Abstract

Two theories dominate the current debate on group agency: functionalism, as endorsed by Bryce Huebner and Brian Epstein, and interpretivism, as defended by Deborah Tollefsen, and Christian List and Philip Pettit. In this paper, I will give a new argument to favour functionalism over interpretivism. I discuss a class of cases which the former, but not the latter, can accommodate. Two features characterise this class: First, distinct groups coincide, that is numerically distinct groups share all their members at all time. Second, we have access to the inner mechanisms of the groups agents, because members know what they have decided on. I construct a counterexample with these features allowing me to reject interpretivism about group agency in favour of functionalism.

Highlights

  • The debate on group agency raises two questions: Are there group agents, that is groups with minds of their own? And if so, what makes the attribution of propositional attitudes, such as beliefs, intentions, and desires, to them correct?1 Two theories answer these questions and dominate the current debate on group agency

  • I start by introducing the distinction between functionalism and interpretivism, at the heart of which lies the difference between mechanisms on the inside and behaviour on the outside

  • If interpretivism cannot distinguish between the mental lives of the two committees, how do we pull it off? We know that the teaching committee intended to dissolve itself, because we know that its members discussed this at the meeting and that the coin came up a certain way

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Summary

Introduction

The debate on group agency raises two questions: Are there group agents, that is groups with minds of their own? And if so, what makes the attribution of propositional attitudes, such as beliefs, intentions, and desires, to them correct?1 Two theories answer these questions and dominate the current debate on group agency. We find the proposals by Huebner (2014) and

Strohmaier
The functionalist principle
The interpretivist principle
The overgeneration worry
Towards the counterexample
The dispositionalist complication
The counterexample
Four interpretivist responses
10 Towards a functionalist solution
11 Conclusion
Full Text
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