Contribution
It moves the question about institutional minds from metaphysics to the function of the practice. Instead of asking whether institutions have beliefs, it asks why ascribing them works, and answers with the mind-shaping literature: ascription regulates.
Key insight
The explanatory success of treating an institution as an agent need not show that it was one beforehand. Attribution can be what makes it behave as one: a court that says a bank “knew” what its tellers jointly knew gives banks a reason to build the machinery that would make the attribution true next time.
Assumptions
- The regulative view of folk psychology (McGeer, Zawidzki, Andrews), assumed, not argued: “I do not have space to argue for the Regulatory View of Folk Psychology here” (p. 5).
- “Institution” and “organization” are used interchangeably for “highly structured groups with decision-making mechanisms” whose identity survives changes of membership (n. 1).
- Narrative is “a special form of folk psychology” (p. 8).
Key results
- Three opening cases of institutional attribution: the Brown and Williamson tobacco documents, the 9/11 Commission’s “The FBI lacked the ability to know what it knew”, and California’s Proposition 65 warning (pp. 1–2).
- A diagnosis: fictionalists, identity theorists (Quinton’s summativism) and functionalists (List and Pettit) all treat ascription as tracking causal antecedents (pp. 2–4).
- The collective knowledge doctrine replacing respondeat superior, and its effect on banks (pp. 6–7).
- Narratives and counter-narratives as regulators, with Philip Morris’s “Working to make a difference” programme (pp. 7–8).
- A restatement of Groups as Agents: attitudes are “dispositional states of whole systems”, ascribed under norms of rationality (p. 8).
- Agnosticism about institutional minds (p. 9).
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Both sides of the group-mind debate share the standard view of folk psychology | moderate | survey of positions, pp. 2–4 |
| C2 | Ascribing attitudes to institutions shapes them to be more agent-like | moderate | assumes the regulative view; two illustrative cases |
| C3 | The collective knowledge doctrine changed banks’ structure and conduct | weak | asserted (“Most banks now track deposits via computer software”); no source cited |
| C4 | Institutional narratives and counter-narratives regulate institutions | weak | one corporate example; mechanism described, not measured |
| C5 | The account holds whether or not institutions really have minds | moderate | argued as a scope restriction, p. 9 |
Concepts
- standard view — ascription as quasi-scientific tracking of pre-existing, internal causes of behaviour (McGeer; p. 2).
- regulative view / mind shaping — ascription as an interpersonal, norm-governed practice that constructs as well as detects the states it ascribes (p. 4).
- intentional spiral — Andrews’s name for the feedback of successful and failed predictions on future conduct (p. 5).
- collective knowledge doctrine — corporate criminal law’s attribution to a corporation of what its employees know collectively, including what that knowledge entails (pp. 6–7).
- respondeat superior — “let the master answer”: the employer is attributed an employee’s acts and knowledge (p. 6).
Connections
It builds on McGeer, Zawidzki and Andrews, and on Hacking’s looping effects; none is in the record. It cites Dennett’s The Intentional Stance (LIT-430, unread) for the stance the shaping aims at, and List and Pettit’s Group Agency (LIT-391, unread) as the functionalism it diagnoses. It restates the author’s Groups as Agents (LIT-483, unread).
Bearing on the record
Source of THEORY-137.
- THEORY-139 (Pettit). Pettit makes a corporation’s attitudes its own through authorised avowal and commitment; Tollefsen’s narrative is a public self-ascription that “sets up expectations” in the same way. The difference is the claim made: Pettit’s is that the corporation thereby has a mind and is fit to be held responsible; Tollefsen’s is only that the self-ascription regulates, whatever the metaphysics. They are compatible, and no relation is declared.
- THEORY-127 (List and Pettit). Tollefsen does not dispute their result; she classes their functionalism under the standard view, whose aim she says is detection. The bank case is a group judgment, “the bank was said to know that p”, that no member held, fixed from outside by a court rather than by the group’s own procedure.
For the owner’s essay:
- §8.4, externalized governance. The bank case is a court supplying the norm, and the institution building internal compliance and training to meet it. Tollefsen’s account says the external attribution came first and the internal capacity followed.
- §7.1, corporate endorsement. A corporate narrative, like a first person’s avowed intention, “has the status of a commitment rather than a report” (p. 5, said of the individual case). That gives endorsement a regulative reading without a higher-order corporate attitude.
- §5.2, declared vs effective commitments (the record’s link). Philip Morris’s narrative of “a responsible corporation” alongside its product is a declared commitment whose effective counterpart was contested by counter-narratives (pp. 7–8). Tollefsen does not use the essay’s terms.
Limitations
The regulative view is assumed. The claim that the ruling caused banks’ compliance systems is asserted without data or citation. The court sentence quoted for the Bank of New England case carries reference [25], United States v. T.I.M.E.-D.C., Inc. (W.D. Va. 1974), not [24], the Bank of New England decision; the record has not checked which court wrote it. Moral responsibility, the subject of the book’s chapter 6, is not treated.
Open questions
How to tell shaping from detection in a given case: what an institution would look like if an attribution had described it rather than shaped it. What “take control of the intentional spiral” (p. 9) would require in practice.