Source
Christian List and Philip Pettit (2012), “Episteme Symposium on Group Agency: Replies to Gaus, Cariani, Sylvan, and Briggs”, Episteme 9(3):293–309, LIT-730, read in full in NOTE-582 from the authors’ typescript. Page numbers are the typescript’s. Group Agency (LIT-391) is unread; its pages (“GA”) are quoted from the replies. The four commentaries were not read.
What was actually shown
The reply to Sylvan (pp. 10–14).
- Role-based acceptance is members treating a proposition as true for group purposes, by assenting in the group’s name or acting on it in an executive role (p. 12). It is necessary for every group belief.
- It does not explain the group belief: “it is the group belief that explains the role-based member acceptance, not the role-based member acceptance that explains the group belief” (p. 13). Knowing which members’ acceptance counts, and that the structure lets the putative belief play the role of belief, already requires the group-level view.
- No “plausible, accessible recipe” renders group agents redundant (p. 14). Non-redundancy is a matter of degree, and the theory lies toward the non-redundant end (citing GA 77–78).
- Executive members must act on the group’s propositions but “need not personally assent to it” (p. 12). Workable group agents “allow any proposition, however long endorsed, to be rejected on grounds of inconsistency” (pp. 11–12).
What the agential view adds. It lets us “see higher-level regularities” and respond “in abstraction from much of what happens at the lower level” (GA 6, quoted p. 10).
What could have come out otherwise. Sylvan’s challenge was that a recipe from member acceptance makes the group posit dispensable. The reply could have conceded a recipe for some class of group. It concedes only that redundancy comes in degrees.
What this does not say
- That a recipe has been shown impossible. The claim is that no plausible, accessible one exists. That is argued against one commentator in a reply (NOTE-582, C3 moderate), not proved.
- That any group agent exists. The book’s argument omits the empirical premise that collections form and act on robustly rational attitudes, which it “mostly take[s] for granted” (GA 75, quoted p. 14; C6 weak).
- That joint intention is analysed. An acceptable account of it is presupposed, not supplied (p. 13).
- That group attitudes are felt. The authors are agnostic about hedonic group states (p. 16). Functionalism is assumed throughout (p. 5).
- That the group’s attitudes fail to supervene on members. THEORY-127 says group judgments supervene on members’ whole sets of judgments. Non-redundancy is a claim about explanation and accessibility, compatible with that supervenience.
- That the premise-based procedure is the model. It is “merely a particularly simple – but also rather inflexible – instance” (p. 1).
Connections
- QUESTION-009 asks when a pattern of coordination constitutes an additional agent. This gives a partial answer of one kind: when the group-level description is needed to say which members’ states count, so that no accessible individual-level recipe replaces it. It does not say what organisation produces that.
- THEORY-131 (French) reaches a similar conclusion, a non-eliminable corporate agent, from a corporate decision structure that licenses redescription. The two are close and neither cites the other here.
- THEORY-127 is the formal result on group judgment from LIT-705, the same authors. These replies add, on the authors’ word, that relaxing robust rationality leaves proposition-wise rules “extremely limited” (p. 4).
- THEORY-139 (Pettit, corporate responsibility) gets the book’s verdict through these replies: group agents are fit to be held responsible “in their own right”, with restricted rights (GA 182, quoted p. 16).
- THEORY-137 holds that attributions to institutions largely shape them. Executive members acting on a group belief they do not hold (p. 12) is the kind of case where tracking and shaping would have to be told apart (QUESTION-049).
- Ritchie (THEORY-575). The groups at issue are organized social groups in her sense.