Abstract
Group agents have been represented as expressive fictions by those who treat ascriptions of agency to groups as metaphorical; as pragmatic fictions by those who think that the agency ascribed to groups belongs in the first place to a distinct individual or set of individuals; and as theoretical fictions by those who think that postulating group agents serves no indispensable role in our theory of the social world. This paper identifies, criticizes and rejects each of these views, defending a strong realist position.
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Notes
Innocent was no doubt responsible for the later popularity of the phrase ‘persona ficta’, though he can only be held to have suggested the idea, as when he uses the verb ‘fingere’ to say that when a group (collegium) acts as a group agent (universitas) it is constituted/cast as a single person’: cum collegium in causa universitatis fingatur una persona. See Eschmann 1946, p 34, who raises a question about whether ‘fingatur’ should be written ‘fungatur’, which would support the translation: ‘…performs as a single person’.
The main novelties in this paper are in the critique of the Hobbesian line on group agency in Sect. 3, and in the discussion of the judicial fiction of a corporation in section 5. While organized in a somewhat different fashion from the book, the other material in the paper relies heavily on arguments put forward there.
For an exploration of how far a group agent’s concern with consistency, and rationality in general, can be derived from its concern to respond to reasons see (Buchak and Pettit 2014).
He thinks that a committee that is even in number will not generally work well, being ‘oftentimes mute and incapable of action’, and presumably prefers to have an odd-numbered committee. But he does admit that even an even-numbered committee may be fine in some cases, as when the issue is whether to condemn someone, for example; in this case a tied vote would argue for absolution: ‘when a cause is heard, not to condemn is to resolve’.
Socrates famously asks in the Euthyphro whether the gods love the holy because it is holy—a reading under which holiness is an objective property tracked by the gods—or whether it is holy because the gods love it: a reading under which holiness is a property constituted, not tracked, by the gods. The issue here is parallel and my argument amounts to an argument for an objective view of group agency. It is because a group has the agency property that members construct an agential voice, not the other way around.
Each of the theorems presupposes, of course, that a number of more or less plausible constraints or conditions are fulfilled. But together they suggest that no matter how we interpret the requirement that a group judgment on any proposition be responsive to the member judgments on that proposition, still that requirement is liable to clash with the requirement that the group be collectively consistent and, more generally, rational.
This observation is consistent with allowing that were we able to consider all the naturalistic configurations possible, and did we know all the naturalistic laws applying in those conditions, we could deduce the fulfillment of conditions sufficient to ensure that the purposive-representational patterns obtain. For more on this assumption see Chalmers (2012), Chalmers and Jackson (2001), Jackson (1998).
For an explicit use of Dennett’s intentional stance in arguing for the reality of group agency, see Tollefsen (2002).
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Acknowledgments
I was greatly helped in preparing this paper by the discussion of related themes at a conference in the University of Vienna in May 2012 and I am most grateful to the organizers and participants. I am in the debt of Christian List, who has long been a co-author and interlocutor on related themes. I was greatly assisted in the final stages of preparation by comments from Alex Prescott-Couch and the anonymous referees for Erkenntnis. In developing the line in the third section I was influenced by discussions with Quentin Skinner about Hobbes’s theory of group agency. And in arguing for the thesis defended in the fifth section I learned a lot from exchanges with David Ciepley as well as from his article cited in the text.
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Pettit, P. Group Agents are Not Expressive, Pragmatic or Theoretical Fictions. Erkenn 79 (Suppl 9), 1641–1662 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9633-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9633-x