I think you are on the right track, Gazi. Cognition purports to be a scientific word and in science all processes are causal processes and they are all local. That is to say they happen somewhere, sometime because of what is happening in that place at that time. This is axiomatic not just to science but any reasonable common sense. There are no collective processes, other than as convenient descriptions of aggregates of individual processes. There are phenomena that deserve to be called emergent (like latent heat) but the collective behaviour of people is not emergent because it is entirely explained by the behaviour of individuals, as you say.

The real problem is that nobody knows what they mean by cognition. If they were honest they would say thinking or learning. Cognition sounds more precise because it is Latin but in practice it is totally imprecise because everyone uses it to mean something different, that they are ashamed of being precise about in a scientific forum because they know it is not well thought through. Which is why the places where the word cognition is used tend not to be scientific fora! They are meeting places for shared poetic declamations about how people would like to believe social interaction works. Good for bonding, by no sign of science I am afraid. My advice is to bin it.

Hi Joachim,

This is an interesting example, and reminiscent of many of the perspectives I have run across. They involve "referent-shift" type cognitions on the part of individuals with regards of the collective. These, in aggregate, shift the whole state of the collective, whose aspects have been in a sense "socially constructed" by the collective action of individuals.

Yet, in such examples, the collective change seems to me to be simply an artifact of individual changes. It may be that this is as far as one can go, and it does have a kind of emergent property to it, but it doesn't seem to be collective cognition - more like a collective outcome of aggregated individual cognitions.

All the best

Gazi

I think that language (natural language) is a perfect example of considering collective (and culturally as well as histrocially situated) cognition in the sense that it provides a social actor with more or less common models and rules ("standards" in David Lewis' sense) for interpreting, classifying, inferring, representing, reasoning, but also acting and interacting, etc.

Hello,

Collective remembering (see for example the wikipedia article as a starting point) is an example of collective cognition. You can already find "features" of collective remembering, such as the "collaborative inhibition" mechanism, that have been studied empirically and experimentally by psychologists interested in memory retrieval issues. Collaborative inhibition is the finding that collaborative groups recall less information than nominal groups -- the combined output of an equal number of individuals. To date, collaborative remembering has not been studied in complex situations such as work settings for example. This could represent a new avenue for research in groups and organisations (inspired by episodic memory research in the lab.; at the intersection between social psychology and cognitive psychology).

Keywords (for google scholar): collaborative remembering; collaborative inhibition

Books and journals: Voices of collective remembering (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Memory (journal); Applied Cognitive Psychology (Journal)

People: Suparna Rajaram; James Wetsch

Should read 'James Wertsch', sorry.

I think you are on the right track, Gazi. Cognition purports to be a scientific word and in science all processes are causal processes and they are all local. That is to say they happen somewhere, sometime because of what is happening in that place at that time. This is axiomatic not just to science but any reasonable common sense. There are no collective processes, other than as convenient descriptions of aggregates of individual processes. There are phenomena that deserve to be called emergent (like latent heat) but the collective behaviour of people is not emergent because it is entirely explained by the behaviour of individuals, as you say.

The real problem is that nobody knows what they mean by cognition. If they were honest they would say thinking or learning. Cognition sounds more precise because it is Latin but in practice it is totally imprecise because everyone uses it to mean something different, that they are ashamed of being precise about in a scientific forum because they know it is not well thought through. Which is why the places where the word cognition is used tend not to be scientific fora! They are meeting places for shared poetic declamations about how people would like to believe social interaction works. Good for bonding, by no sign of science I am afraid. My advice is to bin it.

Dear Gazi,

Your question highlighted an issue extremely interesting in the context of learning.

Intelligence and cognitive abilities are often evaluated more in individual terms, while learning situations happen vice versa in a collective dimension of interchange.

The same constructivist conception of learning implies that individual attitudes can find their "natural" evolutionary environment within collaborative contexts characterised by mutual creative solicitation.

It's the same adaptive history of human cultures that can remind us of all this.

In this respect, point out this two links that I find extremely interesting:

http://epltt.coe.uga.edu/index.php?title=Social_Constructivism

http://ifets.info/journals/10_1/19.pdf

Always about the idea of learning as construction form of spaces and times of shared knowledge that implies moments of individual and collective development, I wish also point out these two interesting links:

http://themartinessays.blogspot.it/2013/10/social-construction-of-society-space.html

http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/faculty/gergen/Social_Construction_and_Pedagogical_Practice.pdf

I am a colony of 37 trillion cells and ''I'' is the collective behavior/cognizer of that community wrting this post.

What do you mean by cognizer Louis? I thought the cognitive revolution was supposed to be different from behaviourism. If cognising is not behaviour what is it? Is to cognise an intransitive verb or transitive like recognise? Beats me. Does talk of cognising help a scientific discussion more than using words people actually understand the use of?Or is it more like transubstantiation, which sounds like a process but isn't?

Why do we need this obscure word?

Jonathan,

The question: ''Can collectives cognize? In what sense?''

''I AM'' a collective that cognizes which makes me a cognizer. Is it so hard to understand?

I'm afraid it is. What does cognise actually mean, in ordinary language?

And there are a whole set of further problems with the idea that if a collective cognises it is collective cognition. Unless we know what this word means we just have word-salad.

I draw inspiration from this confrontation of ideas to revive the discussion.

Knowledge can exist outside of a situation of interchange?

Any cognitive dimension can exist as purely individual act?

It's conceivable a dimension of knowledge outside a network of meaningful relationships between different entities?

I think the problem posed by Louis is more in terms of micro/macro relation.

It is suggested a shared biological quality of different forms of learning and development.

This doesn't seem to be in contrast with an idea of knowledge and learning as socially shared behavior and how personal search path.

I thought Gazi posed this question very well. Nobody will deny that learning is a shared behaviour in the sense that learners make use of interaction with each other in their learning. I think 'social' is redundant. It is a buzzword of no merit that gets slipped in all the time these days. Gazi specifically asked if collectives could exhibit cognitive (maybe learning) processes? Let's stick to learning. Does a group of people exhibit learning processes? In the sense that you will find individuals learning within it yes, but the group does not exhibit the processes that individuals do - getting books from libraries, concentrating on the text, performing practical work, laying down memories in neural circuits, etc. At the end of the year you will find by examination that individuals have learned but there is no other learning process, attributable to the collective, to measure - it has no meaning. A library book may be used by many students but the book itself is not a learning process. Learning processes involving books always involve an individual reading. Collectives do not exhibit the physical processes of learning that individuals do.

I think there may be a confusion between the activity of a collective and collective activity. A bird consists of many cells and it flies, so that is a collective flying but it is not collective flying. That is what flocks of birds do. Words have subtle rules that do not allow us just to move them around and assume they will mean the same (as WIttgenstein pointed out). If cognising is a process engaged in by human bodies of trillions of cells then it is a matter of a collective cognising, not collective cognising, since we do not expect the cells to engage in these same processes, even if the processes they do engage in summate to the cognising of the body. The idea that the same processes are instantiated at various levels of size and aggregation is a nonsense. We could try a very broad behaviouristic definition of learning like modification of internal structure in response to environment and then we can consider cells as learning, human bodies as learning and cities as learning. However the learning if the city collective is not collective learning - because that would refer to the parallel and interacting processes at the human body level. The word has been allowed to slip to a different meaning.

You may ask my motives for arguing this case when it is obvious that I think that discussions about collective processes of this sort in the social arena are empty. The reason is that I think that exactly the same sort of confused thinking underpins most neuroscientific accounts of mental function. So I am interested in how widespread the confusion is. Simultaneous processes never 'bind together'. They are always local. Showing that this axiom holds true inside brains is hard to test empirically because so much as hard to ascertain. However, in the social sphere we can see that the axiom holds true because we can account for everything in terms of local processes - local to the domain of function relevant to that process, which may be a human body or a classroom or a nation.

It's right! Let's stick to learning.

For sake of accuracy the question is about "the conceptual nature of group cognition", and how to search cognitive processes of collective order and how to demonstrate this empirically.

It's not in discussion the individual dimension of learning but rather is assumed a specific quality (to prove) of collective learning as integrative resource in the context of development of cognitive processes.

The suggestions I have previously provided, it seems to me, are in this sense.

A group of people forming an organisation performing service tasks or manufacturing tasks is a collective that cognizes. The success of this organisation/collective depends on the qualities of the individuals but also on the quality of the interactions and culture withing the organisation. This organisation as a whole can learned and improved. This will involve individual learning with a lot of interaction pattern changes, modification of the information infrastructure of a the organisation, etc.

Hello All,

Thank you for all the very interesting responses! I agree with Jonathan that the issue of defining cognition is key here, but also think that it is problematic to define it too reductively, i.e. as a specific information processing function, etc. I feel like Louis asserting "I AM" here is telling, because of the intuition that my own cognizing is indubitable, and thus a starting point. And so, if I am a collection of cells, and I cognize by definition, then there must be collective cognition.

I'm not sure this argument is convincing though - after all, the "I" that so self-evidently cognizes is a kind of phenomenal "I", analytically distinct from the "I" that is the collection of cells...Johathan's response didn't invoke "mentality", but the analytical distinction between the activity of a body and the activity of its parts is a nice analysis.

Yet, we do often invoke collective terms that involve mental states. Is this just bad language use? Jonathan seems to want to treat this as a levels confusion, if I read correctly. But Patrice nicely pointed out that collaboration can lead to learning that is not exhibited by individual people (who presumably are thinkers themselves). If some kind of "surplus cognition" can happen based on organizing, then forcing all this surplus to be ultimately located in individuals might be making the individual do too much of the cognitive work, no?

One detail I keep coming back to here, is who has the burden of proof in this question: The one who says that only individual people can cognize, or the one that says that external systems might potentially cognize?

Thanks again for your thoughts - please do write more!

Gazi

‘’Unlike that of other species, the human mind has a collective counterpart : culture. We stubbornly adhere to the idea that we are distinct individuals, yet we are also highly cultural beings. Indeed, humanity might be defined as the only species on earth that combines individual with collective cognitive processes and in which the individual can identify with, and become part of, a group process. We can see this in our corporations and other institutions. The life of the human imagination oscillates between these two polar extremes, individual and corporate. In our most inward-looking moods, we have the impression that our minds are the only enduring reality for us and that the world ‘’outside’’ is either an illusion or, at best, a source of experience. In our most outward-directed moods, such as in moments of war hysteria, while joined closely to a corporate process, we meld with the group, ‘’losing our-selves’’ in whatever the group dictates.’’

A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human consciousness, Merlin Donald, 2001

Thyere can be little doubt any longer that team reasoning occurs in certain circumstances. This is a form of collective rationality in which individuals make choices that are best for the group rather than for themsleves as individuals. See

Colman, A. M., Pulford, B. D., & Rose, J. (2008). Collective rationality in interactive decisions: Evidence for team reasoning. Acta Psychologica, 128, 387–397.

This was a target article, so you might want to read the commentaries that followed it and our authors' reply in the same issue.

i see two questions central to this discussion. The first, and hardest of the two, pertains to the existence of group mind. This question falls largely under the domain of metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Unfortunately, the ability to empirically demonstrate which entities have minds associated with them and which do not still escapes us. If there was an easy answer to this then we would not have spent the past several decades arguing about a certain Chinese Room. Is there some sort of mind associated with the combined operations of my computer? with the organization and function of corporations? These are hard questions from the perspective of ontology, the latter example being especially relevant to the discussion.

The other question, which is far more approachable empirically, is how people perceive collective minds. For instance, Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz have argued that people attribute more mental capacities for agency than for experience to corporations (a kind of group entity). Some of my own data has shown that people simply attribute less mind at the group level than to individual members of the group. The asymmetry described by Knobe is especially interesting, however, because it suggests that group minds are seen as doing things but not as feeling or experiencing things.

But of course none of this speaks for the ontological question, do cognitions actually exist at the group level. This, as others have already mentioned, requires a clear definition for "cognitions" in order to answer. However, as I see it, to the extent that the collective actions of groups run analagous to a form of information receiving, processing, output producing that is not reducible to the actions of the individual members within the collective, I think we can reasonable speak of the existence of group cognitions.

Dear Curtis,

Is there any evidence at all that the dynamics of groups cannot be reduced to that of individuals? How would you demonstrate that? Computer models based on chaos theory show that when lots of small dynamic patterns are combined you get quite surprising new macro-patterns but by definition these are reducible to the small patterns because that is what you put in the model to get the macro-patterns out. I cannot really see any difficult ontological problems here - just woolly word usage!!

You demonstrate it by conducting experiments in which individual rationality leads to one decision and collective rationality (team reasoning) leads to a different, mutually exclusive decision. That is what we did in Colman, A. M., Pulford, B. D., & Rose, J. (2008), Collective rationality in interactive decisions: Evidence for team reasoning, Acta Psychologica, 128, 387–397, and there was a strong bias in favour of colective rationality in many of the games that we used. Others have performed similar experiments with similar outcomes. therew is nothing metaphysical about this -- it is straightforward behavioural game theory, and the experimental results cannot be reduced to individual decisions, because individual rationality generates different choices.

Curtis,

A bee hive acts in a coordinate fashion. Individual communicate by body movement and chemical messaging, and other means. Individual are specialized like cells in our body are specialized to contribute the whole of our body. What is important for the existence of a collective being is not the existence of a bag of skin around it. What is important is the existance of a communication infrastructure sustaining a collective behavior. Human beings since the beginning of civilisation have increase their capacity of their external communication infrastructure and have gradually create larger and larger colonies, states, civilisation and now are integrating at the global level of this planet with the tool I am using right now. We are able to behave in collective fashion at different level, for different purpose and now we are reaching a new level with the creation of new mind collaborative tool that allow us to think and act in a fashion that is gradually more and more coordinated for the common good. I think that Theilard de Chardin was right in seeing us becoming a stellar being.

Dear Andrew,

That seems to presume that people behave rationally, either alone or in groups, which seems optimistic. I am well aware that groups make decisions that none of the members would have made. I ran a committee once that spent resources on politically correct material because when one is in a committee one says politically correct things. Individually, I doubt most of us would have allocated the resources. But all the decisions were made by individuals. I know because I ran the meetings, and generally speaking made the decisions as long as enough heads nodded. Human behaviour is context dependent and very human-context dependent. That is obviously very interesting but I cannot see that it has anything to do with 'group cognising' or 'group mind', or even 'group rationality' to be honest. The ways individuals behave in an isolated context are not what are to be added together. People who drink beer on their own may drink champagne at a wedding because it is their behaviour to drink champagne at weddings.

The group behaviour can be reduced to the individual context-sensitive behaviours as far as I can see! To lose sight of that is to lose sight of the ground beneath the feet, in my experience as a biologist.

Jonathan,

We interpret rationality in the weak sense that people try to do what is best for themselves, given their preferences, in any circumstances they find themselves in. There isn't any (serious) controversy as to whether people are rational in this weak sense. In expected utility theory, preferences are defined in terms of choices, so there is no meaningful sense in which people can behave contrary to their preferences. Team reasoning, in the sense in which it is defined formally in game theory, certainly involves collective rationality, or group rationality, because it involves maximizing an objective function that differs from the individuals' objective functions. It involves a distinctive mode of reasoning from preferences (of all group members) to decisions. It has nothing to do with the "group mind" in the discredited sense of Le Bon, and it has nothing to do with a person behaving differently when alone or at a wedding.

Peter French distinguishes "conglomerate" from "aggregate" collectives. Aggregate collectives, such as crowds or mobs, are different from conglomerate collectives, such as corporations and other formal organizations that possess internal decision structures. This kind of collective, it is argued by French and others, is capable of decision making and actions which are not reducible to the actions of its members. Further, such organizations act from interests, goals, and specific reasons which are also not reducible to those of the individual members who participate in organizational decision making. While the actions of an organization and the actions of its members are inseparable, organiztional actions are "constituted" by (See David Copp), but not reducible to individual actions. While organizations are capable of a kind of deliberation, I would be reluctant to equate that with cognition. This holistic view of organizations has been extended to include arguments for holding organizations morally responsibile as organizations, separate from any judgments of individual responsibility. Logically, at least, it is possible for an organization to be blameworthy in the absence of any individual culpability. (See: French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility & French, Nesteruk, Risser, Corporations in the Moral Community).

David,

Corporate individuals are rarely found guilty for their actions within our legal system. I hope we will not invent other concepts to further shield them from any responsability.

I agree Louis, that the idea that a company is morally responsible but nobody who works for it is sounds like something dreamt up by a lawyer for the defence! I smell money, not philosophy or science.

You misunderstand my position. Organizational moral responsibility supports extending thier legal liability, without sacrificing individual human responsibility. If you have a chance, see my article, "The Social Dimension of Moral Responsibility: Taking Organizations Seriously", in which I specifically address the objection that both Louis and Jonathan raise. A legal system which gave organizations unique status rather than their current status as juristic, i.e. fictional, persons, which is now the case in Anglo-American law, would allow them to be treated as the intruments to further human needs they are, normatively speaking. In this regard, Meir Dan-Cohen's book, Rights, Persons, and Organizations (U of Calif. Press, Berkeley) is very valuable. It is the current legal status of corporations as persons which made it possible for the U.S. Supreme Court to incorrectly, in my view, further extend their 1st A. right to political speech. Although, I stated that it is logically possible for an organization to be culpable without any of its members being responsible, I doubt that empirically this is ever very likely to be the case. My practical goal has always been to regulate organizational conduct (esp. corporate) more effectively. There is a body of scholarship focused on coporate punishment. My article, "Punishing Corporations: A Proposal" is one small contribution. Thank you both for aiming at the heart of the matter with your comments.

David,

I do not yet understand you position. Here are some thoughts I have on the issue of moral responsibility of organizations. The big private corporations which are own through stocks are effectively controled by a very small number of corporate individuals. They have a lot of power, their actions impact the life of million and impact the environment. A few years back, BP through a series of hill conceive drilling decisions for the extraction of oil from the Gulf of mexico did a lot of harm to the ecology, to the fishing community, to the health of people. So stock holders will have a smaller pension in the years to come but none of the high executive resposible for this will have any consequences for the bad decisions that led to this situation. The message is clear to all the other executive, maximize short term profits at all cost, maximize your bonus and nothing can happen to you. As long as the high executive will not end up in jail, nobody will care.

Collective have more the effect to diffusing the individual responsibility. It is a psychological phenomena that has been studied.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility

After the horrors of the second world war in Europe, a certain number of high ranking nazis officers were judged. The defense for most of them was: i played my role in the government and followed orders as my offcice requires me to do.

The US government is opposed to the creation of an international court for the judgement of war criminal in order to guaranty total immunity to all the order follower of the US government.

What is the logic of the high corporate executive. We are here to make profit. If I do not do that, someone else will do it. This is the raison d'etre of our corporation. They usually do not talk about their own motivation which is to maximize bonus. The motus vivendi is that if you are not sociopath enough someone else will be.

If corporations are rarely held legally responsible for their misconduct, then it is the laws regarding them which must be modified. I view corporate moral responsibility as a foundation for changing the legal system. Also, holding a corporation responsible is not a substitute for holding those individual corporate elites who played major roles in the corporate decision making process responsible as well. I am only arguing here that the grounds for holding an organization responsible for harm or misconduct are different than those which implicate individual elites responsible with regard to that same harm or misconduct. These corporate elites cannot successfully use the excuse that they were only doing their jobs. Nor did that excuse prove successful for the Nuremburg defendants. Thank you for taking time to reply.

The fractal catalytic model of living processes implicates travelling waves - solitons - as the principle agent of both metabolism AND cognition. These non-linear waves are both robust and adaptive. Consciousness correlates with quantum coherent solitons.  

The consequence of collapsing function into metabolism is that ALL biological processes are considered to be essentially cognitive! 

This raises interesting philosophical questions as to the nature of cognition itself - What is cognition? 

The soliton is robust because it embodies information relating to its boundary conditions (i.e. the environment) that it embodies as a central aspect of its dynamic structure (Davia, 2006). From this we may venture that a truly cognitive system is a system that owes its existence/persistence as a direct consequence of the fact that it embodies information relating to the environment that it exists in relation to. 

Similar robust travelling waves that are found in biological systems also characterize the behavior of large populations of animals - e.g. moth migrations and grazing patterns. The fractal catalytic model would necessarily define these dynamics as cognitive!

Chapter Life, Catalysis and Excitable Media: A Dynamic Systems Appro...

very interesting