Abstract
John Searle’s account of collective intentions in action appears to have all the theoretical pros of the non-reductivist view on collective intentionality without the metaphysical cons of committing to the existence of group minds. According to Searle, when we collectively intend to do something together, we intend to cooperate in order to reach a collective goal. Intentions in the first-person plural form therefore have a particular psychological form or mode, for the we-intender conceives of his or her intended actions as singular contributions by means of which – or: by way of which – a collective goal is pursued. Accordingly, we-intentions are held to have a psychological mode with a “collective goal by means of (viz. by way of) singular contribution” structure, which makes them primitive and irreducible to intentions in the I-form. It is further contended that, albeit primitive and irreducible, we-intentions are not the mental states of an alleged group mind but always of an individual’s mind. This paper targets Searle’s claim of irreducibility by developing an argument whose aim is to show that, pace Searle, it is possible to track the idea of intentions with a psychological mode structured in terms of “collective goal by means of (viz. by way of) singular contribution” back to the concept of intentions in the I-form. The argument mainly relies on the idea that Searle’s technical expressions “being a collective goal by means of singular contribution intention in action” or “being a collective goal by way of singular contribution intention in action” are susceptible to conceptual analysis. The upshot of this analysis is that we-intentions can be reduced to complex bundles of mental states, all of which come in the first-person singular form. If this argument is sound, Searlean we-intentions do not belong to a primitive kind of mental states.
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Notes
This is true, most notably, for Raimo Tuomela, cf. Tuomela 2007, 2014. However, it is not always clear whether, within the we-mode approach to Collective Intentionality, the term “mode” is used consistently and generally to refer to a specific intentional or psychological mode (as we will always presuppose in this paper). In fact, other we-mode theorists even explicitly refuse to employ the expression “we-mode” to refer to a psychological mode (cf. Gallotti and Frith 2013).
However, he makes use of the term “form” to distinguish, e.g., “first-plural forms of intentionality” from I-intentionality, cf. 2010: 43. Searle’s terminology might be related to the fact that the I and the we seem to be features or forms that pertain to the psychological modes of mental states and that can occur only as specifications of such modes (cf. also the entry “mode” in the glossary of Gallotti and Frith 2013). That is, such forms can never occur as such, but always as specifications of psychological modes (intentions, desires, perceptions, etc.). This might speak for a conceptual distinction between the “form” and “mode” of a mental state, though in the following I will use the locutions “mode” and “form” interchangeably.
In 2002: 97 Searle considers the possibility “that I may be mistaken in taking it that the ‘we’ in the ‘we intend’ actually refers to a we.” This clearly suggests that there are also cases in which the “we” in the mode of awe-intention does refer to awe.
In a more recent paper, Michael Wilby criticizes Searle’s “individualistic analysis” of we-intentions (cf. Wilby 2012) without explicitly targeting either of these two constraints. This notwithstanding, Wilby’s idea to apply a further direction of fit to we-intentions (such that these mental states would be satisfied only if there are two or more we-intenders) seems to be in line with the other objections: an “envatted” brain cannot be a genuine bearer of collective intentionality.
In his later contribution to the subject, Searle describes another example of collective actions: if we are performing a duet where I play the piano part and you the violin part, we are engaging in an action structured by “the constitutive by-way-of relation” (2010: 51). The distinction between “the constitutive by-way-of relation” and “the causal by-means-of relation” could also be conceptualized by saying that the by-means-of actions have a certain causal effect (making Sauce Béarnaise), such that the individual people’s actions would not make sense except as partial causal steps directed towards the collective goal. By contrast, there is no such effect in the by-way-of actions: here, doing certain things simply is doing other things, such that the playing of an instrument by each of the duet musicians already is the goal (cf. Goldman 1970: 26 and its entire §2 for a more detailed discussion of the phenomenon of “level generation”). Even though I will mainly concentrate on the instrumental kind of intentions, I believe my objections also apply to Searle’s view about “constitutive” intentions (more on this at the end of section 2).
Analogous considerations seem to hold here with regard to constitutive IAs: simple or single rayed IAs have to be distinguished from constitutive IAs because the former (unlike the latter) are not about two actions related to each other by a by-way-of relation. Accordingly, unlike the former, the latter kind of intention can be inflected in a plural form.
One exception here is Ludwig’s 2007 paper, in which the author stresses the importance that Searle’s view on (singular) means-end intentions bears for his theory of collective intentionality. My present proposal seems to be in tune with that of Ludwig: if Searle’s view on instrumental intentions is untenable, so must his theory of collective intentionality be, as well.
Cf.: “In the case of a means-end singular intention, […] we might […] write, ‘singular [goal]’ and ‘singular [contribution]’. Then for the collective case, the only difference lies in replacing ‘singular [goal]’ with ‘collective [goal]’. This makes the account of we-intentions continuous with the account of singular intentions, and represents sentences attributing we-intentions as sharing the same logical form as sentences attributing singular intentions.” Ludwig 2007: 59.
Here I am thinking especially of Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong and Adolf Reinach, cf. Salice 2009.
There is a way to resist the inference from (7) to (8) and, eventually, to support the idea that both sentences are about different kinds of mental states. According to a possible interpretation of Searle’s theory, IAs can represent only bodily movements (cf. Proust 2003: 106). If this interpretation is correct, sentences like (8) can never be true (and that is because, as maintained by this interpretation, the content of simple IAs would always and only refer to bodily movements). This interpretation, however, seems to have certain exegetic and systematic limits. It is true that Searle often discusses IAs in relation to bodily movements, but there are also passages wherein he explicitly refers to IAs whose contents are not mere bodily movements (cf. Searle 1983: 84). In addition, there are also systematic reasons that appear to speak against that interpretation (cf. Blomberg 2011). Blomberg discusses the example of a blind man who, with his cane, explores the surroundings around him and argues (in my view, rather convincingly) that, here, the subject is not intending any bodily movements: “[h]is experience is not that of manipulating his arm, wrist and fingers in order to cause the cane to move in certain ways, as if he was holding a cane for the first time in his life. Rather, the blind man simply taps the ground directly with the tip of the cane” (2011: 344).
I here follow Searle and understand the expression “by means of” as a dyadic relation that can also be rendered by the predicate “to cause,” such that “B by means of A” and “A causes B” are made true by one and the same fact. Mulligan disagrees with this interpretation by claiming that “by means of” is a sentential connective (cf. Mulligan forthcoming).
What would prevent us from accepting the existence of: a) a kind “IA B conventionally generated by means of A” (I intend to do my duty by means of saving John’s life”) or b) a kind “IA B augmentedly generated by means of A” (I intend to run at 8 m.p.h. by means of running), cf. Goldman 1970 §2 for these examples, or c) a kind “IA B by means of A without C,” etc.?
According to Searle’s definition, the action of making mayonnaise would be a “basic action” from the chef’s point of view, since the agent here is not “intending to do any other action by means of which [s]he intends […]” to make mayonnaise (cf. Searle 1983: 100, i.e., an action can be qualified as basic only in relation to the agent’s skills). However, as spelled out in the following, we would want to complement this view by arguing that, indeed, the action is basic, but it is basic only at a phenomenological level, the content of this intention having a B by means of A structure.
This view could be supported by psychological research in action identification theory. According to these investigations, individuals identify their actions at a lower-level (that is, they describe their actions in terms of what here we called the “means”) “when an action is difficult, unfamiliar or complex […], when their performance of the act is disrupted […] or when they are given failure feedback of their performance […]” (Vallacher and Wegner 1987: 661, cf. also Kozak et al. 2006). This seems to provide further evidence for the claim defended above that the difference between simple IAs and instrumental IAs is not a difference between kinds of mental states, but a difference in how the intender (phenomenologically) identifies his or her mental states.
This equation should be taken cum grano salis, given that the paper discussed only collective instrumental IAs and that Searle believes that other kinds of mental states can be inflected collectively. No account has been provided concerning whether there are other forms of the we-mode that can affect other kinds of states, and how to reduce these states to states in the I-mode. It is important to stress, though, that Searle ties the idea of collective intentionality with that of cooperation (no collective intentionality without cooperation, Searle 2010: 58) and that this substantially restricts the class of mental states that can be collective in an authentic sense. In addition, in one of his latest contributions, Searle explicitly abandons the idea that all forms of we-intentionality are primitive: collective recognition, since it is not cooperative, is not collective in an authentic, i.e., in a primitive, sense (cf. Searle 2010: 56ff).
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Salice, A. There are No Primitive We-Intentions. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 695–715 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0203-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0203-6