Abstract
What enables everyday collective attitudes such as the intention of two persons to go for a walk together? Most current approaches are concerned with full-fledged collective attitudes and focus on the content, the mode or the subject of such attitudes. It will be argued that these approaches miss out an important explanatory enabling feature of collective attitudes: an experiential state, called a “sense of us”, in which a we-perspective is grounded. As will be shown, the sense of us pre-structures collective intentional states and is thus relevant to an adequate understanding of collective attitudes. The argument receives indirect support by insights into distortions of interaction due to implicit stereotypes.
Highlights
The overall topic of this article is the question of how we should understand everyday collective attitudes, for instance, the intention of two persons to go for a walk together or the intention to collectively paint the walls of a flat
The reason for this is that theories focusing on an analysis of full-fledged explicit collective attitudes run the risk of circularity or infinite regress
The leading hypothesis of the paper was that the experience of persons being related to each other, called the sense of us, renders a core feature of a we-perspective, which is instantiated in collective attitudes
Summary
The target phenomena of the following analysis are experiential underpinnings of everyday collective attitudes, which may be expressed in sentences such as: “We intend to go to the cinema”, “We will paint the house” and “We agree upon p”. The term might be taken in a genealogical way such that a collective intentional state results (or may result) from an experiential state in a given situation This is one aspect of the meaning I will make use of in the following. Proponents of approaches to collective intentionality predominant in the current debate might at this point already object why one should bother to look at experiential underpinnings of collective intentionality in the first place As they are interested in the question of what features are responsible for the ‘collectivity’ of intentional states, a detailed analysis of those states is all what’s needed, so they could argue. From a pragmatist perspective jointly shared meaning entails shared communicative aims and interrelated intentions that interlocutors are jointly committed to This suggests that Gilbert’s account is circular (see Tollefsen 2002 for a related critique).. The notion of what I call a “minimal sense of us” may provide the necessary equipment (in the conceptual sense of “precursor”)
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