On Pettit’s thought ascription to groups

Abstract

A thought, taken as a propositional attitude or the content of psychological predicates such as believe, wish, desire, and hope, is ascribed to an entity with mental states. A thought is not only allegedly ascribed to particular non-mental things like computer and book, it is also ascribed to non-material things, linguistically in plural terms, e.g., plural pronouns (e.g., we, they), collective names or singular proper names (e.g., the United States), and proper names in plural form or general terms (e.g., the Microsoft, feminists). Plural terms are terms referring to groups of entities. The question is—what is it for a group to have a thought? Two main views are currently on centered stage—the literal view and the metaphorical view. This paper argues that the main argument supporting the literal view, in particular Pettit’s view, faces three main problems, namely, the problem of rule-following in propositional coawareness, the problem of an independent verifiability for group beliefs, and the problem of the indexical “we”-thought.