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LIT-736: Shaping the Institutional Mind

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-570): in full, from the publisher's open-access PDF (CC BY 4.0). Worth reading for a different answer to why we ascribe beliefs and knowledge to institutions: not because the ascriptions describe pre-existing states, but because, on the regulative view of folk psychology, they shape institutions to be more agent-like. Its main case is the collective knowledge doctrine in corporate criminal law, after which banks built systems to detect reporting violations. Limits: the regulative view is assumed, not argued; the causal story about banks is asserted without evidence; and the paper is agnostic about whether institutions have minds. It does not stand in for her book Groups as Agents (LIT-483), which stays unread.
Tagssocial-ontology, cognition, society-and-governance
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-570 — Shaping the Institutional Mind
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-137 — Attributions of mental states to institutions, such as the knowledge that the collective knowledge doctrine of corporate criminal law attributes to a corporation no member of which held it, work largely by shaping the institutions to which they are made rather than by describing states they already had: the attribution holds the institution to a norm, the institution builds structures to meet it, and it becomes more predictable from the intentional stance, whether or not institutions really have minds

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Deborah Tollefsen (2025), “Shaping the Institutional Mind”, Philosophies 10(5):112 — DOI-10.3390/philosophies10050112

Key takeaways

  • The question (§1). Attributing knowledge and belief to institutions is “extremely useful and ubiquitous”. Fictionalism leaves its usefulness unexplained.
  • The shared error (§§1–2). Summativists, functionalists such as List and Pettit, and critics of group minds all hold McGeer’s “standard view”: ascription is causal explanation of pre-existing internal states.
  • The regulative view (§3). After McGeer, Zawidzki and Andrews, folk psychology is “mind-making rather than mind detecting”. Telling a friend that one intends to go to the gym is a commitment, not a report. Extending it to institutions means “We are shaping them to be more and more agent-like.” The view is assumed: “I do not have space to argue” for it.
  • Corporate criminal law (§4.1). Under respondeat superior a corporation could escape conviction by dispersing knowledge. Under the collective knowledge doctrine in United States v. Bank of New England, “no individual human being knew that p, but, according to the courts, the bank was said to know that p”. Banks then built software, rules and training to detect reportable deposits. “The courts were not identifying a pre-existing mental state”.
  • Institutional narratives (§4.2). A narrative “sets up expectations for its behavior moving forward”. Philip Morris’s 1999 repositioning and public counter-narratives both regulate.
  • Agnosticism (§5). Groups as Agents argued, on interpretivism, that organizations are agents. This paper “can, however, remain agnostic” about institutional minds: what is regulated may be only individual behaviour.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-05 at the owner’s request, as the lawful text beside Groups as Agents (LIT-483). The book stays Deferred: §5 restates its interpretivism in a paragraph, and its chapter 6 on moral responsibility is not covered at all. The account is THEORY-137.

It is a different kind of claim from the record’s group-agency accounts. THEORY-127 and THEORY-139 say what is true of group agents; this paper says why the attributions work, and leaves the reality question open. Tollefsen classes List and Pettit’s functionalism under the standard view she rejects.

For the owner’s essay, it bears most on §8.4, externalized governance: a court’s attribution of knowledge changed the internal structure of the institutions it was attributed to. It also bears on §7.1, where a corporation’s self-ascription in a narrative works as a commitment.

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