Explaining collective agency: A defense of internalist corporate interpretivism

Abstract Collective agency is often defended in terms of an interpretivist conception of agency. The idea is that the externally observable behavior of organized collectives is interpretable, and thus explainable, via the posits of beliefs, desires, and intentions. From this perspective, collective agents can be treated as black boxes. Just as an interpreter can ignore the brain processes of individual agents, she can disregard the inner workings of a collective agent. Here, I argue against such externalist versions of corporate interpretivism and defend an internalist alternative. My core claim is that knowledge of the intentional states of individual members involved in the internal processes of collectives should form the primary source of evidence in ascribing corporate intentional states. Hence, collective agents can be interpreted in an accurate manner only if the black box is opened.