Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we identify two common assumptions underlying popular accounts of group agency. The first assumption is that paradigmatic cases of agency are to be identified with individual organisms, typically human beings. The second assumption is that cognition requires the manipulation of mental representations. Combining these two assumptions generates the status quo account of group agency, namely that a group's agency ontologically depends upon the mental representations of the individuals that constitute the group. We provide a taxonomy of views about group agency along two axes, each corresponding to the extent to which the view endorses (or rejects) one of these two common assumptions. We believe that none of the standard conceptions of group cognition and agency reject both of these two assumptions. After developing brief arguments against both assumptions, we provide a brief sketch of what an account of group agency that rejects both assumptions might look like.