What We See ? An Investigation of an Argument Against Collective Representation

We often speak as though collectivities can be in mental states. Israel fears further attacks from Hezbollah; Microsoft intends to unveil a new product in the spring; and, Starbucks believes that it needs to present a friendlier and less overtly monopolistic image. However, two major difficulties stand in the way of understanding such ascriptions of mentality literally. First, there is a prevalent commonsense intuition that such attributions of mentality should be understood as figurative or metaphorical. Second, although the social psychology of the “group mind” was a prominent research project in the social psychology of the late 19 century (cf., Le Bon 1895/2002, Freud 1914/1975, and Durkheim 1895/1982 and 1895/1997), there is a broad consensus among philosophers and cognitive scientists that these accounts of collective mentality failed. The positivism and behaviorism of the early 20 century trimmed away the ontological excess of group minds, and the cognitive revolution suggests little reason to extend the mind beyond the individual. Yet, despite a prevalent hostility to collective mentality, a growing number of philosophers (e.g., Gilbert 1989 and Petit 2003) and cognitive scientists (e.g., Wegner 1986, Hutchins 1995, and Knorr Cetina 1999) have began to develop arguments for the existence of collective mentality. Viable theories of collective mentality are still in their infancy, and as such they continue to face serious objections. In this paper I address the most troubling of these objections: the argument that any appeal to collective representation is explanatorily superfluous. I argue that although many appeals to collective representation are explanatorily superfluous, deploying the claim of explanatory superfluity to readily risks either proving too much, giving us reason to adopt eliminativism about individual mentality and abandon the idea of person-level representations, or risks proving too little, demonstrating precisely the continuity between individual and collective representations that would warrant attributions of collective mentality.