There are group-actions, and if actions are intentional, there should also be group-intentions. Who has got these intentions? The groups? This seems to be the natural answer. But then: Groups do not have a mind or brain of there own to form any mental attitude. Different kinds of individualistic analyses of group-intentions have been suggested in the literature. On the one hand there are suggestions to reduce group intentions to a complex of different Iattitudes. John Searle, (...) on the other hand, suggests a special social kind of attitudes, namely we-intentions. We-intentions are being had by individual persons, though they have the form “We intend to do such-and-such”. However, because of the fallibility of Searlian we-intentions and the possibility of ignorance this concept is of no help: We-intentions are neither necessary nor sufficient for group-intentions. In this respect, Margaret Gilbert’s approach is much more successful, though it covers only a special case, namely small-scale informal groups. I suggest a generalised solution in order to cover also large-scale and formal groups. (shrink)

A substantial literature supports the attribution of intentional states such as beliefs and desires to groups. But within this literature, there is no substantial account of group concepts. Since on many views, one cannot have an intentional state without having concepts, such a gap undermines the cogency of accounts of group intentionality. In this paper I aim to provide an account of group concepts. First I argue that to fix the semantics of the sentences groups use to (...) make their decisions or express their beliefs, we need to appeal to a conventional semantics like that of Lewis. I then argue that the same reasons we have for taking group intentional states to be irreducible to the intentional states of their members apply also to the terms fixed by a conventional semantics. It follows that the meanings of terms in the sentences expressing a group's intentional states are also fixed by facts about the group, not its members. And recognizing this, I argue, amounts to attributing concepts to groups. Finally, I discuss a real-life example of a group concept—the meaning of ‘meter’ as fixed by the International Bureau of Weights and Measurements—and I discuss the upshot of these considerations for the question of social externalism about concepts. (shrink)

We study shared intentions in what we call “loose groups”. These are groups that lack a codified organizational structure, and where the communication channels between group members are either unreliable or not completely open. We start by formulating two desiderata for shared intentions in such groups. We then argue that no existing account meets these two desiderata, because they assume either too strong or too weak an epistemic condition, that is, a condition on what the group members know (...) and believe about what the others intend, know, and believe. We propose an alternative, pooled knowledge, and argue that it allows formulating conditions on shared intentions that meet the two desiderata. (shrink)

The book presents the first comprehensive survey of limits of the intentional control of action from an interdisciplinary perspective. It brings together leading scholars from philosophy, psychology, and the law to elucidate this theoretically and practically important topic from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary approaches. It provides reflections on conceptual foundations as well as a wealth of empirical data and will be a valuable resource for students and researchers alike. Among the authors: Clancy Blair, Todd S. Braver, Michael W. (...) Cole, Anika Fäsche, Maayan Davidov, Peter Gollwitzer, Kai Robin Grzyb, Tobias Heikamp, Gabriele Oettingen, Rachel McKinnon, Nachschon Meiran, Hans Christian Röhl, Michael Schmitz, John R. Searle, Gottfried Seebaß, Gisela Trommsdorff, Felix Thiede, J. Lukas Thürmer, Frank Wieber. (shrink)

Groups behave in a variety of ways. To show that this behavior amounts to action, it would be best to fit it into a general account of action. However, nearly every account from the philosophy of action requires the agent to have mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Unfortunately, theorists are divided over whether groups can instantiate these states—typically depending on whether or not they are willing to accept functionalism about the mind. But we can avoid this debate. (...) I show how a more general view of action captures what is central to action without mentioning mental states, and I argue that a group’s members can fulfill the role in group action that mental states play in our actions. Group behavior is explicable in terms of reasons, regardless of whether the group itself cognizes those reasons. After discussing the kind of reasons at issue and arguing that groups can act in light of them without minds, I assess how this account bears on the question of group responsibility. (shrink)

In the literature of collective intentions, the ‘we-intentions’ that lie behind cooperative actions are analysed in terms of individual mental states. The core forms of these analyses imply that all Nash equilibrium behaviour is the result of collective intentions, even though not all Nash equilibria are cooperative actions. Unsatisfactorily, the latter cases have to be excluded either by stipulation or by the addition of further, problematic conditions. We contend that the cooperative aspect of collective intentions is not a property of (...) the intentions themselves, but of the mode of reasoning by which they are formed. We analyse collective intentions as the outcome of team reasoning, a mode of practical reasoning used by individuals as members of groups. We describe this mode of reasoning in terms of formal schemata, discuss a range of possible accounts of group agency, and show how existing theories of collective intentions fit into this framework. (shrink)

A group is lying when it makes a statement that it believes to be untrue but wants the addressee(s) to believe. But how can we distinguish statements that the group believes to be untrue from honest group statements based on mistaken beliefs or confusion within the group? I will suggest a narrative constraint for honest group statements, made up of two components. Narrative coherence requires that a new group statement should not conflict with (...) class='Hi'>group knowledge on the matter, or beliefs of relevant operative subgroups, unless a coherent rationale is given. Narrative intention looks at the process of gathering new evidence on the area of expertise of the group and requires that the group position behind the statement is formed in good faith. The narrative constraint will help to distinguish group lies from more innocent erroneous statements of group beliefs when there is an internal disagreement within the group, including in cases involving spokespersons. (shrink)

This is an encyclopedia entry written for the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. It provides an overview of the concept of and literature surrounding "group agency" from the perspective of analytic philosophy. It begins with an introduction to agency in its most general sense before examining agency in the social world. Next, group agency as a research field is presented in the context of the problem of collective intentionality. Here, accounts of group intentions (...) are presented, before moving into considerations on structure and metaphysics of group agents. Then, the features of and conditions for group agency are clarified, as well as its relation to rationality and mind. The entry closes with heterodox views of group agency and a description of group agency’s lasting relevance to law and social philosophy. -/- Shussett, Daniel. 2024. “Group Agency.” In M. Sellers & S. Kirste (Eds.), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer. (shrink)

The aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even have rights (...) and a moral status? I will tentatively defend the (increasingly widely held) view that, under certain conditions, artificial intelligent systems, like corporate entities, might qualify as responsible moral agents and as holders of limited rights and legal personhood. I will further suggest that regulators should permit the use of autonomous artificial systems in high-stakes settings only if they are engineered to function as moral (not just intentional) agents and/or there is some liability-transfer arrangement in place. I will finally raise the possibility that if artificial systems ever became phenomenally conscious, there might be a case for extending a stronger moral status to them, but argue that, as of now, this remains very hypothetical. (shrink)

Groups, like individuals, can communicate. They can issue statements, make promises, give advice. Sometimes, in doing so, they lie and deceive. The goal of this paper is to offer a precise characterisation of what it means for a group to make an assertion and to lie. I begin by showing that Lackey’s influential account of group assertion is unable to distinguish assertions from other speech acts, explicit statements from implicatures, and lying from misleading. I propose an alternative view, (...) according to which a group asserts a proposition only if it explicitly presents that proposition as true, thereby committing to its truth. This proposal is then put to work to define group lying. While scholars typically assume that group lying requires (i) a deceptive intent and (ii) a belief in the falsity of the asserted proposition, I offer a definition that drops condition (i) and significantly broadens condition (ii). (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of the logical form of plural action sentences that shows that collective actions so ascribed are a matter of all members of a group contributing to bringing some event about. It then uses this as the basis for a reductive account of the content of we-intentions according to which what distinguishes we-intentions from I-intentions is that we-intentions are directed about bringing it about that members of a group act in accordance with a shared (...) plan. (shrink)

Intentional sampling methods are non-probabilistic procedures that select a group of individuals for a sample with the purpose of meeting specific prescribed criteria. Intentional sampling methods are intended for exploratory research or pilot studies where tight budget constraints preclude the use of traditional randomized representative sampling. The possibility of subsequently generalize statistically from such deterministic samples to the general population has been the issue of long standing arguments and debates. Nevertheless, the intentional sampling techniques developed in this paper explore (...) pragmatic strategies for overcoming some of the real or perceived shortcomings and limitations of intentional sampling in practical applications. (shrink)

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

There is a way of talking that would appear to involve ascriptions of purpose, goal directed activity, and intentional states to groups. Cases are familiar enough: classmates intend to vacation in Switzerland, the department is searching for a metaphysician, the Democrats want to minimize losses in the upcoming elections, and the US intends to improve relations with such and such country. But is this talk to be understood just in terms of the attitudes and actions of the individuals involved? Is (...) the talk, to take an overly simple proposal as an example, a mere summary of familiar individual attitudes of the group members? Or is the ascription of attitudes and actions to groups to be taken more literally, as suggesting that the group for example believes that P, or intends to A, over and above what the members individually think and do? In short, are there groups with minds of their own? Philip Pettit has deployed the “discursive dilemma” to defend the thesis that there are such group minds. In what follows, I explore the relationship between the group allegedly with a mind of its own and the individuals it comprises, and I consider just how this relationship must be understood in order to give Pettit’s argument for group minds its best chance for success. As I understand it, the discursive dilemma has to be used in conjunction with what might be called an indispensability argument for group minds. It is useful to distinguish two forms of this argument. The explanatory version of the indispensability argument is, very schematically, as follows: there is a compelling explanatory theory T concerning the social, certain indispensable elements of T entail the group mind thesis, so the group mind thesis is true. Several questions immediately arise: What sort of theory is T? In what sense is it indispensable? Are there other forms of indispensability? I don’t have definitive answers to these questions. But how we settle them will have implications for the interaction and support the discursive dilemma provides the indispensability argument. In particular, using the discursive dilemma to defend what I characterize below as a practical version of the indispensability argument commits us to the rationality of individual participants in a way that the explanatory version of the indispensability argument does not. My point in the first part of the paper is that if Pettit wants to avoid the weaknesses of the explanatory indispensability argument and pursue the practical version, then he owes us a story about the rationality of individual participation in groups. Pettit also owes us a story about the agency an individual exercises as part of a group. If it takes the actions of individuals to execute the intentions of the group, how are we to understand those actions in order for the group to count as having a mind of its own? How must group intentions figure in the practical or deliberative perspective of individuals who execute those intentions? I will argue that the proponent of the group mind thesis must proceed with some care here, because some natural ways of answering these questions will undermine the thesis. But in the end, I think that these questions are interesting independently of whether Pettit is right to think that groups do have minds of their own. That’s because investigating Pettit’s arguments might lead to new ideas about how the rationality and agency of individuals can be exercised, and suggests new ways of understanding how individuals can act together, irrespective of whether the groups they compose ever have minds of their own. (shrink)

We routinely attribute beliefs to groups as diverse as committees, boards, populaces, research teams, governments, courts, juries, legislatures, markets, and even mobs. There are three points of contention in the literature when it comes to accounting for group beliefs. On the one hand, there is the dispute between so-called believers (those who claim that there is such a thing as group beliefs) and rejectionists (those who think that group beliefs are better understood as collective acceptances). On the (...) other hand, there is the dispute between summativists and non-summativists: those who respectively endorse and reject the idea that a group believes a proposition only if at least one member of the group also believes it. Finally, monists hold group beliefs are only of one kind and that it is in principle possible to offer a unified account of them that provides truth conditions that apply to all group ascriptions. Pluralists, on the other hand, defend that there is more than one kind of group belief, each requiring different accounts that provide different truth conditions that apply to some but not all group ascriptions. This chapter sides with believers and argues that group beliefs, unlike other group attitudes (e.g., group intentions), are best understood in pluralist, summative terms. (shrink)

This paper presents a systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of social groups. I argue against prominent views that attempt to unify all social groups or to divide them into simple typologies. Instead I argue that social groups are enormously diverse, but show how we can investigate their natures nonetheless. I analyze social groups from a bottom-up perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. We can characterize any given kind of social group (...) with four complementary profiles: its “construction” profile, its “extra essentials” profile, its “anchor” profile, and its “accident” profile. Together these provide a framework for understanding the nature of groups, help classify and categorize groups, and shed light on group agency. (shrink)

Group-based reasons are reasons to play one’s part in some pattern of action that the members of some group could perform, because of the good features of the pattern. This paper discusses three broad conceptions of such reasons. According to the agency-first conception, there are no group-based reasons in cases where the relevant group is not or would not be itself an agent. According to the behaviour-first conception, what matters is that the other members of the (...) group would play their parts in the relevant pattern, not whether they would have the cooperative intentional states constitutive of group agency in doing so. This paper argues against these conceptions and in favour of the powers-first conception, according to which what matters is that the members of the group have practically relevant powers. (shrink)

This essay challenges some assumptions of prevalent theories of empathy. The empathizer, according to these theories, must have an emotion or a representation that matches the recipient’s emotion or representation. I argue that these conditions fail to account for important cases, namely surrogate and out-group empathy. In the course of this argument, I isolate some conceptual difficulties in extant models of cognitive empathy. In place of the matching theories,I propose an indexical model that (1) distinguishes virtual from real self-reference (...) and (2) replaces self–other distinctions with an epistemic condition. According to this account, empathy occurs when we index an intention to another person about whom we have the relevant knowledge or understanding. (shrink)

Cooperation has been analyzed primarily in the context of theories of collective intentionality. These discussions have primarily focused on interactions between pairs or small groups of agents who know one another personally. Cooperative game theory has also been used to argue for a form of cooperation in large unorganized groups. Here I consider a form of minimal cooperation that can arise among members of potentially large organized groups (e.g., corporate teams, committees, governmental bodies). I argue that members of organized groups (...) can be minimally cooperative in virtue of playing roles in an organizational structure and having a common goal. The minimal form of cooperation I argue for is not grounded in collective intentions involving symmetric mental states, special collective intentional modes, or joint commitments. More generally, I show how considering minimal cooperation in the context of organized groups provides an opportunity to reevaluate the extent to which the social world and social phenomena depend on internalist mental factors (e.g., intentions, beliefs) and externalist non-mental factors (e.g., documents, laws, job descriptions). The view of minimal cooperation among members of organized groups I offer provides support for an externalist rather than internalist theory of at least one social phenomenon. (shrink)

Treating groups as agents is not at all difficult; teenagers and social scientists do it all the time with great success. Reading Group Agency, though, makes it look like rocket science. According to List and Pettit, groups can be real, and such real groups can cause, as well as bear ethical responsibility for, events. Apparently, not just any collective qualifies as an agent, so a lot turns on how the attitudes and actions of individual members are aggregated. Although I (...) am unsure who will read this book, I can envisage four relatively distinct population segments: philosophers, decision theorists, activists, and social scientists. Philosophers who take questions of ontology seriously will likely find this book evasive. Decision theorists who enjoy axiomatic model building for its own sake will find much to keep them occupied. Activists who have taken it upon themselves to “raise group consciousness” (193) will probably skip ahead to the third part and feel emboldened by the thought that the model builders are busy with the first two. However, since the normative questions (about responsibility and so on) are answerable to prior metaphysical questions for which Group Agency supplies vacillating answers at best, a transition to advocacy would seem hasty. As for social scientists, either they will glance at the book’s dust jacket and (wrongly) assume that philosophers have now “proven” the existence of the groups they study, or they will engage with List and Pettit’s model only to discover that, unless they happen to specialize in commercial corporations, the model’s many stipulations impede rather than facilitate/elucidate their usual group intentional ascriptions. (shrink)

What are the objects of speaker meaning? The traditional answer is: propositions. The traditional answer faces an important challenge: if propositions are the objects of speaker meaning then there must be specific propositions that speakers intend their audiences to recover. Yet, speakers typically exhibit a degree of indifference regarding how they are interpreted, and cannot rationally intend for their audiences to recover specific propositions. Therefore, propositions are not the objects of speaker meaning (Buchanan 2010; MacFarlane 2020a; 2020b; and Abreu Zavaleta (...) 2021). In this paper I do two things. Firstly, I outline a collective analogue of this challenge that undermines the most prominent responses to the original challenge. Secondly, I provide a new solution: typical utterances are backed by a cluster of partial communicative intentions. This response resolves both individual and collective variants of the problem and allows us to retain the traditional propositional view of speaker meaning. (shrink)

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)

The paper provides a taxonomy of group speech acts whose main division is that between collective speech acts (singing Happy Birthday, agreeing to meet) and group proxy speech acts in which a group, such as a corporation, employs a proxy, such as a spokesperson, to convey its official position. The paper provides an analysis of group proxy speech acts using tools developed more generally for analyzing institutional agency, particularly the concepts of shared intention, proxy agent, (...) status role, status function, convention and constitutive rule. (shrink)

Hans Bernhard Schmid has argued that contemporary theories of collective action and social metaphysics unnecessarily reject the concept of a “shared intentional state.” I will argue that three neo-Thomist philosophers, Jacques Maritain, Charles de Koninck, and Yves Simon, all seem to agree that the goals of certain kinds of collective agency cannot be analyzed merely in terms of intentional states of individuals. This was prompted by a controversy over the nature of the “common good,” in response to a perceived threat (...) from “personalist” theories of political life. Common goods, as these three authors analyze them, ground our collective action in pursuit of certain kinds of goals which are immanent to social activity itself. Their analysis can support an alternate position to “intentional individualism,” providing an account of collective practical reasoning and social metaphysics based on shared intentional states, but without involving implausible “group minds.”. (shrink)

Art can be addressed, not just to individuals, but to groups. Art can even be part of how groups think to themselves – how they keep a grip on their values over time. I focus on monuments as a case study. Monuments, I claim, can function as a commitment to a group value, for the sake of long-term action guidance. Art can function here where charters and mission statements cannot, precisely because of art’s powers to capture subtlety and emotion. (...) In particular, art can serve as the vessel for group emotions, by making emotional content sufficiently public so as to be the object of a group commitment. Art enables groups to guide themselves with values too subtle to be codified. (shrink)

Group agency requires a number of people to combine in pursuit of shared goals across varied scenarios. Thus, a group or corporate agent must be organized (1) to act flexibly as its goals require, (2) with the intentional, if not always voluntary, acquiescence of members in the guidance of (3) an authorized spokesperson or (4) a constructed voice, thereby (5) becoming capable of making and honoring commitments.

In her landmark book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Millikan1984),1 Ruth Garrett Millikan utilizes the idea of a biological function to solve philosophical problems associated with the phenomena of language, thought, and meaning. Language and thought are activities of biological organisms, according to Millikan, and we should treat them as such when trying to answer related philosophical questions. Of special interest is Millikan’s treatment of intentionality. Here Millikan employs the notion of a biological function to explain what it is (...) for one thing in nature, a bee dance (43), for example, to be about another, in this case, the location of a nectar source. My concern in this paper is to understand whether Millikan’s account of intentionality adequately explains how humans achieve reference, in language or thought, to individuals and groups in their environment. In bringing her theory of intentional content to bear on human activities, Millikan focuses largely on natural language. Thus, in what follows, I begin by laying out the biology-based principles that underlie Millikan’s theory of content, then proceed with an explanation of how the theory is to apply to natural language. As it appears, Millikan’s account of how content is determined for natural language terms and sentences rests on the determinacy of intentional content at the psychological level. This leads me to take a careful look at what Millikan says about the content of mental representations, in hopes of finding a sufficient basis there for the application of Millikan’s theory of content to natural language. Ultimately, I conclude that Millikan’s theory faces a problem of vacuity. If we approach the theory as a theory of intentional content, intended to explain the nature of reference, the theory is lacking in an extremely important respect: Millikan explains how it could be one of the biological functions of a mental or natural language term to refer, without telling us precisely what in the natural order constitutes the reference relation.. (shrink)

Two studies investigated how planning affects intention-behavior consistency. In Study 1 an experimental group and control group which each consisted of 14 undergraduates were requested in computerized interviews to indicate which activities they intended to perform on the following day. Subjects in the experimental group were also requested in a second phase of the interviews to specify when and where they intended to perform the activities. The results showed that activities for which time and place had (...) been specified were more likely to be performed. In Study 2 another 75 undergraduates volunteered to participate in an experiment in which they were requested to perform an activity (reporting mood effects of reading a prose excerpt) by themselves on one of three following days. One group of subjects only agreed to perform the activity, another group agreed to perform the activity as well as indicated when and where they would do it, and a third group in addition to this indicated which other activities they would perform on the same day. In support of the hypothesis that planning an activity increases the likelihood that it will be performed, the results showed that subjects who indicated other activities more frequently performed the target activity. More efficient time management resulting from planning may account for the findings, although further research is needed to show this conclusively. (shrink)

It is often seen as a truism that social objects and facts are the product of human intentions. I argue that the role of intentions in social ontology is commonly overestimated. I introduce a distinction that is implicit in much discussion of social ontology, but is often overlooked: between a social entity’s “grounds” and its “anchors.” For both, I argue that intentions, either individual or collective, are less essential than many theorists have assumed. Instead, I propose a more worldly – (...) and less intellectualist – approach to social ontology. (shrink)

"The high unemployment rate that has become characteristic of the South African economy has generated some spinoffs that bode undesirable consequences, not only for economic development but also for sane social-cultural coexistence of the people. Recourse to entrepreneurship rather than clinging on to an endless hope for formal employment has been touted as a possible antidote for confronting the situation. However, a prerequisite to self-employment is entrepreneurial intention. This study therefore explores factors that may influence student entrepreneurial intention. (...) The study is based on quantitative data collected in a cross-sectional manner, from students at a South African university. Empirical results suggest that the respondent group strongly accede to the usefulness of entrepreneurship education for economic development which reveals that they are well-versed with the role and gains of entrepreneurship at a macro level. The study also found that perceived competency of the lecturing team demonstrates a moderate and positive correlation with student entrepreneurial intention. The implication of this is that institutions offering entrepreneurship programmes must saddle the responsibility to ensure that persons used to deliver the courses are not only highly competent but can kindle the entrepreneurial intention flame in students." . (shrink)

Female crested gibbons (genus Nomascus) perform conspicuous sequences of twitching movements involving the rump and extremities. However, these dances have attracted little scientific attention and their structure and meaning remain largely obscure. Here we analyse close-range video recordings of captive crested gibbons, extracting descriptions of dance in four species (N. annamensis, N. gabriellae, N. leucogenys and N. siki). In addition, we report results from a survey amongst relevant professionals clarifying behavioural contexts of dance in captive and wild crested gibbons. Our (...) results demonstrate that dances in Nomascus represent a common and intentional form of visual communication restricted to sexually mature females. Whilst primarily used as a proceptive signal to solicit copulation, dances occur in a wide range of contexts related to arousal and/or frustration in captivity. A linguistically informed view of this sequential behaviour demonstrates that movement within dances is organized in groups and follows an isochronous rhythm — patterns not described for visual displays in other non-human primates. We argue that applying the concept of dance to gibbons allows us to expand our understanding of communication in non-human primates and to develop hypotheses on the rules and regularities characterising it. We propose that crested gibbon dances likely evolved from less elaborate rhythmic proceptive signals, similar to those found in siamangs. Although dance displays in humans and crested gibbons share a number of key characteristics, they cannot be assumed to be homologous. Nevertheless, gibbon dances represent a striking model behaviour to investigate the use of complex gestural signals in hominoid primates. (shrink)

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 indi-viduals who make up the group intend and do. One of the main obstacles to solve this prob-lem is that on the one hand collective intentionality is no simple summation, aggregate, or dis-tributive 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 mar-ble (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 be-cause group and members are on different levels. Then there is no longer a contradiction be-tween the Irreducibility Claim and the Individual Ownership Claim, for the former claim con-cerns the group level and the latter claim concerns the level of the group members. This ex-plains 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. (shrink)

Entrepreneurship among youth across the world assists in job creation and self-reliance. On the same vein, there are factors that hinder their entrepreneurial intentions in establishing their goals. Compelling youth entrepreneurship development training is described by responsibility, adaptability, good local contacts and an important but intangible element of inspiration. This study investigated the on the factors inhibiting the success of entrepreneurial intentions to launch business. A case study of youth SME groups in an entrepreneurship class in United States International University (...) - Africa. The study was guided by the following objectives: to determine how propensity to risk impacts entrepreneurial intentions to launch business, to determine how locus of control impact entrepreneurial intentions to launch business, to determine how proactive personality impact entrepreneurial intentions to launch business. The study utilized descriptive survey design. (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)

Pietraszewski provides a compelling case that representations of certain interaction-types are the “cognitive primitives” that allow all tokens of group-in-conflict to be represented within the mind. Here, I argue that the folk concept GROUP encodes shared intentions and goals as more central than these interaction-types, and that providing a computational theory of social groups will be more difficult than Pietraszewski envisages.

Moral judgments about an action are influenced by the action’s intentionality. The reverse is also true: judgments of intentionality can be influenced by an action’s moral valence. For example, respondents judge a harmful side-effect of an intended outcome to be more intentional than a helpful side-effect. Debate continues regarding the mechanisms underlying this “side-effect effect” and the conditions under which it will persist. The research behind this chapter tested whether the side-effect effect is intact in adolescents with psychopathic traits, who (...) are characterized by persistent immoral behavior, deficient moral emotions, and impairments in some forms of moral judgment. Results showed no differences between healthy adolescents and those with psychopathic traits: both groups judged harmful side-effects to be more intentional than helpful side-effects by an approximately 2:1 ratio. The chapter discusses these results in light of hypothesized mechanisms underlying the side-effect effect, and in light of our current understanding of moral reasoning deficits in psychopathy. (shrink)

Prostitution in Kenya is increasing at a very alarming rate and is posing a danger to the society both morally and economically. Efforts to help female sex workers exit prostitution are categorized by the deficiency appropriate interventions among female sex workers (FSWS). Therefore, the current study sought to determine the relationship between the attitude of female sex workers (FSW) towards provision of care and the intention to exit street level prostitution. The study adopted a descriptive correlational study using a (...) mixed approach. This study targeted all the FSW in the Central Business District of Eldoret town and the counselors who deal with a significant number of them. The study used census sampling method. The snowball technique was used to get the respondents up to maturation point. This study utilized questionnaires and interview schedule to get relevant data from the respondents. Experts in the Department of Counselling Psychology and the researcher’s supervisors assisted in ensuring that the instruments are valid. To test for reliability of the instruments, the Cronbach Alpha coefficient was used. Cronbach Alpha coefficient of 0.784 was obtained and used after pilot study. The study used SPSS version 23 software to aid in the analysis of both descriptive and inferential statistics. The inferential statistics used was Pearson product-moment correlation. The interview guides were categorized in themes and analyzed using content analysis. The findings of the study showed that there was a statistically significant relationship between FSWs towards provision of Care and Intention Exit Street Level Prostitution (r=0.113 and p=0.043). It was recommended that the stakeholders should also encourage the FSWs to form support groups that may come up with income generating activities so that they may be occupied and in the process exit prostitution.Regarding areas for further studies, the study recommends a more consultative and comprehensive study on the attitudes of FSW towards the intention of Female sex workers in Eldoret Town that involve, County AIDS and STI Coordinator, non-governmental institutions in Eldoret Town. (shrink)

People often do things together and form groups in order to get things done that they cannot do alone. In short they form a collectivity of some kind or a group, for short. But if we consider a group on the one hand and the persons that constitute the group on the other hand, how does it happen that these persons work together and finish a common task with a common goal? In the philosophy of action this (...) problem is often solved by saying that there is a kind of collective intention that the group members have in mind and that guides their actions. Does such a collective intention really exist? In this article I’ll show that the answer is “no”. In order to substantiate my view I’ll discuss the approaches of Bratman, Gilbert and Searle on collective intention. I’ll put forward four kinds of criticism that undermine the idea of collective intention. They apply mainly to Bratman and Gilbert. First, it is basically difficult to mark off smaller groups from bigger unities. Second, most groups change in membership composition over time. Third, as a rule, on the one hand groups are internally structured and on the other hand they belong to a larger structure. It makes that generally it cannot be a collective intention that moves the actions of the members of a group. Fourth, conversely, most individual actions cannot be performed without the existence of a wider context of agents who support these actions and make them possible. My critique on Searle mainly involves that in his approach his idea of collective intention is superfluous and that he is not radical enough in his idea that collective action is based on coordinated individual intentions and actions. However, it is a good starting point for showing how collective action actually functions, especially when combined with Giddens’s structuration theory. Every agent in a group executes his or her own individual intentions, relying on what the group offers to this agent and asks from him or her. In this way individual actions of the members of a group are coordinated and it makes that the group can function and that its goals can be performed. And in this way the group is produced and reproduced by fitting individual actions together. An individual agent who belongs to a group only needs to know what s/he wants and what s/he has to do in the group, even if s/he has no knowledge of the intentions and commitments of the other members. Then he or she can do things together with others in a group without supposing that there is something like a collective intention. (shrink)

t Intentional sampling methods are non-randomized procedures that select a group of individuals for a sample with the purpose of meeting specific prescribed criteria. In this paper we extend previous works related to intentional sampling, and address the problem of sequential allocation for clinical trials with few patients. Roughly speaking, patients are enrolled sequentially, according to the order in which they start the treatment at the clinic or hospital. The allocation problem consists in assigning each new patient to one, (...) and only one, of the alternative treatment arms. The main requisite is that the profiles in the alternative arms remain similar with respect to some relevant patients’ attributes (age, gender, disease, symptom severity and others). We perform numerical experiments based on a real case study and discuss how to conveniently set up perturbation parameters, in order to yield a suitable balance between optimality – the similarity among the relative frequencies of patients in the several categories for both arms, and decoupling – the absence of a tendency to allocate each pair of patients consistently to the same arm. (shrink)

Corporations have often been taken to be the paradigm of an organization whose agency is autonomous from that of the successive waves of people who occupy the pattern of roles that define its structure, which licenses saying that the corporation has attitudes, interests, goals, and beliefs which are not those of the role occupants. In this essay, I sketch a deflationary account of agency-discourse about corporations. I identify institutional roles with a special type of status function, a status role, in (...) which the collectively accepted function is expressed in part through its occupier’s intentional expression of her agency in that role. I identify institutions as systems of status roles and show how this is compatible with seeing the agency of institutions generally, even over time periods in which there is complete change in role occupiers, as a matter of the contributions only of individual agents. I explain how the reduction of the institution to its members is compatible with its potentially having had a completely different membership. I show in the case of the corporation in particular that, once we see its origins and function, the surface features of legal discourse about corporate agency are misleading and are compatible with a deflationary account of corporate agency. I show in connection with this that the corporation is to be identified with its shareholders, and that where a corporation separates ownership and control, its managers and employees are proxy agents of the shareholders doing business under the corporate form. Finally, I canvass the legitimate ways of construing ordinary talk about corporate intention, belief, and so on, in light of this, none of which support the attribution of genuine agency or intentionality to any group per se associated with the corporation. (shrink)

We live in a world of crowds and corporations, artworks and artifacts, legislatures and languages, money and markets. These are all social objects — they are made, at least in part, by people and by communities. But what exactly are these things? How are they made, and what is the role of people in making them? In The Ant Trap, Brian Epstein rewrites our understanding of the nature of the social world and the foundations of the social sciences. Epstein explains (...) and challenges the three prevailing traditions about how the social world is made. One tradition takes the social world to be built out of people, much as traffic is built out of cars. A second tradition also takes people to be the building blocks of the social world, but focuses on thoughts and attitudes we have toward one another. And a third tradition takes the social world to be a collective projection onto the physical world. Epstein shows that these share critical flaws. Most fundamentally, all three traditions overestimate the role of people in building the social world: they are overly anthropocentric. Epstein starts from scratch, bringing the resources of contemporary metaphysics to bear. In the place of traditional theories, he introduces a model based on a new distinction between the grounds and the anchors of social facts. Epstein illustrates the model with a study of the nature of law, and shows how to interpret the prevailing traditions about the social world. Then he turns to social groups, and to what it means for a group to take an action or have an intention. Contrary to the overwhelming consensus, these often depend on more than the actions and intentions of group members. (shrink)

Groups can be epistemically vicious just like individuals. And just like individuals, groups sometimes want to do something about their vices. They want to change. However, intentionally combating one’s own vices seems impossible without detecting those vices first. Self-knowledge seems to provide a first step towards changing one’s own epistemic vices. I argue that groups can acquire self-knowledge about their epistemic vices and I propose an account of such collective self-knowledge. I suggest that collective self-knowledge of vices is partially based (...) on evidence that a group can generate by performing internal promptings. Whereas these promptings are done mentally in individual self-knowledge, these promptings are done by interactions of group members in the collective case. The group can then acquire inferential self-knowledge of their vices based on the evidence generated by the interactions within the group. Groups thereby bring themselves into a position from which they can combat and change those vices intentionally. (shrink)

This paper argues that to account for group speech acts, we should adopt a representationalist account of mode / force. Individual and collective subjects do not only represent what they e.g. assert or order. By asserting or ordering they also indicate their theoretical or practical positions towards what they assert or order. The ‘Frege point’ cannot establish the received dichotomy of force and propositional content. On the contrary, only the representationalist account allows a satisfactory response to it. It also (...) allows us to give a more satisfactory analysis of the speech act of inviting a joint commitment and to answer two important questions Bernhard Schmid has raised about group speech acts, namely whether there are 1st person plural forms of Moore’s paradox and of 1st person authority. (shrink)

Raimo Tuomela is one of the pioneers of social action theory and has done as much as anyone over the last thirty years to advance the study of social action and collective intentionality. Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents (2013) presents the latest version of his theory and applications to a range of important social phenomena. The book covers so much ground, and so many important topics in detailed discussions, that it would impossible in a short space to (...) do it even partial justice. In this brief note, I will concentrate on a single, though important, theme in the book, namely, the claim that we must give up methodological individualism in the social sciences and embrace instead irreducibly group notions. I wish to defend methodological individualism as up to the theoretical tasks of the social sciences while acknowledging what is distinctive about the social world and collective intentional action. -/- Tuomela frames the question of the adequacy of methodological individualism in terms of a contrast between what he calls the I-mode and the we-mode. He argues that we-mode phenomena are not reducible to I-mode phenomena, and concludes that we must reject methodological individualism. I will argue that the irreducibility of the we-mode to the I-mode, given how the contrast is set up, does not entail the rejection of methodological individualism. In addition, I will argue that the three conditions that Tuomela places on genuine we-mode activities, the group reason, collectivity, and collective commitment conditions, if they are understood in a way that does not beg the question, can plausibly be satisfied by a reductive account. Finally, I will argue that the specific considerations advanced in the book do not give us reason to think that a reductive account cannot be adequate to the descriptive and explanatory requirements of a theory of the social world. (shrink)

In philosophical action theory there is a wide agreement that intentions, often understood in terms of plans, play a major role in the deliberation of rational agents. Planning accounts of rational agency challenge game- and decision-theoretical accounts in that they allow for rationality of actions that do not necessarily maximize expected utility but instead aim at satisfying long-term goals. Another challenge for game-theoretical understanding of rational agency has recently been put forth by the theory of team reasoning in which the (...) agents select their actions by doing their parts in the collective action that is best for the group. Both planning and team reasoning can be seen as instances of a similar type of reasoning in which actions are selected on the basis of an evaluation of a larger unit than an individual’s momentary act. In recent theories of collective agency, both planning and team reasoning have been defended against orthodox game theory, but, interestingly, by different authors: Raimo Tuomela has defended team reasoning in his theory of group agency, but he ignores temporally extended planning in this context. Michael Bratman has extended his theory of planning to the case of shared agency, but he does not seem to see a role for team reasoning in understanding shared intentional activities. In this paper, we argue that both accounts suffer from this one-sidedness. We aim to combine the main insights of Tuomela’s we-mode approach and Bratman’s planning approach into a fruitful synthesis that we think is necessary for understanding the nature of group agency. (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)

Raimo Tuomela is one of the pioneers of social action theory and has done as much as anyone over the last 30 years to advance the study of social action and collective intentionality. Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents presents the latest version of his theory and applications to a range of important social phenomena. The book covers so much ground, and so many important topics in detailed discussions, that it would impossible in a short space to do (...) it even partial justice. In this brief note, I will concentrate on a single, though important, theme in the book, namely, the claim that we must give up methodological individualism in the social sciences and embrace instead irreducibly group notions. I wish to defend methodological individualism as up to the theoretical tasks of the social sciences while acknowledging what is distinctive about the social world and collective intentional action. (shrink)

Conspiracies are, by definition, a group activity; to conspire requires two or more people working together towards some end, typically in secret. Conspirators have intentions; this is borne out by the fact they want some end and are willing to engage in action to achieve. Of course, what these intentions are can be hard to fathom: historians have written a lot about the intentions of the assassins of Julius Caesar, for example; did they want to restore the Republic; was (...) Marcus Brutus lusting after power; was it an attempt to curb the ambitions of the plebeian class, who saw in Caesar someone not unlike themselves? If intentions can be hard to infer, who is a knowing conspirator and who is a dupe is almost as tricky to parse. Not all purported members of a conspiracy are conspirators, even if they aid and abet the conspiracy. Take, for example, the notorious lax engineer who the conspirators know will sign off on substandard building compliance measures, making it all the easier for them to plant their controlled demolitions. On some account of causal or even moral responsibility the lax engineer would then be responsible for the subsequent event, the one the conspirators desired. Yet it also seems clear that even if she is responsible in some sense for the culminating event of the conspiracy, it is clear that they did not conspire. Or, at least, we would like to think so, although should the authorities find out about the lax engineer’s involvement, they may well be considered part of the conspiracy, especially if the conspirators do their best to hide their own involvement or identities. (shrink)

A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist’s ‘knowledge = apt belief’ template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity (e.g., Sosa 2020), to how it is realised at the individual level—viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by (...) alethically affirming that p. An advantage of the proposal developed is that it is shown to be compatible with competing views—viz., joint acceptance accounts and social-distributive accounts—of how group members must interact in order to materially realise a group belief. I conclude by showing how the proposed judgment-focused collective (telic) virtue epistemology has important advantages over a rival version of collective virtue epistemology defended in recent work by Jesper Kallestrup (2016). (shrink)