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LIT-700: Three kinds of collective attitudes

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Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-554); worth reading as the disambiguation the collective-attitudes literature needs: aggregate attitudes (summaries, supervening proposition by proposition), common attitudes (unanimous and commonly known, supervening on a slightly enriched base) and corporate attitudes (a group agent's, supervening holistically and not straightforwardly reducible). The three are almost logically independent. A review by its own description, with no new theorem; its value for this record is that it names fears and hopes among the attitudes the split applies to, which gives the collective-emotion debate a vocabulary.
Tagssocial-ontology, agency, social-science, game-theory, metaphysics
ExtendsLIT-705 — Group Agency and Supervenience
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-554 — List — Three kinds of collective attitudes
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-127 — On the court agenda, and on any agenda in which every proposition reaches every other by conditional entailment and some minimally inconsistent triple stays consistent with two of its members negated, a group whose judgments are robustly rational under universal domain and respect unanimity cannot form its judgment on each proposition from its members' judgments on that proposition alone unless one member dictates; its judgments must supervene on the members' whole sets of judgments, and so can depart from what the members judge on the same proposition while being wholly fixed by them

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Christian List (2014), Erkenntnis 79(S9):1601–1622 (online 6 May 2014) — DOI-10.1007/s10670-014-9631-z

Key takeaways

  • Three kinds, not one. “The electorate prefers”, “the scientists think” and “the Court holds” ascribe different things. An aggregate attitude is a summary of members’ attitudes by some rule or market. A common attitude is one every member holds, with common awareness of that. A corporate attitude is held by the collective as an intentional agent.
  • They differ in reducibility, role and rationality (Table 2). Aggregate and common attitudes are “straightforwardly reducible” and need no group agent. Aggregate ones play at most an indirect role and need not be consistent. Common ones glue coordination and are consistent if members are. Corporate ones guide a group agent’s action, presuppose rationality, and supervene “holistically”, not proposition by proposition.
  • They are almost independent. A corporate attitude need not be any member’s or be commonly known: a state’s intelligence services can give it attitudes “that have never crossed the minds of most citizens” (§5). A falsely attributed common attitude need not match the aggregate one, which is how pluralistic ignorance keeps a hated regime or a harmful norm in place (§3.6).

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-04 at the owner’s request, with List and Pettit’s “Group Agency and Supervenience” (LIT-705), as the lawful List–Pettit material standing in for the unread book Group Agency (LIT-391). The book is cited throughout for the definition of a group agent and for the supervenience results. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.

Carries further LIT-705, declared extends. The paper’s split between aggregate and corporate attitudes is the 2006 paper’s split between proposition-wise and set-wise supervenience, given a name and a role. List cites the 2006 paper and the book for proposition-wise supervenience (§2.5) and for the impossibility result that rules it out for group agents (§4.4). The “holistic supervenience” of §4.4 is the 2006 paper’s set-wise supervenience, widened to include members’ non-attitudinal contributions. The paper could not stand without that result: it is what makes corporate attitudes a third kind rather than a well-behaved aggregate.

What it gives the collective-emotion debate. List says the split applies to “aggregate fears and hopes, common fears and hopes, and corporate fears and hopes” (§1) and goes no further. The three accounts the owner asked about fall into its kinds differently.

  • Gilbert’s plural subjects (LIT-701, unread; her 1989 book LIT-492) are, List says, “more akin” to corporate attitudes, though he doubts plural subjects are needed to explain coordination (§3.4). On that reading Gilbert’s collective guilt feelings would be corporate emotions without a group agent’s full rational structure.
  • Huebner’s “genuinely collective” emotions (LIT-702) are by definition not aggregate, and his integration criterion is a functionalist one like List’s definition of a group agent (§4.2). They are corporate emotions. Huebner’s “holistic” emotions, members’ emotions shaped by their group, are aggregate or common ones.
  • Schmid’s chapter (LIT-697, unread) is titled for “corporate emotions”, but by its abstract it grounds them in plural pre-reflective self-awareness, a “we-mode” account. List sets we-mode attitudes aside as not yet needed in the social sciences (§3.4).
  • The psychology filed alongside this batch, von Scheve and Ismer (LIT-696) and Barsade (LIT-706), defines collective emotion as convergence of members’ affect. In this taxonomy that is an aggregate attitude, or a common one when members are mutually aware. It is not a corporate attitude.

No relation to these is declared: List does not discuss emotion beyond the one sentence, and the placements are the record’s.

Other neighbours. Searle’s we-intentions (LIT-490, unread; LIT-482 read) and Gilbert’s plural subjects are the two “non-reductionistic” accounts of common attitudes that §3.4 contrasts with its own. List’s common attitudes, Lewis-style common knowledge, are what the game-theory holdings call the basis of convention. List’s 2016 paper (LIT-401) uses the corporate-attitude notion to ask whether group agents are conscious.

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