Margaret Gilbert's "Life in Groups"

Margaret Gilbert is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Melden Chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Life in Groups: How We Think, Feel, and Act Together, and reported the following:

We often say that a particular group, such a sports team, has some belief, such as the belief that it is going to win the game. But what do we have in mind when we talk of what a group believes? Page 99 of Life in Groups references two philosophers who take pretty much the same position on this question. L. Jonathan Cohen says that “When a community or nation is said to believe or desire that p this is normally a figurative way of saying that most of its individual members, or most of its official representatives believe or desire that p.” Anthony Quinton says something similar: “With such mental states as beliefs…the ascriptions are what I have called of the summative kind”. I note that on first considering the question many people would agree that in order for a group to believe something, it is both necessary and sufficient that all---or most---of its members believe that thing. I call an account of group or collective belief a summative account if its core condition is that all or most of its members believe that p.

Someone opening Life in Groups at page 99 would be plunged into a discussion that is highly germane to the book as a whole: the nature of group or collective belief. However, it would not at that point be clear whether or not I endorsed or rejected a summative account. In fact, I do not endorse such an account. That emerges later in the chapter within which page 99 lies---chapter 4.

According to my account, in technical terms whose meaning I explain, a group believes that p if and only if its members are jointly committed to believe that p as a body. Importantly, as I understand this, a number of people can be jointly committed to believe that p as a body even though none of them personally believes that p. I do not say that it is often the case that a group believes something when none of its members personally believe it, but, as I note on page 100, that is a possibility, and doubtless sometimes occurs. My joint commitment account of collective belief respects this point among others.

A page of Life in Groups that does not at any point reference joint commitment cannot be considered to contain the key to the book with respect to its central idea or its central theme: that joint commitment lies at the heart of our thinking, feeling, intending, and so on as we understand these in our everyday lives.

That said, Part II contains five chapters devoted to collective belief, arguing against summative accounts, clarifying and defending my own account, connecting that to the process of scientific inquiry, and advocating for collective epistemology as an independent discipline. In sum, page 99 is a good indicator of the book's concerns, but hardly gives the game away.

In addition to chapters that focus on particular collective psychological states such as collective belief, others focus on an important class of rights and obligations. I argue that the joint commitments that constitute the core of our collective psychological states ground such rights and obligations, and link this point to the theory of rights, on the one hand, and the obligations of citizens, as such, on the other.

Learn more about Life in Groups at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue