Deborah Tollefsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 1220422 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deborah Tollefsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deborah |
| FAMILY NAME | Tollefsen |
| SIGNATURE | TOLLEFSEN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Memphis |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Shaping the Institutional Mind
Mind shaping is a concept in philosophy and cognitive science that explores how social and cultural interactions influence the development of individual minds. Rather than viewing cognition as a strictly internal or individual process, the literature on mind shaping emphasizes the profound role of external, interpersonal, and societal factors in shaping mental capacities, beliefs, and behaviors. In this paper, I bring the discussion of mind shapi…
The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility
Defenses of the possibility of collective guilt feelings falls roughly into two categories: collectivistic positions that assign guilt feelings to groups as such but play down the experiential component in guilt feelings, and individualistic positions which understand collective guilt feelings in terms of individual experiences. The analogy between collective and individual guilt feelings is examined from two collectivistic viewpoints. It is argu…
How Do Different Types of Alignment Affect Perceived Entity Status
Joint Action and 4E Cognition
Over past thirty years there has been an increased interest in studying joint action across a number of different disciplines including psychology, sociology, cognitive anthropology, cognitive science, and philosophy. In this chapter we canvas recent philosophical and empirical research on joint action. Along the way we highlight embedded, embodied, extended, and enactive approaches and the challenges they pose for more orthodox approaches to joi…
Collective Intentionality and Methodology in the Social Sciences
This chapter discusses the extent to which philosophers within the field of collective intentionality have adopted an individualistic approach to explaining social phenomena. Methodological individualism, as it developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was a thesis about the proper methodology of the social sciences. The field of collective intentionality is populated with scholars who have adopted methodological individualism…
We-Narratives and the Stability and Depth of Shared Agency
The basic approach to understanding shared agency (or joint action) has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for diff…
The Rationality of Collective Guilt
Let’s Pretend
According to many, joint intentional action must be understood in terms of joint intentions. Most accounts of joint intention appeal to a set of sophisticated individual intentional states. The author argues that standard accounts of joint intention exclude the possibility of joint action in young children because they presuppose that the participants have a robust theory of mind, something young children lack. But young children do engage in joi…
Participant Reactive Attitudes and Collective Responsibility
The debate surrounding the issue of collective moral responsibility is often steeped in metaphysical issues of agency and personhood. I suggest that we can approach the metaphysical problems surrounding the issue of collective responsibility in a roundabout manner. My approach is reminiscent of that taken by P.F. Strawson in "Freedom and Resentment" (1968). Strawson argues that the participant reactive attitudes – attitudes like resentment, grati…
Challenging Epistemic Individualism
Contemporary analytic epistemology exhibits an individualistic bias. The standard analyses of knowledge found in current epistemological discussions assume that the only epistemic agents worthy of philosophical consideration are individual cognizers. The idea that collectives could be genuine knowers has received little, if any, serious consideration. This individualistic bias seems to be motivated by the view that epistemology is about things th…
Collective Intentionality and the Social Sciences
In everyday discourse and in the context of social scientific research we often attribute intentional states to groups. Contemporary approaches to group intentionality have either dismissed these attributions as metaphorical or provided an analysis of our attributions in terms of the intentional states of individuals in the group. Insection1, the author argues that these approaches are problematic. In sections 2 and 3, the author defends the view…
Princess Elisabeth and the Problem of Mind-Body Interaction
This paper focuses on Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's philosophical views as exhibited in her early correspondence with Rene Descartes. Elisabeth's criticisms of Descartes's interactionism as well as her solution to the problem of mind-body interaction are examined in detail. The aim here is to develop a richer picture of Elisabeth as a philosophical thinker and to dispel the myth that she is simply a Cartesian muse.
Princess Elisabeth and the Problem of Mind-Body Interaction
This paper focuses on Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's philosophical views as exhibited in her early correspondence with Rene Descartes. Elisabeth's criticisms of Descartes's interactionism as well as her solution to the problem of mind-body interaction are examined in detail. The aim here is to develop a richer picture of Elisabeth as a philosophical thinker and to dispel the myth that she is simply a Cartesian muse
Collective Intentionality and the Social Sciences
In everyday discourse and in the context of social scientific research we often attribute intentional states to groups. Contemporary approaches to group intentionality have either dismissed these attributions as metaphorical or provided an analysis of our attributions in terms of the intentional states of individuals in the group. Insection1, the author argues that these approaches are problematic. In sections 2 and 3, the author defends the view…
Let’s Pretend
According to many, joint intentional action must be understood in terms of joint intentions. Most accounts of joint intention appeal to a set of sophisticated individual intentional states. The author argues that standard accounts of joint intention exclude the possibility of joint action in young children because they presuppose that the participants have a robust theory of mind, something young children lack. But young children do engage in joi…
We-Narratives and the Stability and Depth of Shared Agency
The basic approach to understanding shared agency (or joint action) has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for diff…
Princess Elisabeth and the Problem of Mind-Body Interaction
This paper focuses on Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's philosophical views as exhibited in her early correspondence with Rene Descartes. Elisabeth's criticisms of Descartes's interactionism as well as her solution to the problem of mind-body interaction are examined in detail. The aim here is to develop a richer picture of Elisabeth as a philosophical thinker and to dispel the myth that she is simply a Cartesian muse.
Princess Elisabeth and the Problem of Mind-Body Interaction
This paper focuses on Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's philosophical views as exhibited in her early correspondence with Rene Descartes. Elisabeth's criticisms of Descartes's interactionism as well as her solution to the problem of mind-body interaction are examined in detail. The aim here is to develop a richer picture of Elisabeth as a philosophical thinker and to dispel the myth that she is simply a Cartesian muse
Challenging Epistemic Individualism
Contemporary analytic epistemology exhibits an individualistic bias. The standard analyses of knowledge found in current epistemological discussions assume that the only epistemic agents worthy of philosophical consideration are individual cognizers. The idea that collectives could be genuine knowers has received little, if any, serious consideration. This individualistic bias seems to be motivated by the view that epistemology is about things th…
Collective Intentionality and the Social Sciences
In everyday discourse and in the context of social scientific research we often attribute intentional states to groups. Contemporary approaches to group intentionality have either dismissed these attributions as metaphorical or provided an analysis of our attributions in terms of the intentional states of individuals in the group. Insection1, the author argues that these approaches are problematic. In sections 2 and 3, the author defends the view…
Participant Reactive Attitudes and Collective Responsibility
The debate surrounding the issue of collective moral responsibility is often steeped in metaphysical issues of agency and personhood. I suggest that we can approach the metaphysical problems surrounding the issue of collective responsibility in a roundabout manner. My approach is reminiscent of that taken by P.F. Strawson in "Freedom and Resentment" (1968). Strawson argues that the participant reactive attitudes – attitudes like resentment, grati…
Let’s Pretend
According to many, joint intentional action must be understood in terms of joint intentions. Most accounts of joint intention appeal to a set of sophisticated individual intentional states. The author argues that standard accounts of joint intention exclude the possibility of joint action in young children because they presuppose that the participants have a robust theory of mind, something young children lack. But young children do engage in joi…
The Rationality of Collective Guilt
Collective Intentionality and Methodology in the Social Sciences
This chapter discusses the extent to which philosophers within the field of collective intentionality have adopted an individualistic approach to explaining social phenomena. Methodological individualism, as it developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was a thesis about the proper methodology of the social sciences. The field of collective intentionality is populated with scholars who have adopted methodological individualism…
We-Narratives and the Stability and Depth of Shared Agency
The basic approach to understanding shared agency (or joint action) has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for diff…
Joint Action and 4E Cognition
Over past thirty years there has been an increased interest in studying joint action across a number of different disciplines including psychology, sociology, cognitive anthropology, cognitive science, and philosophy. In this chapter we canvas recent philosophical and empirical research on joint action. Along the way we highlight embedded, embodied, extended, and enactive approaches and the challenges they pose for more orthodox approaches to joi…
How Do Different Types of Alignment Affect Perceived Entity Status
The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility
Defenses of the possibility of collective guilt feelings falls roughly into two categories: collectivistic positions that assign guilt feelings to groups as such but play down the experiential component in guilt feelings, and individualistic positions which understand collective guilt feelings in terms of individual experiences. The analogy between collective and individual guilt feelings is examined from two collectivistic viewpoints. It is argu…
Shaping the Institutional Mind
Mind shaping is a concept in philosophy and cognitive science that explores how social and cultural interactions influence the development of individual minds. Rather than viewing cognition as a strictly internal or individual process, the literature on mind shaping emphasizes the profound role of external, interpersonal, and societal factors in shaping mental capacities, beliefs, and behaviors. In this paper, I bring the discussion of mind shapi…
Philosophy (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Political science (5 works) · Social Psychology (5 works) · Cognition (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Action (physics) (3 works)