Group Minds and Explanatory Simplicity

Simplicity and the Lascar Group

This paper contains a series of easy constructions and observations relating to the Lascar group and to simple theories. 1 In x1 we review basic model theoretic ideas, relating mostly to model completion and saturated models. We do so in order to introduce a framework very slightly more general than the usual rst-order one that will be useful to us, and that we hope may be useful in the future....

Individual Minds as Groups, Group Minds as Individuals

Group Minds and the Case of Wikipedia

Group-level cognitive states are widely observed in human social systems, but their discussion is often ruled out a priori in quantitative approaches. In this paper, we show how reference to the irreducible mental states and psychological dynamics of a group is necessary to make sense of large scale social phenomena. We introduce the problem of mental boundaries by reference to a classic proble...

Who Is Afraid of Group Agents and Group Minds?

The heyday of the ideas of group mind and group agent seems to be well over. Why dig up these corpses that seem to have been buried ages ago? I will try to give at least a partial answer to this question in this chapter. Yet the main task below is to clarify these notions when viewed from a naturalistic point of view and compatibly with current theorizing in the collective intentionality litera...

On the Simplicity of the Group of Contactomorphisms

We consider the group Contc(M 2n+1, α) of Cr contactomorphisms with compact support of a contact manifold (M2n+1, α) of dimension (2n + 1) with the Cr topology. We show that the first homology group of the classifying space BContc(M 2n+1, α) for the Cr foliated M2n+1 products with compact support with transverse contact structure α is trivial for 1 ≤ r < n + (3/2). This implies that the identit...