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, to group behaviour and to group identity. Recently, this notion has been used in Game Theory and Collective Intentionality Theory to reinforce the claim that one crucial condition for team reasoning and shared agency consists in the individuals’ framing the 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 cashes it out in terms of first-person plural perspective-taking. Accordingly, an individual group-identifies if this individual adopts a we-perspective towards his or her mental states in such a way that these mental states are framed by the individual not only as merely owned, but as co-owned by the we to which the individual ascribes him- or herself. This seems to imply that, when an individual group-identifies, she already presupposes that there is a group (with which she then identifies). This might be conducive to the idea that the we-perspective can be aligned with those mental representations (like remorse, apology, etc.) that have a so-called ‘Presup [Presupposition] Direction of Fit’: part of what it means to conceive of oneself as being a member of a we is to presuppose that there is such a group to begin with.

The last part of the talk focuses on some of the conditions that seem to be able to prompt group identification. In particular, social categorization (i.e., the perception of oneself as belonging to a certain category) and second-person perspective-taking (i.e., the ability to adopt the other’s perspective towards oneself) are subject to closer analysis. It is argued that these mental processes - though they are by no means the only ones – could provide the individual with the sense of there being a group to which he or she belongs. This sense of there being a group might trigger group identification, wherein the individual not only experiences belonging to a group from the outside, as it were, but he or she also identifies with the group by framing his or her mental states accordingly.

All are welcome!