Abstract
AbstractThe article takes issue with the proposal that dominant accounts of collective intentionality suffer from an individualist bias and that one should instead reverse the order of explanation and give primacy to the we and the community. It discusses different versions of thecommunity firstview and argues that they fail because they operate with too simplistic a conception of what it means to be a self and misunderstand what it means to be (part of) a we. In presenting this argument, the article seeks to demonstrate that a thorough investigation of collective intentionality has to address the status and nature of the we, and that doing so will require an analysis of the relation between the we and the I, which in turn will call for a more explicit engagement with the question of selfhood than is customary in contemporary discussions of collective intentionality.
Highlights
The article takes issue with the proposal that dominant accounts of collective intentionality suffer from an individualist bias and that one should instead reverse the order of explanation and give primacy to the we and the community
Can we really understand what that amounts to, if we do not have a proper grasp of what it means to be a self? Does the first-person plural perspective presuppose, precede, preserve or abolish the first-person singular perspective? Is individual subjectivity something that necessarily requires a communal grounding or does a we presuppose a plurality of pre-existing selves? Whereas recent influential analyses of collective intentionality have primarily focused on joint action and paid far less attention to the link between collective intentionality and matters of identity, much of the early formative work on collective intentionality from the first decades of the 20th century recognized that a thorough account of collective intentionality would have to get clearer on the relation between the individual and the group
Contemporary discussions of collective intentionality have often focused on action and sought to explain how we can act together
Summary
Can one at all find similar ideas in the contemporary debate? Whereas the mainstream view is that collective intentionality cannot be explained as a mere summation or aggregation of individual intentionality, there remains widespread disagreement about where to locate the collectivity. It can be used in a distributive sense as a mere stand in for ‘all of us’, as in “we all play solitaire” or “we are all hungry” but the term can be used in a collective sense and refer to more than a mere aggregate of persons, as in “we play tennis together” or “we want to marry” In these latter cases, the notion involves a sense of unity, it links the involved individuals in a way where they jointly constitute what Gilbert calls a plural subject. Despite their differences, all three accounts would claim that the standard way of addressing the topic of collective intentionality suffers from an individualist bias. Let me start with the first two accounts – I will return to the third option later
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