Abstract
It has been claimed in the literature that collective intentionality and group attitudes presuppose some “sense of ‘us’” among the participants (other labels sometimes used are “sense of community,” “communal awareness,” “shared point of view,” or “we-perspective”). While this seems plausible enough on an intuitive level, little attention has been paid so far to the question of what the nature and role of this mysterious “sense of ‘us’” might be. This paper states (and argues for) the following five claims: (1) it is neither the case that the sense in question has the community (or “us”) in its content or as its object nor does the attitude in question presuppose a preexistent community (or “us”) as its subject. (2) The “sense of ‘us’” is plural pre-reflective self-awareness. (3) Plural pre-reflective self-awareness plays the same role in the constitution of a common mind that singular pre-reflective self-awareness plays in the individual mind. (4) The most important conceptions of plural subjects, collective persons, or group agents in the current literature fail to recognize the nature and role of plural self-awareness, and therefore fall short in important respects. (5) In spite of the striking similarities between the plural and the singular mind, there are important differences to consider. The authority of the singular first person point of view has no equivalent in the plural case.
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Notes
Matthiesen (2002) suggests combining an individualistic ontology of collective intentionality with what she calls a collectivistic phenomenology. She argues that it may be the case that in collective intentions, “the intentional subject is not the subject of the intention.” The emerging view is that the subjects of the intention are single individuals, while the intentional subject is some plural self, or “we.” The subject of the intention is the ontological subject, while the intentional subject answers the question of “as whom” the ontological subjects have their experience. In Matthiesen’s account, the question of what phenomenological subjectivity really is remains largely open. I suggest that plural pre-reflective self-awareness provides the answer (this, however, is not to endorse Matthiesen’s claim that the phenomenological dimension of subjectivity can be neatly distinguished from the ontological level, as this conception is open to the obvious objection that whenever people have an intentional state that implies a phenomenological self-conception that differs from their ontological identity they are simply mistaken or deluded about who they really are).
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Schmid, H.B. Plural self-awareness. Phenom Cogn Sci 13, 7–24 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9317-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9317-z