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I concede that most defenses of collective mentality fail to distinguish between a defense of collective mentality and SMH. However, there are tools for distinguishing between the two sorts of collective states in a way that makes the defense of collective mentality stronger as well as distinguishes between genuinely cognitive collective phenomena and phenomena that ought to be understood as only figuratively or derivatively cognitive. Let’s start with an example.

A relatively common case in which one might ascribe a mental state to a collectivity might take the form “The Dixiecrats believe that the South will rise again”. In this case, although it may be true of many people who identify as Dixiecrats that they believe the South will rise again, and although it may be true that there is a platform advanced by this splinter wing of the American Democratic Party that constrains the members of the Dixiecrat Party to make claims about how the South will rise again (on the heels of racist practices), it doesn’t seem as though we gain any explanatory advantage by ascribing a belief to the Dixiecrat party rather than ascribing that belief to each of the members of that party. A Martian psychologist who knew of all the psychological states of the individuals that compose the Dixiecrat party, and who knew all of the relevant rules of behavior for remaining a member of the Dixiecrat party, wouldn’t be missing out on anything explanatorily interesting if she failed to make a claim about the psychology of the Dixiecrat party per se. While there may

be reasons such as relative ease of prediction, or epistemic limitations of human agents, that might lead us to attribute such states to collectivities, this is not enough to compel us to think that there are interesting mental states of the Dixiecrat party—at least not in this case.

At least part of what has gone wrong in this case is precisely what went wrong in the study of the collective psychology tradition of the late 19th century. Briefly, starting with crowd behavior as a paradigmatic case of collective cognition was a mistake! Wilson is right to note that crowd behavior is better understood by way of the SMH. It is clearly true that an individual cannot riot by herself. She can set things on fire, throw bricks through a window, and even attempt to turn a car over. But she will not be rioting unless she finds engages in these behaviors under the right social circumstance. Le Bon correctly note that when people find themselves in a riot they see things as reasonable that they wouldn’t otherwise, their emotions change, and they become less responsive to reason. However, all of this can be explained in terms of the psychological states of the individuals as well as rules for the aggregation of their behavior.

This points us to an important sort of lesson. The presence of self-organizing behavior in a collectivity is never sufficient, by itself, to demonstrate the existence of collective mental states. In fact, the presence of self-organizing systems bolsters Mill’s intuition that there are laws of aggregation for social phenomena that take away the mystery of collective behavior. Perhaps the most widely known case of emergent collective behavior on the basis of simple facts about the individuals that compose a collectivity is the segregation phenomena studied by Thomas Schelling (1971). Here’s one way of telling the story. Suppose that we have an equal number of philosophers and neuroscientists in a room who are distributed randomly. Now suppose that these people have to find comfortable situations for conversation, and

suppose that although each of the philosophers is willing to converse with neuroscientists (and vice versa) no philosopher wants to end up in a conversation where more than 50% of her conversation partners are neuroscientists (and vice versa). Schelling (1971) demonstrates that starting from these individual psychological states, using random movements of individuals, an eventual state of the collectivity exhibiting between 75-90% segregation is likely to occur. Although each of the individuals is willing to integrate, the collectivity will end up segregated. The interesting thing about these phenomena is that although they demonstrate that there are interesting states of the group that emerge out of the individual beliefs and simple algorithms for movement within the constraints of the group, these emergent collective phenomena, that are quite interesting in their own right, do not lead us to posit anything interestingly cognitive at the level of the collectivity. If we were to assume that statistical trends within a collectivity are sufficient for collective mentality, we would just be falling prey to another failing of the 19th _{century tradition of collective psychology.}

In attempting to make sense of which phenomena are genuinely cognitive, it helps to recognize that there are at least two ways in which higher-level phenomena can emerge out of lower-level phenomena. Following Andy Clark (1997, 73ff), I distinguish between direct emergence and indirect emergence. Direct emergence is grounded on the properties of individual elements of a system coupled with rules for composition. In cases where we find direct emergence, the state of a collectivity, even where it diverges from the states of the individuals that compose that collectivity, is determined by the state of the individuals and rules for aggregating these individual behaviors. Note that this model of emergence allows us to retain the intuition advanced by Wilson in the guise SMH by noting that the psychological states of the individuals that compose the collectivity are quite often contingent on the sort of

collectivity to which that individual belongs. However, in this case there are no interesting feedback relations between the collectivity and the environment. To put the point bluntly: if you want to stop a riot, you attack individuals with riot cans of mace, teargas, and nightsticks—and that’s because the state of the riot is just an aggregation of the states of individuals.

Indirect emergence, however, requires that the individual systems involved in the production of collective phenomena use various aspects of the environment in order to coordinate unified, genuinely collective behavior. Clark uses the example of the nest- building behavior of termites, which is causally mediated by the modification of local environments with chemical trace intended to coordinate the goals of the termites as a whole. Now, while I’m not at all sure that we should take the termite mound to count as a single cognitive system (though that is, of course, an open and empirical question at the end of the day), there is a quite important lesson to learn about collective cognition at this point. The point that I want to take from Clark (1997) is that cognitive systems, including collective cognitive systems must be systems that traffic in internal representations of some sort. The stimergetic algorithms used by the termites is one sort of representational structure, however, it’s not the only one. Fodor’s LOT is another—but this is not the only option for thought. I claim that if we are to take a system to be a genuinely cognitive system, then it must be the case that that we will be able to develop some sort of analogue to a psychosemantics for that system in order to explain how it is that genuinely mental representations are passed between the subsystems within a collectivity.72 To put this point another way, if we are going to attribute genuinely cognitive states to a collectivity, it will have to be the case that there is

72 _{There is, of course, a lot to say about this as a genuine possibility. In fact, the most troubling argument}

against collective mentality is that it won’t be possible to give an adequate psychosemantics for a collectivity. But, that’s a topic for Chapter 4.

some story to be told about how the intentionally specified behavior of a collectivity is to be understood in terms of the contribution that each of the parts make—as parts of that system—to the furthering of the goal in question. This leads me to my final remark about what we should learn from Wilson’s picture of collective phenomena in terms of SMH.

To begin with, consider an analog to the Laplacean Martians that troubled Dennett (1987a, 1991b). Suppose that there were creatures that didn’t have to appeal to anything over and above individuals but that could survey a particular aggregation of individuals and determine the psychological state of every member of that aggregate. My contention is that even if there were such people, they would be missing something perfectly objective in the patterns of collective behavior, behavior that is only describable by way of the attribution of mental states to collectivities. Dennett (1987a, 1991b) claims that if his Martians did not see that there were indefinitely many physical realizers that could be substituted for the ones that give rise to fluctuations in stock prices without perturbing the subsequent operations of the market), they will have failed to see a real pattern in the world. I claim, analogously, that if there were cognitive scientists who could predict what press release would be produced by a corporation just by appeal to individual psychological states, they would be missing a real pattern in the world if they failed to realize that this output could be the result of indefinitely many psychological states of the individuals that compose that corporation.

Predicting that a corporation will be secretive about its plan to release a new product that will revolutionize the field is easy from the standpoint of commonsense psychology. Moreover, to suppose that there must be some particular realizer (e.g., a certain sort of neurological machinery or even a system that is physically bounded) or structural just seems silly. The most promising explanatory project, both at the individual level and at the

collective level, is likely to turn on regularities such as the passing of representations from one system to another in a way that’s capable of sustaining commonsense psychological regularities. However, to suppose that we need to go all the way to the individual level to explain the apparently cognitive properties of collectivities seems an unwarranted presupposition. Commonsense psychology is not committed to any theory about realization of mental states. Even if commonsense psychology has it that beliefs are information bearing states that arise from perceptions (or something quasi-perceptual) and that, together with appropriately related desires, lead to intelligent action, there will always be further questions as to which critters have beliefs. Unfortunately, there are further arguments waiting in the wings to explain why it is that collectivities cannot have genuinely cognitive states.