Source
Tollefsen (2025), LIT-736, read in full in NOTE-570. Her book Groups as Agents (LIT-483) is unread.
What was actually shown
Tollefsen (LIT-736) argues it in a short paper, in three steps.
- A shared assumption. Fictionalists, summativists and functionalists about group attitudes all treat folk psychology as causal explanation of pre-existing states (pp. 2–4). That leaves the usefulness of institutional attributions unexplained for the fictionalist, and makes their truth depend on a metaphysics of group minds for the others.
- A different function. On the regulative view (McGeer, Zawidzki, Andrews), ascription is a norm-governed practice that makes its targets more predictable by shaping them. Extended to institutions, “We are shaping them to be more and more agent-like” (p. 5). The view is assumed, not defended (p. 5).
- Two illustrations. In United States v. Bank of New England, three tellers each handled checks under the reporting threshold and a supervisor knew the rule; no one knew both, yet the bank was held to know. Tollefsen reports that banks then installed software, compliance procedures and training, so that “The attribution of knowledge, in this case, produced a reliable process by which the institution can identify violations of the rule” (p. 7). Corporate narratives and public counter-narratives likewise set expectations that shape later conduct (pp. 7–8).
What this does not say
- Not that institutions lack minds. The paper “can, however, remain agnostic” (p. 9); what is regulated may be only individual behaviour. Her earlier book argued, on interpretivism, that organizations are agents (p. 8).
- Not that all attribution is shaping. “Largely” is the record’s word for the paper’s claim about the practice’s primary aim; detection is not denied.
- Not that shaping is good. Philip Morris’s narrative shaped the firm in its own interest, and the shaping of minds by law and narrative “is not always a positive thing” (p. 9).
- Not documented. No evidence is given that the ruling caused the banks’ systems. The court sentence quoted for the case is referenced to a 1974 district court decision, not the Bank of New England appeal; the record has not checked it.
- Not a theory of moral responsibility. Responsibility enters only as legal liability.
Connections
- THEORY-139 (Pettit). Pettit grounds a corporation’s mind in its authorised avowals and their corrective procedures, and argues it is fit to be held responsible. Tollefsen’s self-ascribed narrative is an avowal that regulates, with no claim about a mind behind it. The two can both be true, and her account would explain how holding a corporation responsible could build the capacities Pettit’s argument says it can give itself. No relation is declared: neither text discusses the other.
- THEORY-127 (List and Pettit). Not disputed. Tollefsen classes their functionalism as aiming at detection. In the bank case the group judgment comes from a court applying a doctrine, not from the group’s own aggregation procedure.
- The owner’s essay. §8.4’s externalized governance has a worked case here: an external attribution produced internal truth-tracking. §7.1 can read corporate endorsement as commitment by self-ascription. The paper’s hope to “take control of the intentional spiral” (p. 9) is close to the essay’s recursive self-governance (§8.3), though Tollefsen gives no mechanism for it.
Note of 2026-10-29: what holds it back
Its promote_when is unmet: the paper assumes the regulative view rather than defending it, and asserts without documenting that banks built compliance systems because of the Bank of New England ruling; no comparative case has been read in which an institution attributed a state it lacked then built the structure that made the attribution true, beyond what the penalty alone explains. It could be narrowed to what Tollefsen argues, keeping the wide form as a Proposed THEORY under ADR-047’s kind 1, if a claim comes to need only that.