Abstract

What drives much of the current philosophical interest in the idea of group cognition is its appeal to the manifestation of psychological properties—understood broadly to include states, processes, and dispositions—that are in some important yet elusive sense emergent with respect to the minds of individual group members. Our goal in this paper is to address a set of related, conditional questions: If human mentality is real yet emergent in a modest metaphysical sense only, then: (i) What would it mean for a group to have emergent cognitive states? (ii) Is this even a metaphysically coherent view? (iii) Relative to which notion of emergence do we have reason to believe that certain groups in fact have emergent cognitive states? We shall argue that evidence from a wide variety of social science domains makes it plausible that there are group cognitive states and processes no less metaphysically emergent than human cognitive (and other special science) states and processes.