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Containing Multitudes: Reflection, Expertise and Persons as Groups

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

Simon J. Evnine
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Extract

From time to time, philosophers like to raise the possibility of the existence of group minds or group persons. In order for something to be interestingly and appropriately described as a group person it must satisfy two conditions. First, it must itself exhibit various characteristics that are distinctive of persons. Unless it did this, it would not be a group person. Secondly, it must be composed of entities that are themselves persons or relevantly person-like. Without this, it would not be a group person. It is the difficulty of seeing how these two conditions can be satisfied together that has made the existence and possible natures of group persons problematic. For the things that paradigmatically satisfy the first condition, namely persons, are not obviously thought of as being composed of person-like entities related in some group-like way. And the things that paradigmatically satisfy the second condition, such as sports teams, committees and string quartets, are not obviously thought of as themselves displaying personal characteristics. Investigators of group persons – though not always thinking of themselves as such – have usually approached the problem by starting with paradigmatic and uncontroversial groups and exploring the extent to which personal characteristics can be attributed to them. Since it would be unreasonable to expect such groups to exhibit, even in some possibly attenuated way, all the characteristics of an ordinary person, attention is usually directed to some subset of these characteristics. Can such a group have a single consciousness? Can it be the subject of intentional mental states like belief? Can it act? Can it be guilty?

Type
Research Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , June 2005 , pp. 57 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

Notes

1 Prominent practitioners of this approach include Margaret Gilbert and Raimo Tuomela.

2 The Model is explained in his Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991)Google ScholarPubMed.

3 A fuller treatment can be found in Evnine, Simon, “Epistemic Unities,” Erkenntnis 59, (2003): 365–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Obviously, the notion of a constitutive norm itself needs a good deal of clarification which I cannot provide here. For those familiar with these cases, the following might provide examples of how the notion works: Davidson's views on the relations between principles of rationality and belief systems; Aristotelian views about forms of life and natural kinds; Wolterstorff's views on scores and musical works.

5 Here I refine the terminology introduced in my “Epistemic Unities,” in which I use the more generic term “epistemic unity” as a name for those groups I am here calling “expert epistemic unities.”

6 I do not here offer these remarks as an analysis of the notional of conditional belief, though in fact they are close to Stalnaker's, analysis in Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

7 For the purposes of this paper I pretend what I do not believe, that degrees of belief are subjective probabilities and that full belief is sufficiently high degree of belief. Without the second assumption, two sets of principles would be needed to capture taking someone as an expert, one for degrees of belief and one for full belief.

8 Perhaps one might also take someone as an expert for no reason at all – one simply comes to believe what she does whenever one finds out what that is. I suspect that many cases of taking someone as an expert for non-epistemic reasons will shade off into this less thoughtful phenomenon, but here is not the place to investigate the moral psychology involved.

9 This might be thought to be hinted at by these words of the Catechism: “with this Church [i.e. Rome]… the faithful everywhere, must necessarily be in accord” (Catechism, 1994, p. 834Google Scholar, my emphasis).

10 van Fraassen, Bas, “Belief and the Will,” Journal of Philosophy 81, (1984): 235–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 In addition to the paper just cited, see also his “Belief and the Problem of Ulysses and the Sirens,” Philosophical Studies 77, (1995): 7–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 A good example of this reaction to Reflection can be found in Christensen, David, “Clever Bookies and Coherent Beliefs,” Philosophical Review 100, (1991): 229–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Christensen presents another counter-example that may seem not to be covered by what I have just said (op. cit., p. 236). In it, I hypothesize that I will later believe I am the Messiah. He thinks it would be irrational for me now to believe that I am the Messiah conditionally on this hypothesis. And here, there seems to be nothing in the hypothesis about being hypnotized, drugged, etc. However, from my current point of view, there are some things that I could not believe unless I were crazy or subject to some kind of manipulation. That I am the Messiah is one of them. So, from my current point of view, the mere hypothesis that I shall believe that I am the Messiah implies that I will be crazy, drugged, etc., and this does invalidate the conditional belief. To see this, just imagine the counter-example as described being offered to someone who now thinks it a genuine possibility that she is the Messiah (though she doesn't currently think she is).

14 This is illustrated by the famous case of Ulysses and the Sirens, and by the case of the Nineteenth-Century Russian discussed by Parfit, Derek in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 327–8Google Scholar.

15 For some discussion of degenerationist versus progressivist views of history and their connections with theories of ‘the progress of the mind’ see my “Hume, Conjectural History, and the Uniformity of Human Nature,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 31, (1993): 589–606CrossRefGoogle Scholar.