ages of evolution toward Homo and the Golden Age are analysed. I presented some evidences indicating the factual existence of the Golden Age, as well as its destruction, which was necessarily accompanied by the overthrow of the consciousness of the Golden Age, its repression and replacement by the newly developed rational, upper or superficial mind. Starting from the consideration that our mind is a product of our history, the phenomenon of the 'double mind' is recognised, the largely antagonistic duality of human mind. It is succeeded to solve the riddle of the double mind and determining its substance. Our double mind, consisting of the ‘upper’ or rational mind and the ‘deep-mind’, is a creature of the two fundamental ages of mankind, that of the age of power domination and the Golden Age. Therefore it expresses the duality of our history. We attempted to explore the heritage of the Golden Age embedded into our world of instincts, sexuality, emotional and sensual world, and the expressions of this heritage according to the different periods of our lives. If we will succeed in enlightening the deep-mind it may make it possible to give back the long-forgotten collective fields of forces to mankind, unavailable to the surface mind at present, and would expand the all-pervasive power of the conscious mind significantly. Hopefully, our results open up new vistas for the research of the collective fields and the double nature of the human mind, and may enable us to know and complete ourselves more deeply and thoroughly. (shrink)

In this chapter, we focus on collective action and intention, and their relation to conventions, status functions, norms, institutions, and shared attitudes more generally. Collective action and shared intention play a foundational role in our understanding of the social. -/- The three central questions in the study of collective intentionality are: -/- (1) What is the ontology of collective intentionality? In particular, are groups per se intentional agents, as opposed to just their individual members? (2) (...) What is the psychology of collective intentionality? Do groups per se have psychological states, in particular propositional attitudes? What is the psychology of the individuals who participate in collective intentional behavior? What is special about their participatory intentions, their we-intentions, as they are called (Tuomela and Miller 1988), as opposed to their I-intentions? (3) How is collective intentionality implicated in the construction of social reality? In particular, how does the content of we-intentions and the intentional activity of individual agents create social institutions, practices and structures? -/- We first discuss collective action and shared intention in informal groups. Next we discuss mechanisms for constructing institutional structures out of the conceptual and psychological resources made available by our understanding of informal joint intentional action. Then we extend the discussion of collective action and intention to institutional groups, such as the Supreme Court, and explain how concepts of such organizations are constructed out of the concepts of a rule, convention, and status function. Finally we discuss collective attitudes beyond intention. (shrink)

Does ?ought? imply ?can? for collectives' obligations? In this paper I want to establish two things. The first, what a collective obligation means for members of the collective. The second, how collective ability can be ascertained. I argue that there are four general kinds of obligation, which devolve from collectives to members in different ways, and I give an account of the distribution of obligation from collectives to members for each of these kinds. One implication of (...) class='Hi'>understanding collective obligation and ability in the proposed way is that a group can be blameworthy for failing to realize its obligation even when no member of the group is blameworthy for failing to realize her obligation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the critical success factors and investigate the benefits that might be gained once implementing Electronic Customer Relationship Management at HEI from employee perspective. The study conducted at Al Quds Open University in Palestine and data collected from (300) employee through a questionnaire which consist of four variables. A number of statistical tools were intended for hypotheses testing and data analysis, including Spearman correlation coefficient for Validity, reliability correlation using Cronbach’s alpha, and Frequency (...) and Descriptive analysis. The overall findings of the current study show that all the features were important for staff and it was critical success factors, at the same time, websites were providing all the features discussed by the theory whereas staff showed their willingness to use those features if provided. It is also discovered that implementing Electronic Customer Relationship Management can cause staff retention, were provided efficiently and needed to be improved. Research limitations: The survey findings were based on QOU employee in Palestine, UAE and KSA branches not included in the study. (shrink)

Existing institutions do not seem well-designed to address paradigmatically global, intergenerational and ecological problems, such as climate change. 1 In particular, they tend to crowd out intergenerational concern, and thereby facilitate a “tyranny of the contemporary” in which successive generations exploit the future to their own advantage in morally indefensible ways (albeit perhaps unintentionally). Overcoming such a tyranny will require both accepting responsibility for the future and meeting the institutional gap. I propose that we approach the first in terms of (...) a traditional “delegated responsibility” model of the transmission of individual responsibility to collectives, and the second with a call for a global constitutional convention focused on future generations. In this paper, I develop the delegated responsibility model by suggesting how it leads us to understand both past failures and prospective responsibility. I then briefly defend the call for a global constitutional convention. (shrink)

Positive political theorists typically deny the possibility of collective agents by understanding aggregation problems to imply that groups are not rational decision-makers. This view contrasts with List and Pettit’s view that such problems actually imply the necessity of accounting for collective agents in explanations of group behaviour. In this paper, I explore these conflicting views and ask whether positive political theorists should alter their individualist analyses of groups like legislatures, political parties, and constituent assemblies. I show how (...) we fail to appreciate the significance of strategic voting and agenda control by treating groups as agents. I, therefore, conclude that positive political theorists should cling to their individualist approach and maintain that groups are not agents. (shrink)

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. Beyond this, however, mandevillian intelligence raises issues that are relevant to the research agendas of both virtue epistemology and applied epistemology. From a virtue epistemological perspective, mandevillian intelligence encourages us to adopt a relativistic conception of intellectual vice/virtue, enabling us to see how individual forms of intellectual vice may (sometimes) be relevant to collective forms of intellectual virtue. In addition, mandevillian intelligence is relevant to the nascent sub-discipline of applied epistemology. In particular, mandevillian intelligence forces us see the potential epistemic value of (e.g., technological) interventions that create, maintain or promote individual forms of intellectual vice. (shrink)

Forests, cars and orchestras are very different ontological entities, and yet very similar in some aspects. The relationships they have with the elements they are composed of is often assumed to be reducible to standard ontological relations, like parthood and constitution, but how this could be done is still debated. This paper sheds light on the issue starting from a linguistic and philosophical analysis aimed at understanding notions like plurality, collective and composite, and propos- ing a formal approach (...) to characterise them. We conclude the presentation with a discussion and analysis of social groups within this framework. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Inclusive fitness theory was not originally designed to explain the major transitions in evolution, but there is a growing consensus that it has the resources to do so. My aim in this paper is to highlight, in a constructive spirit, the puzzles and challenges that remain. I first consider the distinctive aspects of the cooperative interactions we see within the most complex social groups in nature: multicellular organisms and eusocial insect colonies. I then focus on one aspect in particular: the (...) extreme redundancy these societies exhibit. I argue that extreme redundancy poses a distinctive explanatory puzzle for inclusive fitness theory, and I offer a potential solution which casts coercion as the key enabler. I suggest that the general moral to draw from the case is one of guarded optimism: while inclusive fitness is a powerful tool for understanding evolutionary transitions, it must be integrated within a broader framework that recognizes the distinctive problems such transitions present and the distinctive mechanisms by which these problems may be overcome. (shrink)

Theories of collective intentions must distinguish genuinely collective intentions from coincidentally harmonized ones. Two apparently equally apt ways of doing so are the ‘neo-reductionism’ of Bacharach (2006) and Gold and Sugden (2007a) and the ‘non-reductionism’ of Searle (1990, 1995). Here, we present findings from theoretical linguistics that show that we is not a cognitive primitive, but is composed of notions of I and grouphood. The ramifications of this finding on the structure both of grammatical and lexical systems suggests (...) that an understanding of collective intentionality does not require a primitive we-intention, but the notion of grouphood implicit in team reasoning, coupled with the individual concept I. This, we argue, supports neo-reductionism but poses difficulties for non-reductionism. (shrink)

What is the ontology of collective action? I have in mind three connected questions. 1. Do the truth conditions of action sentences about groups require there to be group agents over and above individual agents? 2. Is there a difference, in this connection, between action sentences about informal groups that use plural noun phrases, such as ‘We pushed the car’ and ‘The women left the party early’, and action sentences about formal or institutional groups that use singular noun phrases, (...) such as ‘The United States declared war on Japan on December 8th, 1941’ and ‘The Supreme Court ruled that segregation is unconstitutional in 1954 in Brown vs. Board of Education’? 3. Under what conditions does it make sense to speak of a group doing something together, and what, if anything, is a collective action? In this paper, I argue that a) understanding action sentences about groups does not commit us to the existence of group agents per se, but only to the existence of individual agents; b) there is no difference in this regard between sentences which attribute actions to informal groups on the one hand and institutional groups on the other; c) collective action can be both intentional and unintentional; d) any random group of agents each of whom does something is also a group which does something together; e) while there is a sense in which groups per se perform no primitive collective actions, and therefore no actions at all, f) there is a sensible extension of talk of actions to groups, though it should be treated strictly speaking, like talk of group agents, as a façon de parler, for g) the only agents per se are individuals and the only actions are theirs. -/-. (shrink)

I argue that, in one sense, collective wisdom can save civilization. But in a more important sense, collective wisdom should be understood as a form of civilization, as the result and expression of a moral civilizing-process that comes about through the creation and transmission of collective interpretations of human experience and human nature. Collective wisdom traditions function in this manner by providing an interpretation of what it means to be human and what thoughts, skills, and actions (...) are required to live a successful human life at the most general level of analysis. Collective wisdom can have a civilizing effect on individuals, and indirectly on societies, by providing a type of orienting framework for understanding the proper relationship between the self, others, and the world. Such traditions in effect provide a “blueprint” for the successful human life as such, by providing guidance on thought and action, on what is appropriate to think, feel, desire, and do in theoretical and practical contexts. A wise individual will be a 'civilized' individual in this moral sense, an individual who is properly habituated and educated so as to now reflectively endorse and desire thinking and acting in virtuous ways. However, this understanding of collective wisdom and civilization is in many ways today controversial and met with justified critiques and skeptical criticisms. To defend this way of approaching and answering our question against these critiques, I turn to ancient wisdom traditions from ancient India, China, and Greece as paradigms for understanding exactly how collective wisdom can achieve the end of civilizing humanity. Based on this analysis, I sketch the outlines of a revitalized ancient wisdom tradition able to civilize individuals today, but such a tradition must be updated to reflect the advancement of modern natural science and to meet the demands of living in our diverse, pluralistic, and globalized world. (shrink)

This paper investigates the limitations of exclusively reducing community-based advantages to individual goods, while highlighting the intricate dynamics that shape the well-being of both individuals and the collective. Drawing inspiration from Aristotelian distinctions, the argument challenges Hartney's perspective by emphasizing the inherent value of corrective justice within communities. It explores the interplay between distributive and corrective justice, asserting that the implementation of corrective measures, crucial for societal harmony, transcends individual advantages. The discourse extends to the multifaceted nature of community-based (...) benefits, encompassing shared values, common goods, social cohesion, and collective endeavors. Neglecting these complexities oversimplifies the intricate web of societal interactions, thereby diminishing the intrinsic value of communities in fostering the well-being of their members. The abstract advocates for a holistic approach that acknowledges the interconnected and collective nature of these benefits to achieve a comprehensive understanding of societal flourishing. (shrink)

This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, and partition-of. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in particular their behavior with respect to time – is (...) critical for formal ontology. We provide examples to support this thesis from the domain of biomedicine. (shrink)

In this essay, I will outline a novel strategy for using constitutivist ideas from Kantian metaethics to critique social practices and institutions. In doing so, I do not mean to defend this model of critique as the only viable form of social and political critique, even within a Kantian framework – nor, indeed, as always the most appropriate. But I hope to show that it provides us with a form of critique that allows us to (i) develop a robust critique (...) of many social practices (ii) on both epistemic and practical grounds, while nonetheless (iii) beginning from a perspective that is, in some sense, internal – or better, immanent – to the practice in question. Thus, if we are looking for a form of social critique that is neither purely epistemic nor merely external – which, in other words, allows us to critique social practices on something like their own terms as practically irrational – this method should be attractive for philosophers with Kantian (or post-Kantian) sympathies. At the heart of this conception of critique lies in the idea that social practices may be thought of as attempts at (some form of) collective practical understanding. As I will explain more below, this way of thinking about the rationality of social practices may be seen as the product of applying a general (post-Kantian) model of rationality, which I have developed elsewhere, to the rationality of social collectives or practices. (shrink)

Comments presented at the 35th International Seminar on the -- New Institutional Economics -- Empirical Methods for the Law; Syracuse, 2018.

This article is part of a symposium on property-owning democracy. In A Theory of Justice John Rawls argued that people in a just society would have rights to some forms of personal property, whatever the best way to organise the economy. Without being explicit about it, he also seems to have believed that protection for at least some forms of privacy are included in the Basic Liberties, to which all are entitled. Thus, Rawls assumes that people are entitled to form (...) families, as well as personal associations which reflect their tastes as well as their beliefs and interests. He seems also to have assumed that people are entitled to seclude themselves, as well as to associate with others, and to keep some of their beliefs, knowledge, feelings and ideas to themselves, rather than having to share them with others. So, thinking of privacy as an amalgam of claims to seclusion, solitude, anonymity and intimate association, we can say that Rawls appears to include at least some forms of privacy in his account of the liberties protected by the first principle of justice. -/- However, Rawls did not say very much about how he understands people’s claims to privacy, or how those claims relate to his ideas about property-ownership. This is unfortunate, because two familiar objections to privacy seem particularly pertinent to his conception of the basic liberties. The first was articulated with customary panache by Judith Thomson, in a famous article on the moral right to privacy, in which she argued that talk of a moral right to privacy is confused and confusing, because privacy rights are really just property rights in disguise. The second objection has long been a staple of leftist politics, and is that the association of privacy with private property means that privacy rights are just a mask for coercive and exploitative relationships, and therefore at odds with democratic freedom, equality and solidarity. If the first objection implies that Rawls is wrong to think that protection for privacy can be distinguished from protection of personal property, the second objection implies that Rawls cannot hope to protect privacy without thereby committing himself to the grossest forms of capitalist inequality. -/- In this paper I will not discuss Rawls’ views of property-owning democracy. However, by clarifying the relationship between claims to privacy and claims to property-ownership, I hope to illuminate some of the conceptual, moral and political issues raised by Rawls’ ideas, and by work on the concept of a property-owning democracy, which he inspired. As we will see, privacy-based justifications of private ownership are not always unappealing, and privacy is sometimes promoted, rather than threatened, by collective ownership. The conclusion draws out the significance of these claims for the idea of a property-owning democracy. (shrink)

In this essay we collect and put together a number of ideas relevant to the under- standing of the phenomenon of creativity, confining our considerations mostly to the domain of cognitive psychology while we will, on a few occasions, hint at neuropsy- chological underpinnings as well. In this, we will mostly focus on creativity in science, since creativity in other domains of human endeavor have common links with scientific creativity while differing in numerous other specific respects. We begin by briefly (...) introducing a few basic notions relating to cognition, among which the notion of ‘concepts’ is of basic relevance. The myriads of concepts lodged in our mind constitute a ‘conceptual space’ of an enormously complex structure, where con- cepts are correlated by beliefs that are themselves made up of concepts and are as- sociated with emotions. The conceptual space, moreover, is perpetually in a state of dynamic evolution that is once again of a complex nature. A major component of the dynamic evolution is made up of incessant acts of inference, where an inference occurs essentially by means of a succession of correlations among concepts set up with beliefs and heuristics, the latter being beliefs of a special kind, namely, ones relatively free of emotional associations and possessed of a relatively greater degree of justification. Beliefs, along with heuristics, have been described as the ‘mind’s software’, and con- stitute important cognitive components of the self-linked psychological resources of an individual. The self is the psychological engine driving all our mental and physical activity, and is in a state of ceaseless dynamics resulting from one’s most intimate ex- periences of the world accumulating in the course of one’s journey through life. Many of our psychological resources are of a dual character, having both a self-linked and a shared character, the latter being held in common with larger groups of people and imbibed from cultural inputs. We focus on the privately held self-linked beliefs of an individual, since these are presumably of central relevance in making possible inductive inferences – ones in which there arises a fundamental need of adopting a choice or making a decision. Beliefs, decisions, and inferences, all have the common link to the self of an individual and, in this, are fundamentally analogous to free will, where all of these have an aspect of non-determinism inherent in them. Creativity involves a major restructuring of the conceptual space where a sustained inferential process eventually links remote conceptual domains, thereby opening up the possibility of a large number of new correlations between remote concepts by a cascading process. Since the process of inductive inference depends crucially on de- cisions at critical junctures of the inferential chain, it becomes necessary to examine the basic mechanism underlying the making of decisions. In the framework that we attempt to build up for the understanding of scientific creativity, this role of decision making in the inferential process assumes central relevance. With this background in place, we briefly sketch the affect theory of decisions. Affect is an innate system of response to perceptual inputs received either from the exter- nal world or from the internal physiological and psychological environment whereby a positive or negative valence gets associated with a perceptual input. Almost every sit- uation faced by an individual, even one experienced tacitly, i.e., without overt aware-ness, elicits an affective response from him, carrying a positive or negative valence that underlies all sorts of decision making, including ones carried out unconsciously in inferential processes. Referring to the process of inferential exploration of the conceptual space that gener- ates the possibility of correlations being established between remote conceptual do- mains, such exploration is guided and steered at every stage by the affect system, analogous to the way a complex computer program proceeds through junctures where the program ascertains whether specified conditions are met with by way of generating appropriate numerical values – for instance, the program takes different routes, depending on whether some particular numerical value turns out to be positive or negative. The valence generated by the affect system in the process of adoption of a choice plays a similar role which therefore is of crucial relevance in inferential processes, especially in the exploration of the conceptual space where remote domains need to be linked up – the affect system produces a response along a single value dimension, resembling a number with a sign and a magnitude. While the affect system plays a guiding role in the exploration of the conceptual space, the process of exploration itself consists of the establishment of correlations between concepts by means of beliefs and heuristics, the self-linked ones among the latter having a special role in making possible the inferential journey along alternative routes whenever the shared rules of inference become inadequate. A successful access to a remote conceptual domain, necessary for the creative solution of a standing problem or anomaly – one that could not be solved within the limited domain hitherto accessed – requires a phase of relatively slow cumulative search and then, at some stage, a rapid cascading process when a solution is in sight. Representing the conceptual space in the form of a complex network, the overall process can be likened to one of self-organized criticality commonly observed in the dynamical evolution of complex systems. In order that inferential access to remote domains may actually be possible, it is necessary that restrictions on the exploration process – necessary for setting the context in ordinary instances of inductive inference – be relaxed and a relatively free exploration in a larger conceptual terrain be made possible. This is achieved by the mind going into the default mode, where external constraints – ones imposed by shared beliefs and modes of exploration – are made inoperative. While explaining all these various aspects of the creative process, we underline the supremely important role that analogy plays in it. Broadly speaking, analogy is in the nature of a heuristic, establishing correlations between concepts. However, analo- gies are very special in that these are particularly effective in establishing correlations among remote concepts, since analogy works without regard to the contiguity of the concepts in the conceptual space. In establishing links between concepts, analogies have the power to light up entire terrains in the conceptual space when a rapid cas- cading of fresh correlations becomes possible. The creative process occurs within the mind of a single individual or of a few closely collaborating individuals, but is then continued by an entire epistemic community, eventually resulting in a conceptual revolution. Such conceptual revolutions make pos- sible the radical revision of scientific theories whereby the scope of an extant theory is broadened and a new theoretical framework makes its appearance. The emerging theory is characterized by a certain degree of incommensurability when compared with the earlier one – a feature that may appear strange at first sight. But incommen- surability does not mean incompatibility and the apparently contrary features of the relation between the successive theories may be traced to the multi-layered structureof the conceptual space where concepts are correlated not by means of single links but by multiple ones, thereby generating multiple layers of correlation, among which some are retained and some created afresh in a conceptual restructuring. We conclude with the observation that creativity occurs on all scales. Analogous to correlations being set up across domains in the conceptual space and new domains being generated, processes with similar features can occur within the confines of a domain where a new layer of inferential links may be generated, connecting up sub- domains. In this context, insight can be looked upon as an instance of creativity within the confines of a domain of a relatively limited extent. (shrink)

In the Sociology of Emotion and Affect Studies, affects are usually regarded as an aspect of human beings alone, or of impersonal or collective atmospheres. However, feelings and emotions are only specific cases of affectivity that require subjective inner selves, while the concept of ‘atmospheres’ fails to explain the singularity of each individual case. This article develops a theory of social affect that does not reduce affect to either personal feelings or collective emotions. First, I use a Spinozist (...) understanding of the ‘body’ to conceptualize the receptivity and mutual constitution of bodies, to show how affects do not ‘belong’ to anybody; they are not solely attributable either to the human or to any kind of body alone, but emerge in situations of the encounter and interaction. Next I build upon Jean-Marie Guyau’s concept of transmissions to show how we can theorize affect as an emerging transmission between and among bodies. Finally, I demonstrate how we now have a complete conceptual frame for theorizing affect in relation to all bodies in any given social scene, the grand composition of which I call affectif. (shrink)

A computer simulation is used to study collective judgements that an expert panel reaches on the basis of qualitative probability judgements contributed by individual members. The simulated panel displays a strong and robust crowd wisdom effect. The panel's performance is better when members contribute precise probability estimates instead of qualitative judgements, but not by much. Surprisingly, it doesn't always hurt for panel members to interpret the probability expressions differently. Indeed, coordinating their understandings can be much worse.

Very broadly, an argument from collections is an argument that purports to show that our beliefs about sets imply — in some sense — the existence of God. Plantinga (2007) first sketched such an argument in “Two Dozen” and filled it out somewhat in his 2011 monograph Where the Conflict Really Lies: Religion, Science, and Naturalism. In this paper I reconstruct what strikes me as the most plausible version of Plantinga’s argument. While it is a good argument in at least (...) a fairly weak sense, it doesn’t initially appear to have any explanatory advantages over a non-theistic understanding of sets — what I call set theoretic realism. However, I go on to argue that the theist can avoid an important dilemma faced by the realist and, hence, that Plantinga’s argument from collections has explanatory advantages that realism does not have. (shrink)

What do we owe each other when we act together? According to normativists about collective action, necessarily something and potentially quite a bit. They contend that collective action inherently involves a special normative status amongst participants, which may, for example, involve mutual obligations to receive the concurrence of the others before leaving. We build on recent empirical work whose results lend plausibility to a normativist account by further investigating the specific package of mutual obligations associated with collective (...) action according to our everyday understanding. However, our results cast doubt on a proposed obligation to seek the permission of co-actors before exiting a collective action, and suggest instead that this obligation is a function of explicit promising. We then discuss how our results pave the path for a new normativism, a theory that neither under- nor overshoots the target given by our common conception of the interpersonal obligations present in collective action.*. (shrink)

This Paper claims that, contrary to the common assumption of Anglo-American jurists, collective rights are secondary to a analytically and experientially prior culture. Culture constitutes the identity and content of a collective right. The thrust of my Paper examines the disjunction between collective rights and the culture constituting a collective right. The clue to the disjuncture is that a collective right is assumed to be a rule or principle signified or represented in a written language. (...) A rule or principle is a concept. A culture, in contrast, is constituted from an experiential knowledge in an unwritten language. -/- I raise two contexts where a collective right cannot be identified without a consideration the analytically prior culture of the social group protected by a collective right: peremptory norms in international law and affirmative discrimination clauses in constitutional law. I then highlight a crucially important factor generating the unwritten language of a culture: namely, the collective memories of a group. Although a personal memory is experienced in a context-specific event, a member of a group absorbs its collective memory. The collective memory of the group exists before one is a member. Such a memory may defer to some event centuries earlier. The event may possess a mythic or even false character which cannot be verified except as a myth or historical falsity. One cannot be accepted as a member of a group without the group’s collective memory. Shared assumptions and expectations characterise a collective memory generating a culture. Such assumptions and expectations constitute meant objects. Meant objects are not posted by some source 2 external to the individual members. Meant objects are experienced. A jurist cannot analyze the signified collective rights without examining the social culture said to be represented by the boundary of the collective rights. One may be able to rationally justify a collective right in terms of its source, such as a basic constitutional text, the regularity of behaviour of lawyers and judges or some ultimate concept such as dignity. Such a rational justification, however, does not address why an individual is obligated to defer to the collective rights of an in-group in a state. One has to examine the social-cultural assumptions and expectations presupposed in the content of such collective rights in order to understand why the rights are obligatory. Such an examination dissolves the traditional boundary of legal knowledge which has excluded cultural phenomena generating the collective rights. (shrink)

The framework of the modern Western analysis of culture, in terms of the socio-historical situation of the subject and the reciprocal influence of one on the other, has its roots in nineteenth century discussions. This paper will examine two traditions: the hermeneutic approach of Wilhelm Dilthey, and the Völkerpsychologie of Moses Lazarus and Chajim Steinthal. The account will focus on two elements. First, Lazarus and Steinthal attempted to motivate an account based on collective structures, or forms, of rationality made (...) manifest by a people or Volk; the paper will explore their account of how collective structures can be employed in sociohistorical analysis. Second, Dilthey rejected Lazarus’s and Steinthal’s argument that it was possible to identify the norms of action governing social phenomena. Dilthey rejected any account of psychology that took it to be law-governed, even retrospectively, because he argued that the ‘nexus of life’ that is the ultimate basis of the human sciences cannot be reduced to any law-governed or explanatory relationship between the self, society, and nature. However, there is a deep tension in Dilthey’s position here, which is evident in the development of his work over time. The account below will explore this tension and its significance for the understanding of the subject and the role of psychology in the human sciences. (shrink)

This essay is part of a larger project aimed at making sense of rational thought and agency as part of the natural world. It provides a semantic framework for thinking about the contents of: 1) descriptive thoughts and sentences having a representational or mind-to-world direction of fit, and which manifest our capacity for theoretical rationality; and 2) prescriptive and intentional sentences having an expressive or world-to-mind direction of fit, and which manifest our capacity for practical rationality. I use a modified (...) version of Allan Gibbard’s hyperstate semantics, employing both maximally determinate possible worlds and maximally determinate plans of action, as a basis for providing a unified understanding of moral judgments and expressions of individual and collective intentionality – they one and all give voice to our ability as rational agents to adopt the perspectives of various individuals within a community and consider how we would behave were we in their positions. In the course of spelling out the view I draw on and criticize ideas that Wilfrid Sellars advanced in the middle of the 20th century, while employing the tools of contemporary modal logic and model-theoretic semantics to give perspicuous formulation to his thought that the moral judgment ‘one ought to do A’ should be understood in terms of the collective intention ‘we shall do A’, where the pronoun denotes the unrestricted class of rational agents and the ‘ought’ is in some sense unconditionally binding. (shrink)

While social epistemology is a diverse field, much of it still understands knowledge as an individual status—albeit an individual status that crucially depends on various social factors (such as testimony). Further, the literature on group knowledge until now has primarily focused on limited, specialized groups that may be said to know this or that as a group. I wish to argue, to the contrary, that all knowledge-attributions ascribe a collective status; and that this follows more or less directly from (...) an essential function of entitlement-ascriptions: Ascriptions of knowledge and entitlement serve a primarily social function in that they facilitate coordination by maintaining consensus around true beliefs, true theories, and truth-producing methodologies. This conclusion will shed light on ways in which traditional theories of knowledge (such as foundationalism and coherentism) fail to capture a central function of our epistemic practice. (shrink)

This paper discusses Raimo Tuomela's we-mode account in his recent book "Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents" and develops the idea that mode should be thought of as representational. I argue that in any posture – intentional state or speech act – we do not merely represent a state of affairs as what we believe, or intend etc. – as the received view of 'propositional attitudes' has it –, but our position relative to that state of affairs and (...) thus ourselves. That is, we represent the subject through what I call "subject mode" and its position through what I call "position mode". I argue that the key to understanding collective intentionality is to understand how we represent others as co-subjects of positions rather than as their objects. This is shown on various levels of collective intentionality. On the non-conceptual level of joint attention we experience others as co-subjects who we attend with rather than to and who we are at least also disposed to act jointly with. On the conceptual level of the we-mode we represent others as co-subjects of positions of knowledge, intention, belief and shared values. Organizations and thus group agents in Tuomela's sense I propose to understand in terms of what I call "role mode", that is, in terms of the positions individuals and groups take as occupants of certain roles, for example, as committee members, or as chancellor of Germany. I try to show how this account, while very much in the spirit of Tuomela's, can avoid his fictionalism about group agents and some other problems of his account, while steering between the Scylla of excessive individualism and the Charybdis of extreme collectivism. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine two different kinds of production processes, mass production and collaborative production. While both production processes intuitively seem like collective actions, the established views about collective action fail to treat them as collective action due to the common issue: the lack of shared intention. As an alternative, I propose the artifactual view of action, according to which collective action is possible even when there is no shared intention among agents. Motivated by Evnine’s (...) (2016) view about action, the artifactual view of action claims that we can have other people’s actions as matter out of which we create our own action. I argue that the artifactual account of action can successfully explain mass production as collective action. Furthermore, it provides a way for the intention-dependent views about artifacts to better understand how mass-produced artifacts come into existence. (shrink)

What makes public history more than just another hill to fight over in culture war politics? In this paper I propose a novel way of understanding the political significance of how public history creates and shapes identities: a contractarian one. I argue that public history can be sensibly understood as representing groups as a society’s contracting parties. One particular value of the contractarian approach is that it helps to elucidate the phenomenon of “signing on,” where a marginalized or oppressed (...) group is offered membership in a society without the social order being meaningfully changed. (shrink)

This topical collection of Synthese is in honor of Catherine Z. Elgin. The idea for it arose in the context of an international book symposium dedicated to Elgin's latest book, organized by Katherine Dormandy, Christoph Jäger, and myself, which took place at the University of Innsbruck in March 2018. The topical collection comprises fourteen papers addressing a broad array of issues related to True Enough and to Elgin’s work more generally, plus a contribution by Elgin with detailed comments and replies. (...) True Enough is an extraordinarily rich, wide-ranging book; it reflects both the breadth and sharpness of Elgin’s philosophical gaze and exemplifies the impressive variety of her philosophical interests. In this introduction, I give an overview of the topical collection’s content, zooming in on the aspects of Elgin’s work which captured the contributors’ attention. My discussion will not remotely do justice to the complexity of Elgin’s system, but I hope that it will help the reader navigate the topical collection and appreciate how the fourteen papers relate to Elgin’s overall project. (shrink)

This article identifies and compares meanings of wildfire risk mitigation for stakeholders in the Front Range of Colorado, USA. We examine the case of a collaborative partnership sponsored by government agencies and directed to decrease hazardous fuels in interface areas. Data were collected by way of key informant interviews and focus groups. The analysis is guided by the Circuit of Culture model in communication research. We found both shared and differing meanings between members of this partnership (the ‘‘producers’’) and other (...) stakeholders not formally in the partnership (the ‘‘consumers’’). We conclude that those promoting the partnership’s project to mitigate risk are primarily aligned with a discourse of scientific management. Stakeholders outside the partnership follow a discourse of community. We argue that failure to recognize and account for differences in the way risk mitigation is framed and related power dynamics could hamper the communicational efforts of the collaborative partnership and impact goals for fuels reduction. We recommend ways that both groups can capitalize on shared meanings and how agency managers and decision makers can build better working relationships with interface communities and other external stakeholders. (shrink)

Lecturing is the only educational form inherited from the universities of the middle ages that is still in use today. However, it seems that lecturing is under threat, as recent calls to do away with lecturing in favour of more dynamic settings, such as the flipped classroom or pre-recorded talks, have found many adherents. In line with the post-critical approach of this book, this chapter argues that there is something in the university lecture that needs to be affirmed: at its (...) best, the university lecture functions as a technique for thinking together or for making collective thinking happen in a lecture hall. The lecture offers the set-up, both technological and architectural, to forge a common experience that binds together the listeners and the speakers; that experience can be characterised as visualising ideas or seeing things as if they had taken on a ‘bodily form’. By looking at several examples of lecturing moments experienced by Gadamer as a student and later recounted in his autobiography, we can better understand the paradigmatic experience that characterises the lecture – as an ideal to be sought, even if, perhaps, not always actualised in everyday lectures. (shrink)

Very often our memories of the past are of experiences or events we shared with others. And ‘‘in many circumstances in society, remembering is a social event’’ (Roediger, Bergman, & Meade, 2000, p. 129): parents and children reminisce about significant family events, friends discuss a movie they just saw together, students study for exams with their roommates, colleagues remind one another of information relevant to an important group decision, and complete strangers discuss a crime they happened to witness together. Psychology (...) is at the heart of recent interdisciplinary efforts to understand the relationships between an individual remembering alone, an individual remembering in a group, and the group itself remembering. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary exploration discusses the intricate conceptual linkages among Buddhism’s Eighth State of Consciousness, Quantum Holography, and the Jungian Collective Unconscious. Central to this study is examining the Eighth Consciousness in Buddhist thought—a realm that transcends the conventional sensory and mental states to connect with a more universal and profound awareness. Drawing parallels, Quantum Holography posits that every part of the universe retains information about the whole, much like a hologram. This notion seemingly mirrors the Jungian concept of the (...) Collective Unconscious, which postulates a shared reservoir of memories and ideas across humanity. The paper contends that the intricate dance of photons, oscillating between particle and wave states, mediates perception through resonance and hints at a multi-layered consciousness stratum that mirrors the vast, enigmatic quantum reality expanse. The study illuminates the intersections and divergences among these frameworks through meticulous comparative analysis, positing that an integrative understanding of quantum theories and Buddhist wisdom can unravel the human psyche’s profound depths. By weaving Eastern philosophies with Western psychological and quantum theoretical tapestry, the discourse unveils a multifaceted consciousness comprehension, championing integrative approaches as invaluable tools for decoding the mind and universe's enigmatic interplay from a quantum viewpoint. (shrink)

This paper argues that the ubiquitous digital networks in which we are increasingly becoming immersed present a threat to our ability to exercise free will. Using process philosophy, and expanding upon understandings of causal autonomy, the paper outlines a thematic analysis of diary studies and interviews gathered in a project exploring the nature of digital experience. It concludes that without mindfulness in both the use and design of digital devices and services we run the risk of allowing such services to (...) direct our daily lives in ways over which we are increasingly losing control. (shrink)

The impossibility results in judgement aggregation show a clash between fair aggregation procedures and rational collective outcomes. In this paper, we are interested in analysing the notion of rational outcome by proposing a proof-theoretical understanding of collective rationality. In particular, we use the analysis of proofs and inferences provided by linear logic in order to define a fine-grained notion of group reasoning that allows for studying collective rationality with respect to a number of logics. We analyse (...) the well-known paradoxes in judgement aggregation and we pinpoint the reasoning steps that trigger the inconsistencies. Moreover, we extend the map of possibility and impossibility results in judgement aggregation by discussing the case of substructural logics. In particular, we show that there exist fragments of linear logic for which general possibility results can be obtained. (shrink)