EVALUACIÓN Y SEGUIMIENTO

Robert Rupert (2005) argues that there is no plausible naturalistic theory of mental content that can serve as a legitimate foundation for collective mentality. I am inclined to believe that Rupert’s (2005) arguments are the most troubling objection to collective mentality, and his arguments are all the more troubling given that he and I shares a number of important methodological assumptions about what it takes for something to count as a collective mental state. Rupert agrees that it is unacceptable to “simply assert the existence of genuinely autonomous group mental states—because, for example, that is what our everyday

talk presupposes—while claiming that they are not states of minds” (Rupert 2005, 2ms).86 With Rupert, I agree that assuming radical discontinuity between individual and group mental states is the point on which many accounts of collective intentionality fail. After all, if you introduce enough discontinuity, the states of collectivities will fail to count as genuinely mental. Rupert (2005, 2ms) also contends that if something is going to count as a collective mental state, it must “instantiate the central features of minds as we know them best”; I also endorse a version of this claim. Rupert’s position is an attempt to endorse our best philosophical and psychological theories of what a mind is. Finally, Rupert (2005, 2ms) argues that collective mentality requires distinctive causal-explanatory work for collective mental states; in the absence of such causal-explanatory work, attributions of collective mentality begin to look like mere instrumental shorthand for claims about individual psychological states in aggregation. With these assumptions in hand, Rupert argues that without some account of collective representations, we ought not read attributions of collective mentality as literally true of the collectivity itself. On this point, I’m also in agreement with Rupert. But this is where the trouble begins.

Focusing on the case of formally organized institutional systems such as labor unions, courts, and corporations, Rupert contends that there are no viable theories of individual representational states than can be applied “in a natural or convincing way to group states” (Rupert 2005, 8ms). In the remainder of this section, I’ll briefly survey the naturalistic theories of mental representation that are on the table and the sorts of worries that Rupert thinks will arise in adopting each of them. The first theory that Rupert considers is indicator semantics. Proponents of indicator semantics (e.g., Dretske 1988) hold that:

86 _{I’ve not yet considered this position as a possibility. However, in my discussion of Ron Giere’s work on}

A mental representation MR represents a property P iff MR has an acquired function of indicating P for a system S, and it acquired this function because MR indicates P to S.

Rupert (2005, 10ms) argues that there are no states of a group that can stand in an indication relation to the properties that would have to be tracked by a mental representation. After all, indicator semantics typically rely on a relationship between internal perceptual states (which are later decoupled from immediate perceptual stimuli) and properties of the world; however, Rupert claims that there are no states of collectivities that seem to fill the relevant perceptual roles to allow for this sort of content fixing. If public language structures such as a press release or a court’s opinion are supposed to play the role of representations, it’s unclear how such representations could indicate anything on their own. In fact, such representations seem to be a paradigmatic case of a representation with non-natural meaning (Grice 1957): the meaning of these representations depends completely on the intentional states of the cognitive system that produces them.

Having argued that indicator semantics is unworkable as a theory of collective representation, Rupert considers the possibility of adopting a pure-informational theory of content in defense of collective mentality.87 According to the most prominent pure- informational theory of mental representation (cf., Fodor 1990):

A mental representation MR represents a property P iff 1) it’s a law that ‘P causes MR’, 2) some P actually does cause MR, and 3) if something other than P causes MR doing so is asymmetrically dependent on ‘P causing R’.

87 _{Note that the term ‘pure-informational’ here is Rupert’s choice and not mine. Using this term seems to}

suggest a view more like Dretske’s (1988) since Dretske specifically spells out his theory in terms of the Shannon-Weaver theory of information.

However, Rupert (2005, 11) argues that “it is difficult to see why the proper causal relations would hold independently (or independently enough) of the asymmetric dependencies into which individuals’ mental representations enter”. If an informational theory of content is going to be adopted in defending collective mentality, a story will have to be told about how it is that some states of the collectivity qua states of the collectivity stand in the right sort of informational relation to some property. However, if public language structures such as a press release or a court’s opinion are supposed to play the role of representations, it seems clear that informational relations only obtain between the individuals that produce these public language structures and the property that is supposed to be tracked by the relevant representation. In the absence of an account of how some property of the group qua property of the group that stands in the right sort of informational relation, it seems reasonable to think that the “group cognitive systems, qua group systems, contain no representations whose content is not derived from the content of representations in some other system—not what we should want in a genuine cognitive system (or mind)” (Rupert 2005, 11-12).

Rupert also argues that teleological theories of mental representation are insufficient to underwrite a theory of collective representation. Though there are a number of teleological theories of mental representation on the table, they all seem to hold that:

A mental representation MR represents a property P iff some privileged relation between MR and P accounts for the continued reproduction of MR (cf., Rupert 2005, 12ms).88

There are, however, a couple of ways of spelling out the relevant relation, and Rupert contends that on any interpretation this theory is problematic as a theory of collective representation. If we adopt the evolutionary interpretation (cf., Millikan 1984), Rupert claims

88 _{As Bill Lycan has pointed out in conversation, this understanding of teleological theories of representation}

rests on a standard misinterpretation of teleological theories of representation. As such, teleological theories of mental representation make no mention of reproduction, etiology, or anything of the sort.

that there is no straightforward way to make sense of the application of evolutionary theory to the most promising cases of collective mentality. After all, it doesn’t seem as though the public language structures such as a press release or a court’s opinion that are supposed to play the role of representations have much of any selectionist story to be told of them—there is “(1) nothing that varies in such a way that its differences might then be inherited by the group and (2) nothing to encode successful variations in fitness, so that they may be passed on to descendants” (Rupert 2005, 12ms). The proponent of collective representations might adopt a non-evolutionary theory of function. However, on these accounts, Rupert (2005, 13ms) argues that there is no account of the relevant causal mechanism for the sustenance of a function that don’t simply appeal to the causal relations between the mental representations of individual and the properties in the world that they are supposed to represent.

Another option is to adopt a causal-historical semantics (cf., Prinz 2002). On this view, the content of a mental representation is specified partly in terms of cause and partly in terms of etiology, such that:

A mental representation MR represents a property P iff MR is disposed to be reliably activated by encounters with P, and encounters with P played a role in the acquisition of MR.

Rupert (1998, 1999, and 2001) advances a similar view according to which the neural structures that realize a mental representation are shaped developmentally, by interaction with the environment. On his view, “this shaping involves a certain statistical pattern of interaction with the very things that thereby come to be represented” (Rupert 2005, 13ms). Here again, the proponent of collective representations faces the worry that collectivities possess no perceptual faculties to ground this sort of representational capacity. Moreover, on Prinz’s view, mental representations are, to a large extent, best understood in terms of their

capacity to facilitate categorization, and although words in public languages have the capacity to represent, they must be interpreted in order to facilitate categorization because they are arbitrary symbols (cf., Prinz 2005) If there is nowhere to locate interactions between the mental representations and properties, and if the most promising sorts of collective representations don’t seem to facilitate categorization, it looks like this theory is out as well.

Finally, Rupert (2005, 14ms) turns to what he calls ‘teleo-isomorphic’ theories that ground mental representation in an isomorphism between the structural properties of the representation and the thing represented (cf., Cummins 1996). On this view:

A mental representation MR represents a property P iff the structure of MR is isomorphic to the structure of P and it is the function of the portion of the cognitive system in which MR occurs to represent P.

Again, according to Rupert, the most promising way to utilize this theory in defending collective representation would be to look of the relevant sort of isomorphism between public language structures such as a press release or a court’s opinion that are supposed to play the role of representations and the things that are meant to be represented. However, although

The ink marks that constitute a court’s decision are, taken as an entire structure, isomorphic to some other structures, but we have no reason to think that the abstract structures the decision is about—abstract conceptual structures, typically—will be among those things structurally mirrored by the arrangement of ink on page. (Rupert 2005, 15), 3)

Moreover, the sorts of worries that arise in the case of teleological theories of mental representation once again arise in this case. After all, even if we find the right sorts of functions in place in a collectivity, it seems as though “our best account of why those parts have those functions adverts in a straightforward way to the mental states of individuals” (Rupert 2005, 15-16ms).

Having canvassed all of the most promising accounts of mental representation, and having argued that none of these are applicable in the case of collective representation, Rupert claims that there is a significant hurdle faced by any proponent of collective mentality. If there is to be a viable account of collective mentality, then there will have to be some account of how a collectivity could have the right sorts of representational states. Rupert, much like Weber, contends that there is no obvious way to apply the tools of individual psychology to collective states; Rupert thus voices his skepticism about collective mentality.