Group Minds and Natural Kinds

It is often claimed that structured collections of individuals with mental or cognitive states—such collections as courts, countries, and corporations—have mental or cognitive states of their own. The existing critical literature casts substantial doubt on this claim. In this paper, I evaluate a defensive move made by some proponents of the view that groups have mental or cognitive states of their own: to concede that group states and individual states aren’t of the same specific natural kinds, while holding that groups instantiate different species of mental or cognitive states—perhaps a different species of cognition itself—from those instantiated by humans. In order to evaluate this defense of group cognition, I present a view of natural kinds—or at least of the sort of evidence that supports inferences to sameness of natural kind—a view I have previously dubbed the ‘tweak-and-extend’ theory, as well as a theory of cognitive systems. Guided by the tweak-and-extend approach, I arrive at a tentative conclusion: that what is common to models of individual cognitive processing and models of group processing does not suffice to establish sameness of cognitive (or mental) kinds, properties, or state-types across individuals and extant groups, not even at a generic level.