 In the context of a discussion of atomistic and holist accounts of institutions, it is important to distinguish the view that institutions are not reducible to the individual human persons who constitute them from the view that institutions are themselves agents possessed of minds and a capacity to reason (see Section 5). Epstein (2015) has offered detailed arguments against the former view, including in its favoured contemporary form according to which institutions (and other collective entities) supervene on the individual persons whose roles they occupy. Thus Epstein points out (2015: 46) that some facts about the firm, Starbucks, do not depend (supervene)on facts about people and the actions they perform but rather on facts about coffee, for instance. (See also Ruben 1985). Peter French (1984) is an advocate of the latter view as are, in somewhat different forms, List and Pettit (2011), Tollefsen (2015) and Epstein (2015). (See also Margaret Gilbert’s notion of a “plural subject” [1989: 200]). Searle (1990), Miller (2001) and Ludwig (2017) have argued against the proposition that collective entities per se are agents possessed of mental states. For instance, Ludwig has offered analyses of sentences that apparently ascribe mental states to collective entities, such as ‘Germany intends to invade Poland’, in terms of the intentions of individual members of these entities, and the actions of collective entities in terms of the members of the collective group in question being agents of an event (Ludwig 2017).