Huebner, Bryce ; Bruno, Michael & Sarkissian, Hagop (2010). What Does the Nation of China Think About Phenomenal States? Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):225-243.
1 Introduction
For example, the question, “What is it like to be Microsoft?” seems to stand in stark contrast to the well-worn philosophical question, “What is it like to be a bat?” To put the contrast bluntly, faced with the question “what is it like to be Microsoft”, philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists, as well as most students in introductory philosophy classes, are likely to look perplexed and take the question to suggest a deep confusion on the part of the person who is asking.
Functionalism allows mental states to be implemented byanystructuresthat preserve functional organization. As Ned Block (1978) famously argues, this implies that the citizens of China, properly organized, would have mental states at the level of the group. But, as Block and many others have noted, this seems an affront to common sense: there just isn’t anything that it’s like to be the nation of China. Functionalism, therefore, appears to be an incomplete or inadequate theory of the mind.
We are not convinced by this version of the argument, and in this paper we hope to take some of the wind out of the sails of those who object to the implementational plasticity of functionalist theories of mind by relying on the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity.
2 Are We Really Hostile to Collective Mentality?
Notwithstanding these results, it would be surprising if people thought that collections of circles and triangles really were in cognitive states. As Daniel Dennett (1978, 1987) has often argued, our commonsense ascriptions of intentional states form a motley assortment of genuine ascriptions, metaphors, façons de parler, and countless other varieties of clearly dubious mental ascriptions. So, just as we are likely to treat the ascription of mental state to triangles and circles as in some way dubious, there are deep theoretical reasons for resisting the idea that collectives can literally be in mental states in the same way that individuals can. The mere fact that people generally have a tendency to make such attributions does not by itself show that they are correct in doing so. Perhaps the theory of mind mechanism over generalizes, and people reject its anthropomorphizing tendencies once they became fully competent with mentalistic concepts. In other words, mere appeal to this sort of data is unlikely to persuade anyone.
3 Theoretical and Empirical Constraints on Entitativity
On the basis of this individualism/collectivism research, Kashima et al. (1995, 2005) investigated differences in the attribution of entitativity by East Asian and Western participants. In line with the research by O’Laughlin and Malle (2002) reported above, Kashima and colleagues found that two sorts of considerations underwrite the theoretical models that drive judgments of entitativity: psychological essentialism and agency. According to their model, psychological essentialism is seen as the assumption that individuals that belong to a group are likely to resemble one another in appearance and behavior as well as the belief that the properties of a collectivity are unchangeable because the collectivity has some underlying essence that is causally responsible for these similarities among its members. Kashima et al (2005) found that insofar as being a single entity is understood in terms of psychological essentialism, as with categories such as race, individuals are perceived to be far more entity-like than collectivities across cultures. However, in relying on considerations of agency, individuals are only perceived by Western participants to be more entity-like than are collectivities (Kashima et al. 2005, 162). In other words, people in East Asia are far more willing to ascribe agency to a collectivity than are Western participants, and on this basis East Asian participants are far more willing to classify collectivities as single entities than are their Western counterparts.
This suggests that the intuitive plausibility of the methodological individualism that pervades the cognitive and social sciences may be grounded in a uniquely Western perspective. In fact, as some philosophers (even in the West) have noted, thinking that individuals are the only sorts of cognitive systems that there are requires a peculiar act of reification of an abstract entity—the individual person (cf., Nietzsche 1887/1998). This is not, of course, to claim that individuals are mere abstractions from collectivities. Rather, we suggest that the commonsense theories that underlie our understanding of something as a cognitive system may be structured by our theoretical commitments about which sorts of things are capable of intentional action. Thus, while there are strong evolutionary pressures (e.g., seeing another as a mate or as a threat) that are likely to militate in favor of seeing discrete, physically bounded entities as intentional actors, it seems reasonable to suppose that the primary factors operative in the construction of a theory of cognitive systems and intentional actors will be susceptible to a wide range of social pressures that are not biased in this way. These social considerations are likely to vary across cultures and even across a variety of more local social milieus. This, we suggest, should give us pause, evoking skepticism about the prominence of the intuition that collective mentality is impossible. This skepticism, we hold, opens up the possibility of cultural variation in the sorts of mental states that are likely to be ascribed to collectivities.