Introduction to the Special Issue on Cognition, Joint Action and Collective Intentionality

Abstract

Many remember an Iron Lady claiming that there is no such thing as society but only individuals. Considerably less, we assume, are also aware that the same Lady granted existence also to families, and hence by extension to groups. If this Lady were a social philosopher, she could have continued her inquiry wondering whether families and groups, like individuals, can have intentional states. Can a family as such believe something? Can a family intend to do something as a family? More generally, what does it mean to ascribe such intentional states to a collective? What kind of attitudes have the members of a group when they jointly intend to achieve a certain result? What does it take to act as a member of a group? This kind of issues and many others related to the social and institutional reality that surrounds us (pace our Lady) fall within the scope of a field of research that goes under the rubric of Collective Intentionality. Intentionality is a philosophical notion used to refer to the distinct property of mental states of being about something; mental states like believing, hoping, fearing, wanting, intending and so on are about and are directed towards something. Such intentional states are used to understand and structure human actions. When I intend to do a certain action, usually it is because I want to achieve a certain result on the background of what I believe about the world and about my capabilities. It is hardly controversial to claim that such intentional behaviour is not only individual. We can intend to do something together (e.g. go to the movies tonight) because we want to achieve a certain result on the basis of what we believe. Joint intentional action is done on the background of such shared intentional states. The philosophical debate on these issues is lively and several accounts of how such shared intentional states should be analysed have been proposed (Bratman, 1992; Gilbert, 1989; Searle, 1990, 1995; Tuomela, 1995; Tuomela & Miller, 1988). However the import of this field of research spans well beyond the philosophical arena. It is often claimed in fact that we, as humans, are a cooperative species. Our ability to act together with our conspecifics vastly surmounts that of other animals (including our closest primate relatives) both in its scale and its temporal extension. Only humans are able to engage in complex collaborative activities that are learned from the others (cultural learning). Only humans are able to create complex tools, structured symbol systems (i.e. language) and social institutions (i.e. government and marriage) as means to facilitate such coordination and cooperation. It has been recently proposed that underlying this uniquely human capability for joint action and cooperation there is in fact this capacity to share intentional states (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). This special issue has precisely the aim to bring together researchers from different disciplines (philosophy of mind, social philosophy, developmental psychology, evolutionary anthropology, artificial intelligence and ontology) to further the understanding of the role of cognition in collective intentional activities from the micro-level (the cognitive mechanisms enabling joint activities) to the macro-level (how large scale cooperation is enabled and sustained). The conceptual apparatus originally developed in philosophy has in fact the potential to open new exciting directions of research in the cognitive, computational and social sciences. Exploring the lower bound of the relation between cognition and collective intentionality, Pacherie and Dokic provide a clarifying analysis of the function of mirror