Abstract
Michael Schmitz has written a critical review of my account. I appreciate his ideas and his friendly way of addressing my work. In this response I will focus on some of his critical points and consider their tenability.
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Notes
- 1.
I occasionally say in SO that all group agents are fictitious, but that does not mean more than that they all have some fictitious features, viz. made up features that are metaphorically described or named (cf. my response to Laitinen’s paper). E.g. a group agent’s intentional features like its “wants” and “beliefs” as well as its “consciousness” are such fictitious features. Yet group agents as discussed in this book are causally real, viz. capable of causing outcomes in the real world through their members acting as group members with extrinsically intentional attitudes, e.g. role-based goals and views in something like Schmitz’s sense. What Schmitz says of my view of group agents is not right and requires modification in accordance with what I say in this response (that I take to be compatible with what I say in SO).
- 2.
See my remarks on List and Pettit (2011) in SO on the “autonomous” nature of a group’s mental states in relation to its members’ states, also see my discussion especially in Chaps. 3 and 7 in SO of the discrepancy between I-mode and we-mode states (as well as other group-based properties).
- 3.
See Tuomela (2007, Chap. 1) for my notions of acting as a group member in the we-mode and in the I-mode. As to a group’s explanatory control, I cannot here tackle this complex matter. The recent paper by Strand (2012) shows in detail how one can feasibly combine the group’s explanatory control with the group members’ causal control over their actions. Briefly, the group non-causally filters for certain actions (viz. actions as a group member in the terms of my account) and thus structurally control and serve to explain those actions. Also cf. List and Pettit, 2011, Chaps. 6 and 7 for a somewhat different kind of account of a group’s control over its activities and their intended consequences. Their account of how to combine individual level causal control with group level control seems to work in cases where the group’s control depends on specific individuals but not in more general cases where that qualification does not hold.
- 4.
Cf. my account of social roles in a positional context (see Tuomela 1995).
- 5.
Schmitz criticizes my view of we-intending as being strictly group-based. If a small change in the group members occurs the members left may not any more rationally hold the we-intention. Suppose a task requires three members to satisfy the original we-intention. Suppose the group is a triad and that the three members share the we-intention but that then one of them leaves the group or otherwise gives up his we-intention. Now the two members left cannot rationally satisfy the we-intention as the task requires that three persons contribute. This is gives my central intuition for claiming that the we-intention then must be re-applied for the case at hand, if possible, or otherwise the we-intention will rationally (but perhaps sometimes not psychologically) cease to exist.
References
List, C., & Pettit, P. (2011). Group agency: The possibility, design and status of corporate agents. New York: Oxford University Press.
Strand, A. (2012). Group agency, responsibility, and control. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 43(2), 201–224.
Tuomela, R. (1995). The importance of us: A philosophical study of basic social notions. Stanford University Press, Stanford
Tuomela, R. (2013). Social ontology: Collective intentionality and group agents. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Schmitz, M. (2017). Raimo Tuomela: Response to Michael Schmitz. In: Preyer, G., Peter, G. (eds) Social Ontology and Collective Intentionality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33236-9_4
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