Department of History and Philosophy of Science will hold the 56th Tokyo Colloquium of Cognitive Philosophy. Everyone is welcome.

Date & Time: 22 June (Monday), 2015, 18:30-20:30
Venue: the 14th Building, Room 710 on the 7th floor, Komaba Campus

Presenter: Alessandro Salice(University of Copenhagen)
Title:"Who am we?"

Abstract:
What does it mean to conceive of oneself as being a member of a group; in other words, what does it mean to “group-identify”? Ever since the seminal experiments in the seventies on the so-called ‘minimal group paradigm’, the process of group-identification has been considered by the ‘Social Identity Approach’ within social psychology to be quintessential to social identity and to group behavior. Recently, this notion has been used in Game Theory and within the debate on Collective Intentionality to underpin the claim that one crucial condition for team reasoning and shared agency consists in the individuals’ framing the decision problem or the agentive scenario they are facing not as a merely individual affair, but rather as a collective one, i.e., as an affair of the group.

This talk approaches the notion of group identification from the angle of phenomenologically-oriented philosophy of mind and suggests that to group identify the individual has to (i) adopt a we-perspective, (ii) feel attached to the group and (iii) have specific social expertise (so-called ‘group nous’). Accordingly, an individual group-identifies if she frames her mental states not only as merely owned, but as co-owned by the members of her group. In addition, she persistently values the group to which she ascribes herself. Finally, she is also able to navigate the social world by relying on a specific form of background knowledge about groups and their functioning.

Particular attention shall be paid to the idea that, if group-identification partly consists in taking the perspective of a group, then the group-identifier seems to take it for granted that there is such a group to begin with. Said another way, it will be argued that, when an individual group-identifies (in the threefold sense specified above), she already presupposes that there is a group – a group with which she then identifies. This might be conducive to the idea that group identification can be aligned with those mental representations (like remorse, apology, etc.) that have a so-called ‘Presup [Presupposition] Direction of Fit.’