The only way to sweep the cynics up and make them genuine agents for change is from a grassroots social movement.
This entails that groups can be genuine agents and subjects of intentional attitudes.
By using this mechanism, the organizers check whether the participants regard themselves as parts of a genuine collective agent with attitudes of its own and not just as individuals who do not form a collective agent.
In the paper, the group writes that XMRV is still a "genuine infectious agent" with "as-yet undefined pathogenic potential"; they point out that the virus is able to infect mice and two primate species and that several research groups have discovered interesting biological properties that could be useful, for instance, in cancer research.
But for that subject to be a person, a genuine moral agent, those experiences must be actively unified, must be gathered together into the life of one narrative ego by virtue of a story the subject tells that weaves them together, giving them a kind of coherence and intelligibility they wouldn't otherwise have had.
However, assuming that the organizers were successful in meeting the third condition, one can regard their PIA as featuring a genuine collective agent.
There are two reasons why we believe that the collective recognition by the organizers alone is likely to be insufficient to create a genuine collective agent during a PIA.
Although friends had confidently predicted the fact in advance, Harriet Walter insists that it was a genuine surprise when her agent called to say she was going to be made a dame.
*This is definitely genuine and not an agent's attempts to link another club in the hope of getting a better deal for his clients somewhere down the line...* Nolito, who was linked with a move to Arsenal on Tuesday, is said to prefer a move back to Barcelona, according to Spanish newspaper Diario Sport.
