Description
Book SynopsisWe live in an age of scientific collaboration, popular uprisings, failing political parties, and increasing corporate power. Many of these kinds of collective action derive from the decisions of intelligent and powerful leaders, and many others emerge as a result of the aggregation of individual interests. But genuinely collective mentality remains a seductive possibility. This book develops a novel approach to distributed cognition and collective intentionality. It argues that genuine cognition requires the capacity to engage in flexible goal-directed behavior, and that this requires specialized representational systems that are integrated in a way that yields fluid and skillful coping with environmental contingencies. In line with this argument, the book claims that collective mentality should be posited where and only where specialized subroutines are integrated to yields goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to the concerns that are relevant to a group as such. Unlike traditiona
Trade Reviewan original and thought-provoking book that advances the field of cognitive science in a number of theoretically and practically important directions. * Matteo Colombo, Minds & Machines *
In this book, Bryce Huebner articulates and defends the hypothesis of collective mentality, the claim that some collectives 'are minded' or have psychologies in the same sense as individuals. His approach is relentlessly and impressively naturalistic in setting a defense of this surprising hypothesis within a detailed computational theory of individual cognition. [It] is the most sophisticated defense of collective mentality based in cognitive science yet offered. * John Sutton, Professor of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University *
Table of ContentsPart I: Macrocognition: A new foundation for a theory of collective mentality ; 1. Why bother with collective mentality? ; 2. Missteps on the road to macrocognition ; 3. One step closer on the road to macrocognition ; 4. A Plausible foundation for macrocognition ; Part II: Toward a more complete theory of collective mentality ; 5. Is collective mentality intuitively implausible? ; 6. The explanatory superfluity of collective mentality, Part I ; 7. The explanatory superfluity of collective mentality, Part II ; 8. Collective selves and collective personhood ; 9. Different kinds of collective minds ; 10. Conclusion ; References ; Index
