Abstract
Many attempts to understand collective intentionality have tried to steer between two extremes. We want to understand how the members of a group are bound together, what turns them into a group, so we don’t want to think of the group as a mere sum of individuals. At the same time, we don’t want the group to be free-floating with regard to the members. It should not come out as just another individual, as an additional person as it were, nor should it be emergent in a radical sense. It’s useful to distinguish attempts to accomplish this balancing act in terms of where they solely or predominantly locate collectivity: in the content of relevant intentional states (or speech acts), in their mode, or in their subject(s) (Schweikard and Schmid 2012). A content approach tries to understand collectivity in terms of the contents of the subjects’ intentionality, where content is understood in the standard fashion, namely as what the subjects believe, intend, hope, feel, and so on. So on this kind of view, collectivity is just a matter of certain kinds of things that individuals believe, intend, and feel with regard to each other. On this perspective, the best-known representative of which is Michael Bratman (1992, 2014), there may be a ‘we’ of joint action as represented in the content of intentions, but these intentions are always of the form ‘I intend that we J’, so that no collective ‘we’-subject of intentional states is represented. Now, this kind of approach is in danger of erring on the side of being too individualistic. Can we really reduce all our practical and theoretical we-thoughts to I-thoughts? Does it make sense to suppose that an individual subject intends a collective action? On the other side of the spectrum, we find those who unabashedly embrace the notion of collective, plural subjects (Gilbert 1992; Schmid 2009) and thus, many will feel, put themselves in danger of erring on the side of being too collectivistic. What can it mean that there is an additional subject here? Do we really have to commit to such an entity just in order to explain joint action?
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that Bratman restricts his claim to what he calls “modest sociality”, planning agency in small-scale groups.
- 2.
- 3.
For a lucid discussion of another fundamental question about the we-mode, namely in which sense if any it is a mode in the same sense in which e.g. intending and believing are modes, see Bernhard Schmid’s contribution to this issue.
- 4.
For a discussion of this in the context of Searle’s notion of the background, see my (2012).
- 5.
Those who believe that mental states can become occurrent other than by becoming conscious can reformulate this explication accordingly. For some thoughts on the relation between mind and consciousness, see my (2012).
- 6.
For the notion of the pro-group I-mode, see p. 37. Tuomela also holds that there can be we-thinking in the I-mode and conversely. For ease of exposition, I defer discussion of these complexities until the end of this paper.
- 7.
On this understanding, it is true by definition that satisfaction conditions are determined by intentional/representational content, and I think it could be shown that those who attempt to do without content do so because they associate more with this notion than is contained in my stipulation. For example, they implicitly or explicitly assume a language-centric notion of content and representation and suppose they must be symbolic, or they assume that content is an object of the mind, so that, for example, perceptual content would intervene between mind and world and block direct access, so to speak.
- 8.
A related, but different account in terms of plural self-awareness is provided by Hans Bernhard Schmid (2014a). For a discussion of some of the differences see his contribution to this symposium.
- 9.
In the next sections I draw on some material from (Schmitz 2015).
- 10.
Thanks to Olle Blomberg for pushing me to get clearer about this.
- 11.
For more discussion of levels of collective intentionality and their relation to representational format, see (Schmitz 2013b).
- 12.
Compare e.g. p. 92 and the following passage on p. 223: “Fictitious” here means simply that the group mind … of a group agent may appear to be real but actually is not, and the same in part goes for the group agent itself …. However, if by a group agent’s mind we mean only the collection of the group members’ attitudes and mental states, no metaphysical quibbles about that should arise.
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Acknowledgement
Thanks to Olle Blomberg, Alessandro Salice, Alba Montes Sánchez, Glenda Satne, Hans Bernhard Schmid, Thomas Szanto, and Gerhard Thonhauser for a stimulating discussion of an earlier draft during a workshop in Vienna.I thank Maj Tuomela for her contribution and I also wish to thank the other members of my research group for comments on this response paper of mine.
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Schmitz, M. (2017). What is a Mode Account of Collective Intentionality?. In: Preyer, G., Peter, G. (eds) Social Ontology and Collective Intentionality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33236-9_3
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