Group Agency and the Dynamics of Intragroup Deliberation
Jason Alexander (London School of Economics)

part of: Topics in Scientific Philosophy
February 25, 2018, 5:30am - 6:30am
The Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine

The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies
100 Academy Way
Irvine 92617
United States

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University of California, Irvine
University of California, Irvine
University of California, Irvine

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Jason McKenzie Alexander, London School of Economics

Group Agency and the Dynamics of Intragroup Deliberation

Recent attempts to understand the phenomenon of group agency have proceeded by looking at conditions required for the formation of group attitudes, particularly using axiomatic methods (see List and Pettit, 2011). In this paper, we argue that this methodology fails to capture, either from a normative or descriptive perspective, a number of essential features of how groups form collective attitudes in practice. Drawing upon an empirical case study involving the construction of regulation by the International Accounting Standards Board over several years, we show that this group (and, we suggest, many other groups) routinely behave in ways which violate every one of List and Pettit’s axioms. We argue that attending to details of the dynamics of intragroup deliberation shifts responsibility to the individuals involved, rather than the group. This suggests alternative methods for analysing group agency and group attitude formation are required to capture these additional complicating features.

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