Do Corporations Have Minds?

[C C]

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-157379

EXCERPT: [...] In everyday speech, it seems perfectly correct to say that a corporation can “intend,” “know,” “believe,” “want” or “decide.” Yet, when we begin thinking the matter over from a more theoretical standpoint, it may seem that there is something deeply puzzling here. What could people possibly mean when they talk about corporations in this way?

One possible approach would be to try to dismiss this whole issue as merely a misleading figure of speech. Sure, people sometimes describe a corporation using words like “decides” or “knows,” but they don’t necessarily mean this literally. Maybe all they really mean to say is that it is able to take in certain information and then use that information to adjust its plans and policies.

Then again, maybe the way people talk about corporations is getting at something more fundamental. One of our most basic psychological capacities is our ability to think about things as having mental states, such as intentions and beliefs. Researchers refer to this capacity as “theory of mind.” Our capacity for theory of mind appears to be such a fundamental aspect of our way of understanding the world that we apply it even to completely inanimate entities.

[...] You might recognize on some level that these entities don’t have minds, but all the same, some part of you might be drawn to thinking of them in this way. Is it such a big leap, then, to suppose that people might think of corporations as having intentions?

This is a disturbing thought. Corporations play an absolutely fundamental role in contemporary society, and if we are going to react to them appropriately, we need to make sense of them in terms of the complex structure that they actually have. It is deeply worrisome to think that our approach to understanding corporations might be shaped in part by a mode of thought that would be more appropriate for understanding the minds of individual human beings.

To put this idea to the test, I teamed up with the cognitive neuroscientists Adrianna Jenkins, David Dodell-Feder and Rebecca Saxe, and together we ran a study....

[Magical Realist]

Corporations can be ascribed with intent and agency because they are made up of conscious beings, at least in part. While the corporation is more than just the decisions of its board member and CEO, so are we in a sense. We are our minds and our bodies as well. And our own minds are a conglomerate of POVs from the standpoints of various psychological substructures. We ascribe overall intent and agency to the corporate entity that is the person we are, but in reality is this not even a mere symbolic way of speaking of a range of subjectivities that vary from our job personae, our gender, our age, our ego, our id, our familial role, our online avatar, and our superego? Isn't personhood itself a type of incorporated being involving the integration and relationship of various alters who merely take turns speaking for the whole? See this theory of mind played out humorously in the new Disney movie "Inside Out."

[Image: Pixar%2BPost%2B-%2BInside%2BOut%2Bcharac...loseup.jpg]