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Co‐Subjective Consciousness Constitutes Collectives

2018; Wiley; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/josp.12228

1467-9833

Michael Schmitz,

Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics

Journal of Social PhilosophyVolume 49, Issue 1 p. 137-160 Original ArticleOpen Access Co-Subjective Consciousness Constitutes Collectives Michael Schmitz, Michael SchmitzSearch for more papers by this author Michael Schmitz, Michael SchmitzSearch for more papers by this author First published: 06 April 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12228Citations: 7AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat 1 Introduction In this article, I introduce and defend what I call the "subject mode account" of collective intentionality. I propose to understand collectives from joint attention dyads over small informal groups of various types to organizations, institutions and political entities such as nation-states, in terms of their self-awareness. On the subject mode account, the self-consciousness of such collectives is constitutive for their being. More precisely, their self-representation as subjects of joint theoretical and practical positions toward the world—rather than as objects of such positions—makes them what they are. Members of such collectives represent each other as co-subjects of such positions and thus represent the world from the point of view of the collective. I will try to show how this account applies at different levels of collective intentionality and how it is preferable to its rivals at each level. At the preconceptual level of joint attention and action, our co-attenders are not what we attend to. They are not the objects of attention, but rather who we attend with. Analogously, at the conceptual level of joint beliefs, intentions, desires, and so on, collectivity is not a matter of what we believe about others and what we intend with regard to them, but who we believe and intend things with. Finally, at the institutional or organizational level, where individuals and groups function in formal roles such as being a manager or a committee, these roles do not, as some philosophers, notably John Searle (1995, 2010), have suggested, exist because people believe that they exist. The primary, collective-constituting intentional phenomena are not beliefs about these roles, but people viewing the world from the vantage point of these roles—and other roles defined relative to them—in a self-aware way, in what I will call "role mode." For example, a head of a corporation may be aware of giving an order as chairwoman, or committee members of making a recommendation as a committee. It has become standard to distinguish three main philosophical approaches to collective intentionality: content, subject, and mode approaches (Schweikard and Schmid 2013). According to the content approach, collective intentionality can be understood in terms of the content of intentional states, where that content, in the context of the received understanding of propositional attitudes, is taken to be what is believed, intended, and so on. On this perspective, the best-known representative of which is Michael Bratman (1992, 2014), the we of joint action is represented in the content of intentions, but these intentions are always of the form "I intend that we J," so that no collective we-subject of intentional states is represented. According to Bratman, at least small scale cooperative activity can be understood without appealing to we-subjects. At the opposite end of the spectrum we find those who, like Margaret Gilbert (1989) and Hans Bernhard Schmid (2009), unabashedly embrace the notion of collective, plural subjects. According to Gilbert, committing to go for a walk together is already sufficient to create a subject that is irreducibly plural. The we-mode approach is most closely associated with the work of Raimo Tuomela (e.g., 2013), but Searle, even though he does not himself use the term "we-mode," can also be seen as one of its champions.1 Searle holds that we-intentionality is conceptually irreducible to I-intentionality, but that it can be entirely located in the minds (and heads) of individuals, and that these individuals—and only these individuals—are the logical subjects of this intentionality. So Searle rejects both Bratmanian conceptual reduction and ontologically irreducible collective subjects, which he and many others take to be ontologically mysterious. There is a sense in which the present proposal synthesizes elements of all these approaches. With the mode approach it holds that collective intentionality should be understood in terms of people displaying characteristic and irreducible forms of group mindedness such as the we-mode. But it proposes to understand this group mindedness itself in representational terms and at least in part as a representation of the subject. It, therefore—in a sense—also agrees with the content approach that collective intentionality can be explained in terms of content. But I will argue that we need to extend the notion of content beyond what subjects believe, intend, and so on, to include content representing the subject—subject mode content—and its position such as intending or believing—position mode content. Finally, with the subject approach it embraces the reality and irreducibility of collective subjects. But at the same time it tries to explain and demystify these subjects in terms of mode representation. I will show that, properly understood, collective subjects are not mysterious, or free-floating relative to individuals. They just are individuals as related in certain ways—by being aware of one another as co-subjects of positions toward objects, including states of affairs, facts or goals, in the world. And these relations are intentional relations that obtain in virtue of intentional contents in the co-subjects' minds. The big puzzle for the subject mode account is as follows: How can ontologically real collective subjects be constituted or created by representation? Isn't that like magic? Now, the thought that social entities may be created or constructed through representation, that, for example, a certain piece of paper constitutes a dollar bill because it is believed to have a certain function (Searle 1995), is well-established in current debates. Most contemporary approaches to social ontology agree that social kinds and collectives exist in virtue of the intentionality of subjects (but see Epstein 2015). They think of intentionality as being constitutive for collectivity. But at the same time, many do not think of the relevant intentionality as the self-awareness of ontologically real subjects. This is true in particular of the mode approaches of Searle and Tuomela, but it also applies to others like Schmid's (e.g., 2014) version of the subject account in terms of plural pre-reflective self-awareness. Searle does not believe that there are collective subjects at all. Tuomela thinks group agents are mere fictitious creations, with merely derived intentionality, of the ontologically real subjects, flesh-and-blood individuals with intrinsic intentionality. Schmid identifies collective subjects with plural self-awareness. He says (with reference to my (Schmitz 2017) version of the mode account) that "what is called a mode here is really the subject," and that "self-awareness is the subject" (both quotes are from Schmid 2017; both italics are his). In a similar vein, Björn Petersson (2017) defends the irreducibility of a we-perspective, but explicitly rejects the idea that this we-perspective could be understood as the representation of an ontologically real subject. And again, it is easy to sympathize with this kind of move when one confronts the apparent difficulty of making sense of the idea that one could create an ontologically real subject by being aware of it. Still, I will try to show in this article that the sense of mystery surrounding this idea can be dispelled, and that on reflection it is actually easier to make sense of the widely accepted constitutive role of intentionality for collectives, if this intentionality is self-awareness, awareness of the collective as a subject rather than as an object. To make this plausible, the following points are crucial. First, let me clarify what the relevant subjects are, beginning with the individual case. It is essential to my view that individual subjects are flesh-and-blood creatures, not purely mental selves or anything of this kind. Whether it makes sense to speak of such selves or not, they are not my topic here, but the self-awareness of flesh-and-blood creatures. Accordingly, collective subjects comprise such flesh-and-blood individuals as related in certain ways. Both individuals and collectives are essentially subjects of both mental and physical attributes, but as such straddle these categories. So even though the self-awareness of these subjects is essential to what they are, neither people, nor corporations or other collectives are as such purely mental or purely physical entities. The second step is to see that a subject can evolve, can become a new kind of subject, by taking up new attitudes, new positions toward the world, in a self-aware way. Again consider the individual case first. Based on its preconceptual actional and perceptual experience and its sense of itself as a spatially located and spatially extended creature, a child will at some point take its self-understanding to a new level by starting to say "I," by beginning to report its memories and to construct a narrative of its life, a self-image, and so on. The child existed before, it was even self-aware before, but it is still transformed by this capacity for a new kind of self-awareness. By representing itself and its position in the world in new ways, it simultaneously grows into a new kind of being, it becomes a person. Analogously, by becoming more and more sensitive to others in sensory-motor-emotional interactions, by experiencing and thus representing them as like us and as sharing and doing things with us, we become their co-attenders and co-actors, form joint attention and joint action units. Then, after starting to say "we," we begin constructing a shared narrative, negotiating joint beliefs, values and plans and committing to them, and so take our relationship to a new level and create a new kind of group entity: a couple perhaps, a friendship, or maybe just a subject of a commitment to take a walk together. Finally, we may also grow into predefined institutional roles or create such roles ourselves from scratch, by representing power relationships with regard to certain domains and in relation to other people. Third, such constitution of collectives through representation is, fittingly, a divided labor. It depends on all or at least several of the co-subjects doing the representing. Only, for example, because we both represent taking a walk together as our goal, do we become a we-subject of joint intention. Fourth, this collectivity constituting kind of self-awareness is not awareness of some antecedently existing mental fact about a group. It is rather the awareness involved in jointly taking up a position in a self-aware way. When you say "Let's go for a walk together, shall we?" and I respond "Yes, let's go!," neither of us is reporting the existence of a joint intention. Neither is representing the intention as an object of belief or of another theoretical, mind-to-world direction of fit, attitude. If we conceive the relevant self-awareness in this way, it is indeed mysterious how it could have a constitutive role regarding what it represents. But what is rather going on is this: you propose a joint walk and by positively responding to your proposal, I complete the shared labor of representing this joint commitment. We undertake this commitment by representing it jointly. And in so doing, we don't represent our joint walk as a fact, but as a goal we are adopting in a self-aware way, by jointly taking a practical position toward it and being aware of this position at the same time. This is how we create a we-subject of a commitment to walk together. I believe that in this way we can make sense of how we constitute collectives by being conscious of others as co-subjects of positions toward the world. These collectives are not fictitious, but just as real as the persons which are their members. And their intentionality is also real. Even when collectives are created outright by explicit declaration like corporations, their members, officers, and other agents still need to grow into their respective roles in order for this legal entity to function appropriately in the world. They need to internalize these roles, and, as I will argue later, this means that they have to take theoretical and practical positions from the vantage points of these roles. I think this also means that this intentionality is not merely extrinsic and derived. Just like we-intentionality, role-intentionality is rather a specific form of the intrinsic intentionality of individuals and their co-subjects. The gist of my argument is that we can and should make sense of a constitutive role for collective self-awareness if we think of it as the awareness of jointly taking up positions toward the world. If this is correct, it also means that self-awareness and awareness of the world are inextricably linked, that awareness of the self as subject and the world as object are two sides of the same coin. This point also already applies at the individual level. I want to make fully explicit an assumption of my picture here, namely that our primary kind of self-consciousness generally is not an introspective awareness of some preexisting mental fact, but an awareness of taking up a position toward the world. As many philosophers since Wittgenstein have emphasized, when I am asked something like whether I believe that it will rain, I will look at the sky, not inside myself. I don't aim to discover a fact about myself, but to take a position, to make up my mind, with regard to whether something is a fact in the world. The point equally applies to making up one's mind with regard to what to do and to collective subjects—for example, consider a parliament deciding whether to pass a law. Nor is it restricted to cases of making up one's mind in the sense of an initial deliberation. Even if I routinely take a certain position, having done it many times before, it's still the taking of a position rather than the report of one as a fact. If an argument for this is wanted, it can be that I could always change my mind at this very moment and sometimes do. Though this point strikes me as compelling, it sits rather uneasily with deeply entrenched ways of thinking about mind and language, in particular with the received understanding of speech acts and so-called propositional attitudes. There is a deep-seated tendency to think self-consciousness must be consciousness of oneself as an object, and the standard understanding of propositional attitudes reflects this insofar as their representational content is taken to be identical to what is believed or intended (and this content in turn is taken to be identical to a proposition). That is, the subject and the mode of the attitude are not represented. To represent them, we need an additional attitude which has the first as its object, such as, for example, knowing that one believes. Therefore, to try to make sense of our point in the received framework, one has to think of such cases as somehow simultaneously involving taking a position and something like acquiring the knowledge that one believes or intends, and so on. One might even, like Matthew Boyle, think of the belief and the knowledge of it "as two aspects of one cognitive state" (2011, 228). While such a view is a step in the right direction and rightly emphasizes that each belief has an aspect of self-awareness, I will try to show that this idea can be more straightforwardly made sense of if we abandon the traditional conception of propositional attitudes in favor of the mode account, according to which in every intentional state the subject is aware of its theoretical or practical position toward the world. This is especially important for the collective case. While the received framework allows that each of us can have our joint walk as an object of individual intention, it cannot make sense of how we are both aware of us as co-subjects of a joint intention, notably in the act of jointly taking up this position, as I have argued we are. It cannot make sense of how we are aware of each other as co-subjects of positions toward the world, because already in the individual case it reduces what is represented to the object of the attitude. This is most obviously true for the content account, but as I already pointed out above, it is also true for those versions of the mode and of the subject account that try to account for mode or the constitution of the subject in nonrepresentational terms. In contrast, I propose that already in the individual case awareness of the subject and its position is an integral part of each intentional attitude. The collective case can then be understood in terms of an extension of this subject pole of an attitude to include others represented as its co-subjects. However, the received framework of propositional attitudes is still deeply entrenched in contemporary philosophy, even though it has received some cogent criticisms lately (e.g., Hanks 2015). Therefore, in the next, second, section I want to briefly address what I take to be its deeper roots in the philosophical tradition and justify my general outlook of seeing self- and world-consciousness as essentially related, as the two poles of each intentional attitude. In the third section I critique the received model and explain the alternative subject mode account in more detail. In the three following sections I will then sketch how this account works on the preconceptual level of joint attention and action, the conceptual level of joint propositional attitudes, and the institutional level of corporations and other institutional actors. I conclude with some thoughts on whether this approach commits us to the idea of group minds and in which regard it is collectivist and in which individualist. 2 Self-Consciousness between Subjectivism and Objectivism There are two broad tendencies of philosophical thought which, even though they are diametrically opposed, agree in treating self- and world-awareness as independent. On the subjectivist, broadly Cartesian version, it is usually taken for granted that we can know the contents of our mind independently of knowledge of the external world. Objectivism, which historically arose in response to this subjectivism, conversely tries to characterize knowledge of the world as being completely independent of any reference to the subject. For example, it supposes that the content of such knowledge can be exhaustively specified in nonindexical terms, that is, without referring to its subject as such, or to anything in terms of its relations to this subject. It becomes mysterious then what in the world an indexical sentence such as, for example, "I am Thomas Nagel" might be about (Nagel 1986). Both subjectivism and objectivism tend to treat the subject as a "mere limit of the world" (Wittgenstein 1922, §5.632), as like an unextended point to which the world is somehow coordinated, but which is not really part of it. On the subjectivist picture, the basic reality of sense data or other mental items is somehow given to a subject—a "transcendental ego" or the like. On the objectivist version, the basic reality of the physical world is apprehended from an implied impersonal, "god"s eye' point of view. But both equally struggle to make sense of the other side of the dichotomy or dualism they have constructed. This is true in epistemological as well as in ontological respects. As an epistemological example, since sense data block immediate access to the world, the subjectivist picture puts us into the familiar predicament of trying to make sense of knowledge of the world against skepticism. The main ontological problem of objectivism is how to integrate subjectivity into its picture. Often this leads to attempts to overcome these dualisms by force, as it were, viz. by reducing the other side of the dualism to one's preferred side. For example, subjectivism tries to reduce the world to a logical construction of sense data, or objectivism subjectivity to one out of behavior. I've sketched this background history because I believe that current philosophy is still too strongly influenced by the objectivist response to the excesses of subjectivism that dominated the twentieth century. We need to move beyond these oppositions. Kant's response to Descartes in the first critique provides a model for a better reaction, namely to think of self- and object awareness as inextricably linked, as two sides of the same coin. Of course Kant's philosophy as a form of idealism—even as a transcendental form of idealism—is ultimately itself a form of subjectivism. Luckily, however, we now possess detranscendentalized, naturalized versions of Kant's original insight, thanks to the work of such thinkers as Jean Piaget, Peter Strawson, Gareth Evans, and José Luis Bermúdez. The crucial claim I want to make here is that every attitude also has an aspect of self-consciousness. We are never aware of objects (including states of affairs) from nowhere, as it were—and as by nobody—but always situate them in relation to ourselves—spatially, temporally, causally, cognitively, conatively, and so on—and even in relation to our social and institutional position, as we will soon discuss. In contrast, subjectivist and objectivist attempts to dissolve the connection between how we represent the world and how we represent ourselves and our positions in it, end up robbing these notions of their meaning. For example, I cannot understand mind independently of knowledge of the external world because in order to distinguish mind and its contents from its objects I need to understand misrepresentation; but a reason to ascribe a bad case of misrepresentation, such as in a perceptual illusion, to myself can only come from a good case of successful representation (Schmitz forthcoming). Nor can I know the spatial or temporal location of something through a purely objective, allocentric means of representation such as a map or a system of temporal reference alone. If I have no clue where I am on the map now or have been in the past, or cannot locate the present time, my now, relative to the dates specified on a calendar, there is a perfectly ordinary sense in which I do not know where the locations on the map are, or when the times specified on the calendar were. So objective, nonindexical, forms of representation cannot really function and determine conditions of satisfaction independently of subjective, indexical ones. And the most characteristic and fundamental use of the paradigmatic indexical "I" is its use in subject position (Wittgenstein 1958), as part of what I call subject mode content, not as part of object content, of what I see, think, or am otherwise aware of, but in essential relatedness to it. 3 Propositional Attitudes and the Representationality of Mode Let us now look more closely at the received view of propositions and propositional attitudes (compare McGrath 2005; Hanks 2015) and its shortcomings. For this purpose it will be useful to fix some terminology. As the received view applies to intentional attitudes as well as speech acts, it will be handy to have a term covering both, and I will use "posture" in that sense. I will use "position mode" for a representation that represents the position such as asserting or ordering, believing or intending, that a subject takes up vis-à-vis a state of affairs and "subject mode" for a representation of that subject as subject. Subject modes include the we-mode and role modes. The received view has been held in different forms through its history, but one important version of it can be characterized through the following claims: (1) Postures are attitudes toward propositions, which are their objects/contents. (2) The representational content of a posture is, therefore, identical to that of the relevant embedded proposition. Subject and mode make no contribution to representational content. They are only represented in reports of postures. (3) Propositions are the contents of both practical and theoretical postures, that is, they are what is asserted and believed as well as what is ordered or intended. That is, a proposition is asserted or believed to be true, or there is an order or intention to make it true. (4) Propositions are truth value bearers. (Indeed they are often seen as the constant, underived truth value bearers.) I have already criticized the received view extensively elsewhere (Schmitz 2013, 2017) and will be brief here. (1) and (2) together embody its view-from-nowhere aspect. The proposition represents a state of affairs, but the subject of this representation and its position vis-à-vis that state of affairs are not represented at all. That the proposition is sometimes treated as the content and sometimes as the object of the posture and often that distinction is not clearly drawn, or not at all, reflects the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism and the conceptual confusion it has often generated: either one tries to do without any subjective notion of content distinct from what in the world the posture is about, or one misconstrues subjective content as an object of the mind. On the present view, the object of, for example, a belief that it is raining is the corresponding state of affairs in the world, the condition of satisfaction as thing required. The content is not between mind and world, blocking immediate access to the world, as the objectivist fears, but is rather that property of the subject in virtue of which it is directed at this state of affairs rather than others, that which sets the conditions of satisfaction as requirement (Searle 1983, chapter 1). (3) and (4) show how in the received view the proposition is deployed in what I believe are two incompatible roles: as a mere representation of a state of affairs, which can be the content/object of practical postures like intention, as well as of theoretical postures like belief, in 3), and as a representation of a state of affairs from a theoretical position as in (4). As a truth value bearer, a proposition must be connected to a theoretical position, since truth is representational success from a theoretical position. But a mere representation of a state of affairs is as such neutral between the practical/theoretical distinction and essentially incomplete: it needs to be connected to a theoretical or a practical position in order to become the bearer of a truth or other satisfaction value. Now there are different ways to think about how the subject's position is connected to the representation of a state of affairs. Most philosophers, if they think about mode/force/position at all, will tend to think about it in functionalist terms, but purely phenomenal, normativist, or expressivist accounts are also possible. The most important reason I favor a representationalist account is simply that I find it plausible that we always experience our position, our kind of relatedness to the world, or have a sense of it. In perceptual and actional experience, we experience our passive, respectively active, position toward the world. In believing, we have at least a sense of being receptive to the world and of our position being grounded in perception—our own, or, via testimony, that of others. By contrast, in intending we have a sense of an active position, of practical responsibility to bring about a state of affairs. And I believe we also always have a sense of the strength of our position, metacognitive feelings of the degree of our epistemic confidence, for example, or the strength of our desire for an outcome or our sense of control over it. Note that the claim here is not that we necessarily have a concept of our position: experiencing our position or having a sense of it are nonconceptual forms of representation.2 But there are also more theoretical arguments for the view that position mode is representational. Let me briefly mention four here. The first departs from Searle's observation that a variety of postures such as actional and perceptual states, memories, intentions, and orders, have a causal component in their satisfaction conditions (Searle 1983). For example, an intention or order needs to cause what is intended or ordered to count as executed and thus as satisfied, while a perceptual state or a memory needs to be caused by what is perceived or remembered to count as veridical or true and thus as satisfied. Under the influence of the received view, Searle sought to capture this by inserting into the propositional content of these postures a clause to the effect that they themselves cause the relevant state of affairs or be caused by it—he refers to this as "causal self-referentiality" or, more recently, as causal "self-reflexivity" (2015). However, the self-reference is potentially problematic, the idea that the contents of perceptual and actional experience represent experience itself is questionable (Armstrong 1991; McDowell 1991), and the analysis has the further implausible consequence that, because of