Collective Intentionality

Abstract

Collective intentionality concerns the intentionality of groups or collectives. Intentionality is the property of being about, directed at, oriented toward, or representing objects, events, properties, and states of affairs. Examples of intentional states (states with intentionality, not just intentions) are belief, desire, hope, intention, admiration, perception, guilt, love, grief, fear, and so on. Collective intentionality involves joint, shared, or group intentionality and the intentionality of members (qua members) of groups that have joint or shared attitudes. More broadly, the study of collective intentionality concerns forms of intentionality that underpin social reality. What is distinctive about the study of collective intentionality within the broader study of social interactions and structures is its focus on the conceptual, ontological, and psychological features of joint or shared actions and attitudes, that is, actions and attitudes of (or apparent attributions of such to) groups or collectives, their relations to individual actions and attitudes, and their implications for the nature of social groups and their functioning. It subsumes collective action, intention, thought, reasoning, emotion, phenomenology, decision-making, responsibility, knowledge, trust, rationality, cooperation, competition, and related issues, and how these underpin social practices, conventions, institutions, and social ontology. The two main theoretical questions in the study of collective intentionality concern the ontology and psychology of collective agency and collective attitudes. The main ontological question is whether we should admit into our ontology group subjects of intentional states or attribute intentionality only to their members. The main psychological questions are, if we admit group subjects of intentional states, first, how to understand what they come to, whether they are the same or different than the intentional states we attribute to individuals and if different exactly how, and, second, what is special about the attitudes of individuals who participate in group action or whose attitudes underpin attributions of intentionality to groups? More specifically, can we understand what is special about the attitudes of individuals who participate in group agency or sustain the potential for group agency in terms of concepts already available in our understanding of individual agency, or must we introduce new concepts either of the modes of intending, believing, etc., or in the contents of such attitudes? Both questions concern the debate between methodological individualists and holists about the social, the first with respect to its ontology, the second with respect to its ideology.