Abstract
There has been an extensive debate about we-intentionality, with some positions demonstrating how it is derived from individual intentionality or others arguing that it precedes and takes priority over individual intentionality. Recent contributions have come to recognize that the theoretical discussions of we-intentionality depend upon pre-theoretical, pre-analytic, and commonsense experiences of joint intentionality, the description of which might avoid some of the polarizations that the theoretical discussions cannot escape. One needs to consider the spectrum of positions from the more individualistically inclined treatments (Bratman, Tuomela) to those attempting to establish the irreducibility of we-intentionality (Searle, Gilbert) to those de-emphasizing individual intentionality (Baier) or striving for a more refined balance (Schmid). In the end, Alfred Schutz’s genetic phenomenology, capturing pretheoretical, commonsense experience, can show how we-intentionality is a primitive experience in which individual consciousness is at the same time historically and biographically shaped. Schutz’s account holds in tension the individual and social dimensions of experience and avoids reducing we-intentionality to individual intentionality.
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Notes
- 1.
“Genetic phenomenology” can have several senses. In this paper and in the work of Alfred Schutz, the “we relationship,” is something experienced, first of all, in the everyday life-world that is the often-forgotten basis that higher-level theories arise out of and often forget and that we all inhabit before we undertake theorizing. In addition, it is within that everyday life we-relationship that the child begins learning about how to live and maneuver in the life-world. In each sense, that of the life-world and that of the child’s development, one is starting with something already established, the theoretical sphere or the experience of adults, and reconstructing experiences that genetically preceded those higher-level activities and that gave them birth.
- 2.
Another way in which Tuomela argues that a we-intention differs from and is irreducible to an individual intention is by distinguishing an “aim-intention” in contrast to an “action intention.” He states, “An aim-intention can be satisfied without the aim-intending agent alone satisfying the intention, whereas in the case of an action intention the agent must believe, if rational at all, that he can (with some probability) satisfy the intention by means of his own actions.” See Tuomela [1]. Aim-intentions are clearly not reducible to the action intentions of individuals and the “we” is not reducible to “you and I,” nevertheless the way aim intentions are developed depends upon individuals taking account of, considering, or estimating whether others will be willing to an adopt an end and “do their part” to realize it [1].
- 3.
Tuomela [1, 2]: One ought not to think that there can be no group, joint action if group members do not share a we-intention insofar as Tuomela allows for joint intention in a we-mode sense and an I-mode sense. The We-mode includes a sense of “for-groupness” and acting for a group reason, whereas the I-mode requires only private reasons for cooperation; and in the we-mode the group has authority whereas in the I-mode each person has full authority over whatever he or she is doing; in we-mode, the group members are committed to each other as opposed to the “I-mode” in which the participant is only committed to herself; in the We-mode actors are willing to do all parts if others do not agree but the I-mode would not do the same and instead weighs actions in terms of individual costs or private reasons. Tuomela insists that his analysis is conceptually non-reductive since all these intertwined conditions must be in place as opposed to having individual intentions merely aggregated with each other, and he admits that his account is “ontically individualistic or, better, interrelational” [1].
- 4.
The italics in the quotation are mine.
- 5.
Gilbert [7] is reluctant to call these obligations “moral.”
- 6.
It should be noted that when Searle speaks of a “pre-intentional” sense of the other, he is taking “intentional” in the typical way that analytic philosophy uses that term, namely as describing an aiming at a goal toward which action will be directed and as implying a certain amount of deliberateness. For Schutz and the phenomenological tradition, “intention” refers to any conscious act, such as desiring, thinking, memory, judging, etc. that is aimed at an object (and hence one is desirous of, thinks of, has a memory of, or judges about), and often one is unaware of such intentions until one reflects upon them.
- 7.
Of course, the use of the term “primitives” to describe cultures different from one’s own or not as technologically advanced as one’s own is regrettable. The negative connotations of that term may lead one to ignore the psychological or spiritual dimensions of such cultures that may be richer than those in one’s own culture.
- 8.
There would be several indications that the other is “like” me, and the indications of the likeness and the likeness itself are not a matter of inference, but passive syntheses, by which I immediate assimilate the other to myself, as capable of sharing a we-relationship.
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Barber, M. (2020). Joint and Individual Intentionality: A Genetic, Phenomenological Approach. In: Giovagnoli, R., Lowe, R. (eds) The Logic of Social Practices. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37305-4_1
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