Deborah Tollefsen

While mainstream epistemology has recently turned its focus on individual know-how (e.g., knowing-how to swim, ride a bike, play chess, etc.), there is very little, if any, work on group know-how (e.g., sports-team performance, jazz improvisation, knowing-how to tango, etc.). This chapter attempts to fill the gap in the existing literature by exploring the relevant philosophical terrain. It starts by surveying recent debates on individual knowledge-how and argues that group know-how (G-KH) cannot always be reduced to individual knowledge-how. Rather, certain cases of G-KH call for a non-reductive analysis. A natural place to look for a theory of irreducible G-KH is the literature on joint intentionality and distributed cognition. First, the chapter explores what a joint intentionality approach to G-KH might look like. Then it considers an alternative approach that views G-KH as a form of distributed cognition. Finally, the chapter discusses a potential link between the two approaches.

According to many philosophers working on collective intentionality, there is a “jointness” or “we-ness” that accounts for the different flavor of certain social interactions. This chapter argues that experimental philosophy provides a useful method for gauging ordinary people’s intuitions about the concept of joint action, and that doing so provides some empirical support for philosophical theories that appeal to primitive concepts of “we-ness” or “jointness.” In order to explore people’s intuitions about joint actions, the studies behind this chapter used multidimensional scaling to identify underlying dimensions that affect how people think about shared intention and jointness. The results support the intuition that jointness plays a role in the conception of activities.

This chapter introduces a new theory of collective intentions that focuses on the dynamic process of maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action. The chapter draws on empirical findings from cognitive science concerning the way in which individuals maintain control over their bodily actions over time. The chapter's ambition is to explicate the dynamics of collective action in considerable detail in a way that is less cognitively demanding than rival theories. It argues that a dynamic theory of collective intention serves to improve our understanding of the phenomenology of collective action and the experience of joint control.

Mind shaping is a concept in philosophy and cognitive science that explores how social and cultural interactions influence the development of individual minds. Rather than viewing cognition as a strictly internal or individual process, the literature on mind shaping emphasizes the profound role of external, interpersonal, and societal factors in shaping mental capacities, beliefs, and behaviors. In this paper, I bring the discussion of mind shaping to bear on discussions of mental state ascription to groups.

Given the importance of scientific research in shaping our perception of the world, and our senses of what policies will and won’t succeed in altering that world, it is of great practical, political, and moral importance that we carry out scientific research with integrity. The phenomenon of scientific fraud stands in the way of that, as scientists may knowingly enter claims they take to be false into the scientific literature, often knowingly doing so in defiance of norms they profess allegiance to. In this chapter we take a look at some of the causes of scientific fraud, and how it might be manifested in large-scale research teams and situations of anonymous authorship. We find that such cases make trouble for what might seem like intuitive answers to the question “who should be held responsible for this fraud?”, and we argue that in such cases it would be better to hold the entire community responsible for seeing to it that there is less fraud.

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility comprehensively addresses questions about who is responsible and how blame or praise should be attributed when human agents act together. Such questions include: Do individuals share responsibility for the outcome or are individuals responsible only for their contribution to the act? Are individuals responsible for actions done by their group even when they don't contribute to the outcome? Can a corporation or institution be held morally responsible apart from the responsibility of its members? The Handbook's 35 chapters--all appearing here for the first time and written by an international team of experts--are organized into four parts: Part I: Foundations of Collective Responsibility Part II: Theoretical Issues in Collective Responsibility Part III: Domains of Collective Responsibility Part IV: Applied Issues in Collective Responsibility Each part begins with a short introduction that provides an overview of issues and debates within that area and a brief summary of its chapters. In addition, a comprehensive index allows readers to better navigate the entirety of the volume's contents. The result is the first major work in the field that serves as an instructional aid for those in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, as well as a reference for scholars interested in learning more about collective responsibility.

Narrative is rarely mentioned in philosophical discussions of collective intentionality and group identity despite the fact that narratives are often thought important for the formation of action intentions and self-identity in individuals. We argue that the concept of the ‘we-narrative’ can solve several problems in regard to defining the status of the we. It provides the typical format for the attribution of joint agency; it contributes to the formation of group identity; and it generates group stability.

The basic approach to understanding shared agency has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for different reasons, what binds them to one another such that they have some reason for continuing to participate in the joint action in the face of conflicting reasons? This is particularly pressing in cases of joint actions that unfold over long periods of time. There are a variety of ways that the problem of stability and depth of shared intention might be addressed. We review some of those ways in section 1. We do not intend to challenge these approaches. Instead, in this article, we want to suggest that narrative is an additional, perhaps in some cases a predominant, way in which stability and depth are achieved. According to some theories, narrative plays a crucial role in the development of the self. Our suggestion is that the narratives we tell about our joint projects contribute to the development of a stable and deep “we.”

Although there have been a number of recent discussions about the emotions that we bring with us to our epistemic endeavors, there has been little, if any, discussion of the emotions we bring with us to epistemic appraisal. This paper focuses on a particular set of emotions, the reactive attitudes. As Peter F. Strawson and others have argued, our reactive attitudes reveal something deep about our moral commitments. A similar argument can be made within the domain of epistemology. Our "epistemic reactive attitudes" reveal our epistemic commitments. Reflection on the role they play in our practice of epistemic appraisal can contribute to a number of different debates in contemporary epistemology, including the nature of epistemic norms and epistemic responsibility.

The debate surrounding the issue of collective moral responsibility is often steeped in metaphysical issues of agency and personhood. I suggest that we can approach the metaphysical problems surrounding the issue of collective responsibility in a roundabout manner. My approach is reminiscent of that taken by P.F. Strawson in “Freedom and Resentment” (1968). Strawson argues that the participant reactive attitudes – attitudes like resentment, gratitude, forgiveness and so on – provide the justification for holding individuals morally responsible. I argue that the framework of the reactive attitudes extends to collectives and provides the justification for holding collectives morally responsible.

InEpistemic InjusticeMiranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in his or her capacity as a knower. Fricker's examples of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit primarily involve gender, race, and class, in which individuals are given less credibility due to prejudicial stereotypes. We argue that children, as a class, are also subject to testimonial injustice and receive less epistemic credibility than they deserve. To illustrate the prevalence of testimonial injustice against children we document examples of negative prejudicial treatment in forensic contexts where children frequently act as testifiers. These examples, along with research on the child's competence and reliability as a testifier, reveal widespread epistemic prejudice against children. Given that subjection to prejudice can have a detrimental impact on children we discuss ways to ameliorate this form of testimonial injustice. We argue that, both in formal and natural contexts, the child's testimony should be evaluated alongside the relationships that support (or fail to support) her development as a testifier. The adult can play a central role in creating successful testimonial interactions with children by acting as a “responsible hearer.”

In the social sciences and in everyday speech we often talk about groups as if they behaved in the same way as individuals, thinking and acting as a singular being. We say for example that "Google intends to develop an automated car", "the U.S. Government believes that Syria has used chemical weapons on its people", or that "the NRA wants to protect the rights of gun owners". We also often ascribe legal and moral responsibility to groups. But could groups literally intend things? Is there such a thing as a collective mind? If so, should groups be held morally responsible? Such questions are of vital importance to our understanding of the social world. In this lively, engaging introduction Deborah Tollefsen offers a careful survey of contemporary philosophers? answers to these questions, and argues for the unorthodox view that certain groups should, indeed, be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable. Tollefsen explores the nature of belief, action and intention, and shows the reader how a belief in group agency can be reconciled with our understanding of individual agency and accountability. _Groups as Agents_ will be a vital resource for scholars as well as for students of philosophy and the social sciences encountering the topic for the first time

In everyday discourse we often attribute intentional states to groups. These attributions are found not only in colloquial speech but also in the context of legal, moral, and social scientific research. Contemporary accounts of group intentionality have attempted to analyze these ascriptions in terms of the intentional states of individuals in the group. Although these accounts acknowledge that group intentional ascriptions are something more than mere metaphors, they do not typically acknowledge groups as genuine intentional agents. I challenge these contemporary accounts and individualistic intuitions by arguing that, given a plausible account of the nature of intentionality, certain groups are genuine intentional agents. ;Focusing on the work of Gilbert, Tuomela, Searle, and Bratman, I argue that there are significant explanatory reasons for countenancing groups as legitimate intentional agents, reasons that require that we reject the individualism to which each of these authors is committed. My account of collective intentional agency is grounded in interpretationism. Interpretationism is the view an agent is an intentional agent if and only if he or she is interpretable. I defend interpretationism by building on the work of Davidson and Dennett. In particular, I develop more fully the notion of a rational point of view and argue that an adequate interpretationism must accommodate it. A rational point of view is not simply a point of view from which one's own actions can be seen as intelligible, it is a point of view from which an agent engages in deliberation and it is a locus of authority and responsibility. I argue that organizations have a rational point of view and are, therefore, interpretable. Thus, organizations are genuine intentional agents. ;If groups can be believers, then group knowledge and justification are coherent notions. There is a pervasive individualistic bias in contemporary epistemology, however, that rejects the idea of group knowledge and justification. This bias is largely motivated by the assumption that cognition is a process that takes place only within the individual mind/brain. I challenge this bias by showing how the standard models of individual cognition and epistemic agency can be extended to groups.

Contemporary analytic epistemology exhibits an individualistic bias. The standard analyses of knowledge found in current epistemological discussions assume that the only epistemic agents worthy of philosophical consideration are individual cognizers. The idea that collectives could be genuine knowers has received little, if any, serious consideration. This individualistic bias seems to be motivated by the view that epistemology is about things that go on inside the head. In this paper I challenge this type of epistemic individualism by arguing that certain groups are intentional agents and that cognition occurs at the level of groups. In section I, I extend a plausible and well-defended account of individual intentionality to organizations. In section II, I appeal to research on distributed cognition in order to challenge the view that cognition occurs exclusively in the individual mind-brain. Having established that groups can be believers and cognizers, I turn to the issue of the justification of group belief. In section III, consider whether a reliabilist account of justification can be extended to groups.

There is a small, but growing, number of philosophers who acknowledge the existence of plural subjects – collective agents that act in the world and are the appropriate subject of intentional state ascriptions. Among those who believe in collective agency, there are some who wish to limit the types of intentional state ascriptions that can be made to collectives. According to rejectionists, although groups can accept propositions, they cannot believe them. In this paper I argue that, given the centrality of belief and the similarities between individual belief and collective attitudes, we ought to reject rejectionism. If one believes in collective agency, one must also believe in collective belief.

The debate surrounding the issue of collective moral responsibility is often steeped in metaphysical issues of agency and personhood. I suggest that we can approach the metaphysical problems surrounding the issue of collective responsibility in a roundabout manner. My approach is reminiscent of that taken by P.F. Strawson in "Freedom and Resentment" (1968). Strawson argues that the participant reactive attitudes - attitudes like resentment, gratitude, forgiveness and so on - provide the justification for holding individuals morally responsible. I argue that the framework of the reactive attitudes extends to collectives and provides the justification for holding collectives morally responsible.