Collective Intentionality Research Articles

Collective intentionality and the further challenge of collective free improvisation

The kind of collective improvisation attained by free jazz at the beginning of the sixties appears interesting from the perspective of contemporary debates on collective intentionality for several reasons. The most notable of these, is that it holds a mirror up to what analytical philosophers of action identify as “the complexly interwoven sets of collective intentions” that make a group more than the sum of its parts. But at the same time, free jazz poses a challenge to these philosophical theories of collective intentionality, because what happens is not planned in advance but arises from spontaneous interactions in the group. The second and no less decisive reason is that jazz musicians act together in a very distinctive way, which casts into clear relief the interplay between togetherness and agonism, individual freedom and group commitment, which is contained in every human interaction. In other words, in free jazz we find what Hannah Arendt calls the “paradoxical” or “twofold” character of “human plurality.” Starting with the analysis of two paradigmatic case studies—Charles Mingus’s Folk Forms No. 1 and Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation—my main concern in this paper is to provide a phenomenological account of the individual-yet-plural intentionality that emerges and runs through the improvisatory process in the free jazz case. After having made the negative point that this phenomenon represents a challenge to the analytical theories of collective intentionality, I shall argue that it can be accounted for from a phenomenological perspective. My basic thesis is that the overall cohesiveness of the improvisatory process must be regarded as a meaningful realization of an overall feeling, shared and shaped together by musicians over time—and not as the execution of an advanced plan.

Collectively accepted social norms and performativity: the pursuit of normativity of globalization in economic institutions

ABSTRACT Although the philosophical literature on social institutions has been insightful for social scientific studies, the application of its core concepts, such as collective intentionality, to real institutional dynamics remains challenging. One factor contributing to this situation is insufficient work that identifies collectively accepted social norms and shows how they constitute social institutions. Relying on the perspectives of John Searle and Raimo Tuomela, this study integrates recent analyses of the concept of performativity with discourse analysis. It presents an analytic framework, drawing on the concept of nominalization, to identify collectively accepted social norms that performatively constitute social institutions. Finally, it illustrates the identification of collectively accepted ‘globalization’ that performatively constitutes and shapes economic institutions engaged in corporate financial reporting. This study contributes to closing the gap between philosophical analyses of social institutions and social scientific studies by highlighting the performance of nominalized collectively accepted social norms.

Legislative Intent, Collective Intentionality and Fictionalism

It is commonly taken for granted that legislatures form intentions and act on them. When a legislature passes a law, it comes naturally to think that this is the law that the legislature intended to make. Furthermore, legal officials often claim that they interpret statutes according to the legislature’s intention, or on the basis of the ends that the legislature intended to pursue. Now the question is: can institutional entities such as legislatures have intentional attitudes? According to some writers, the answer is negative. Legislatures are not capable of forming genuine intentions. Legislative intentions can obviously be attributed to the members of a legislative body but individual intentions do not matter with regard to the statutory contents. This standpoint is puzzling, however. As a matter of political theory, it seems meaningless to give a legislative body law-making power unless the law that the members of this body make is the law they intended to make. Furthermore, any conception of judging rooted in the principle of legislative supremacy appears unintelligible without a conception of legislative intent. This is the reasons why a number of legal scholars defend the common view that legislatures do have intentions and act on them. To vindicate this view, however, one is to show that intentional attitudes can be attributed to legislative bodies and that such intentions can be known. An obvious way to address these issues is to rely on collective intentionality. The general idea is that legislative intent is something that individual legislators join together, that allows them to act in a coordinative and cooperative fashion and to achieve collective goals. Based on all this, I will defend four claims in this paper: (1) Individual legislators necessarily share a collective participatory intention when they legislate. A legislature is able to legislate only if individual legislators intend that the legislature enacts a statute. (2) However, participatory intentions do not determine statutory contents, nor individual legislators necessarily share any form of communicative intention when they participate in the legislative activity. (3) When legal officials resort to legislative intent in legal interpretation, they actually make reference to a fictional entity within a collective game of make-believe. (4) Yet, legislative intent qua fictional entity serves important functions in current legal systems. It is the cornerstone of a set of argumentative frameworks that provide guidance to judicial interpretation, contribute to align individual expectations with regard to statutory contents, put constraints on how litigants and courts pursue their goals, help identifying the interpretive practice legal officials are engaged in. In short, legislative intent is a coordination tool for practice of legal officials. Furthermore, fictionalism calls attention to the fact that when judges interpret statuses according to legislative intent, they actually employ various interpretative frameworks that are grounded on concurrent principles and values. Choosing one doctrine of legislative intent over the others ultimately depends on the normative claim that this choice will make legal interpretation better.

Supplemental Material for Forum Theater Can Improve Intergroup Attitudes, Sense of Community, and Collective Action Intentions: Evidence From Liberia

Supplemental Material for Forum Theater Can Improve Intergroup Attitudes, Sense of Community, and Collective Action Intentions: Evidence From Liberia

СПІВВІДНОШЕННЯ ІНДИВІДУАЛЬНОГО ТА КОЛЕКТИВНОГО НАМІРУ ВЗЛОЧИНІ ГЕНОЦИДУ (НА ПРИКЛАДІГОЛОДОМОРУ-ГЕНОЦИДУ ПРОТИ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ НАЦІЇ)

The article deals with the definition of the concept of intent to commit genocide in the Statute of the International Criminal Court, in the document “Elements of Crimes” adopted by the International Criminal Court, as well as in decisions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, International Criminal Court and in practice of the International Court of Justice. The author reveals constitutive elements of the concept of intent to commit genocide: intent to be engaged in the conduct which would cause destructive consequences for a national, ethnic, religious or racial group as such; intent to reach these consequences; or awareness that they will occur as a result of this conduct in the ordinary course of events. The author indicates slightly different approaches of the international criminal tribunals and courts to knowledge of the consequences as a result of destruction of a group. It is stated that the intent should not necessarily be fixed in documents or formulated in public oral speeches, but may also be certified by facts and circumstances of a crime. The author analyzes different circumstances which may evidence the intent to commit genocide. Special attention is paid to differentiation between individual and collective intent to commit genocide. The author examines the intent to commit genocide in the Holodomor organized against the Ukrainian national and ethnic group.

The Social Enterprise Company in Europe: Policy, Theory and Isomorphism

The last decade or so has witnessed a proliferation in the introduction of corporate organisational constructs to facilitate social enterprise across many European jurisdictions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this phenomenon, and provide an (initial) analytical framework through which the social enterprise company can be understood, both on its own terms and with respect to the traditional business organisation. The paper begins by laying out policymakers’ collective intentions for designing the social enterprise company. From this departure point, the discussion then turns to theorising the social enterprise company’s organisational architecture. The social enterprise company is a hybrid organisational construct, which combines specific legal mechanisms and institutional logics of public, private and social economy organisations together. The social enterprise company is designed to create social value. For this reason it operates according to the principle of publicness. The intention was also for the social enterprise company to be resource flexible and attract altruistic investors and managers. The paper then further extends the theoretical discussion by examining the social enterprise company’s isomorphic prevention mechanisms, which encourage impact fidelity in the context of a conversion or a winding up. The paper concludes with some criticisms and suggestions for improvement.

The Semiotics of Development: Towards the Economics of Path Dependence

Development is a concept whose ontological foundations are include phenomena, such as technologies, institutions, and cultural traits that embody the determinants of development differentials. This contribution argues that semiotics is the science to study these complex phenomena of development. Its approach is based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics and John Searle’s analysis of social reality. Development trajectories are depicted as specific compounds of institutions (signs), technologies (objects), and markets (interpretants) that create meaningful properties depending on symbolic forms. Development is a socially structured and observer-relative phenomenon. Developmental semiosis depends upon symbolic powers that structure and assemble collective intentionality. The paper advances two critical conditions essential to development. The first is semiotic intra-coherence, which is related with the bridging of dispositional functions in a coordinated way in networks of artifacts and users. The second is inter-coherence. It takes place as the supervenient causality of social structures and the performative character of habitual patterns of behavior. Both are intertwined in syntactic and semantic forms evolving in time by forging the development of path-dependent trajectories.

What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Community? Commentary on “It Takes a Village to Sustain a Village” by Christina Hertel, Sophie Bacq, and Frank-Martin Belz

In light of Hertel et al.’s contribution, our commentary offers a constructive critique and reflects on three opportunities to continue expanding the frontiers in our limited understanding of commu...

Collective Affordances

This article develops an ecological framework for understanding collective action. This is contrasted with approaches familiar from the collective intentionality debate, which treat individuals (with collective intentions) as fundamental units of collective action. Instead, we turn to social ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory and argue that they provide a promising framework for understanding collectives as the central unit in collective action. However, we submit that these approaches do not yet appreciate enough the relevance of social identities for collective action. To analyze this aspect, we build on key insights from social identity theory and synthesize it with embodied and ecological accounts of perception and action. This results in the proposal of two new types of affordances. For an individual who enacts her “embodied social identity” of being a member of a particular collective, there can be what we call embodied social identity affordances. Moreover, when several individuals dynamically interact with each other against the background of their embodied social identities, this might lead to the emergence of a collective, which we understand as a dynamically constituted and ecologically situated perception-action system consisting of several individuals enacting relevant embodied social identity affordances. Building on previous work in social ecological psychology, we suggest that there can be genuine collective affordances, that is, affordances whose subject is not an individual, but a collective.

Intercorporeity and the first-person plural in Merleau-Ponty

A theory of the first-person plural occupies a unique place in philosophical investigations into intersubjectivity and social cognition. In order for the referent of the first-person plural—“the We”—to come into existence, it seems there must be a shared ground of communicative possibility, but this requires a non-circular explanation of how this ground could be shared in the absence of a pre-existing context of communicative conventions. Margaret Gilbert’s and John Searle’s theories of collective intentionality capture important aspects of the We, but fail to fully account for this shared ground of communicative possibility. This paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intercorporeity helps reconcile the positive aspects of these accounts while also explaining how the genesis of the social world is continuous with perceptual life in general. This enables an account of the first-person plural as dependent on reciprocal communicative interaction (a la Gilbert) without the need to posit a primitive or primordial “we-mode” of consciousness (a la Searle). “Intercorporeity” designates a bodily openness to others that is not fundamentally different in kind from the general style of bodily comportment found in Merleau-Ponty’s rich analyses of perceptual life.

Data, Data Everywhere, Not a Lot in Sync

Up to 100 billion devices will be seeking to visually map out our existence over the internet by 2020 (UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser 2014). Just as the urban is a forcefield "of spatial transformations... that takes many different morphological forms” (Brenner 2014), this paper explores another underlying forcefield: our visual relationship with data. The most important piece of data, the individual, exists in the city as both prey and predator; having evolved from a "passive aesthetic view of the city” (Appleyard 1979, 144); transformed through shared territory (Evans and Jones 2008); and forged into impressively intricate sets of power relations through collective intentionality (Searle 2011). Through the presentation of self (Goffman, 1969, cited in Appleyard 1979, 146) we inhabit another home: the digital; in which we are simultaneously co-existent and removed by synchronisation of data. Traditionally, the software authoring the physical production of ‘space/hardware' has been value driven (Raban, 1974, 128, cited in Appleyard 1979, 146). In a parallel universe, algorithms drive the data. For Ellis (2012) it is in the software, that meaning resides. What then is the allure of data to the individual? And what is the allure of the individual to data? It lies arguably in the perception of power and control through meaning (Appleyard, Searle et al.). We seek in the new reality to "discover where the real power lies” (Appleyard 1979, 146). Curiously, the power of data appears to increase the irrelevancy of ownership, between "ours” and "theirs” (Appleyard 1979, 152). This paper analyses past, present, and future states of data production. The data we get from data; data produced from objects; and objects produced from data. In closing, a speculative working hypothesis is presented of visual data production, which hopefully encourages further research reconciling data with meaning in the context of visual sustainability.

Being one of us. Group identification, joint actions, and collective intentionality

ABSTRACTWithin social psychology, group identification refers to a mental process that leads an individual to conceive of herself as a group member. This phenomenon has recently attracted a great deal of attention in the debate about shared agency. In this debate, group identification is appealing to many because it appears to explain important forms of intentionally shared actions in a cognitively unsophisticated way. This paper argues that, unless important issues about group identification are not illuminated, the heuristic function ascribed to this notion for an understanding of shared agency remains dubious at best and unfulfilled at worst. This paper offers such a clarification by distinguishing and describing two different mental processes that constitute group identification: adoption of the group perspective and transformation in self-understanding. It is claimed that the latter process consists in the production of what Ruth Millikan labels “Pushmi-Pullyu representations” and that it is developmentally prior with respect to the ability of adopting the group perspective.

A frame of analysis for collective free improvisation on the bridge between Husserl’s phenomenology of time and some recent readings of the predictive coding model

The kind of collective improvisation attained by the “free jazz” at the beginning of the sixties sets a challenge to analytic theories of collective intentionality, that emphasize the role played by future-directed plans in the interlocking and interdependent intentions (and attitudes) of the individual participants, because in the free jazz case the performers’ interdependence or [interplay] stems from an intuitive understanding between musicians. Otherwise said: what happens musically is not planned in advance, but arises from spontaneous interactions in the group. By looking at the way jazz improvisers take up the challenge of making music together without a pre-conceived notion as to what kind of effect they will achieve and without a pre-set code of agreements (related to theme, chord patterns and chorus lengths), my aim has been to clarify what kind of strategies — other than advanced action plans and joint commitments — are used by improvising musicians to integrate their improvisations into a unified shared activity. In developing this proposal I initially drawn pre-theoretically on one paradigmatic study case — Ornette Coleman’s double quartet Free Jazz, A collective Improvisation (1960) and brought it in conversation with Husserl’s phenomenology of time. In a final move, I brought this phenomenological frame into dialogue with some recent readings of the predictive coding model. All in all, what we learned from the Free Jazz case is that the interdependence and interlocking of attitudes among individual participants characteristic of shared intention is not determined by a future-directed plan and the rational pressure to be responsive to and coordinate with others, it typically engages. Rather, in the free jazz case, the performers’ connection and interplay depend on the players’ readiness to feel each other out, by listening to each other playing, in a way that no doubt presupposes the Husserlian retention-protention scheme.

Revisit euphemisms from the perspective of intentionality

This paper studies the role of intentionality in the process of generating euphemisms. Intentionality, as the key to human consciousness activities, is not only the starting point of the language user’s consciousness activity related to euphemism generation, but also functions through the whole generating process. Its functions can be specified as triggering, orientation, and selection. Collective intentionality restricts individual intentionality and has the function of identifying and integrating individual intentionality. Under the effect of collective intentionality and social environment, the euphemisms are renewed with the time and bear features unique to a particular group.

CONSTITUTIVE ASPECTS OF JOINT ACTIVITY: PRERQUISITES AND CONTRADICTIONS OF REALIZING COOPERATIVE RELATIONS

The article examines the dominant paradigm and current research state of the theoretical and practical dimension of cooperative behavior based on the notion of “collective intentionality” scrutinized within the framework of analytic social philosophy. Accordingly, the goal was to elaborate foundational normative, socio-ontological and psychological aspects of the debate around the underlying nature of the mechanisms of content, modality, and subjects of shared praxeological undertakings, outline major points of agreement, controversy and contention in positions and arguments of the principal sides and their proponents.

Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication.

Parallels in anatomy between humans and domesticated mammals suggest that for the last 300,000 years, Homo sapiens has experienced more intense selection against the propensity for reactive aggression than other species of Homo. Selection against reactive aggression, a process that can also be called self-domestication, would help explain various physiological, behavioral, and cognitive features of humans, including the unique system of egalitarian male hierarchy in mobile hunter-gatherers. Here I review nine leading proposals for the occurrence of self-domestication in H. sapiens. To account for the domestication syndrome, proposals must explain what led to a decline in fitness of highly aggressive males, and why the explanatory factor applies only to H. sapiens and not to other species of Homo. The proposed explanations invoke genetic group selection; group-structured culture selection (also known as cultural group selection); social selection by female mate choice; social selection by male partner choice; increased self-control; cooperative breeding; high population density; use of lethal weapons; and language-based conspiracy. Most of these proposals face difficulties in accounting for the origins and/or maintenance of reduced reactive aggression. I conclude that the evolution of language-based conspiracy, which is a form of collective intentionality, was the key factor initiating and maintaining self-domestication in H. sapiens, because it is the most convincing mechanism for explaining the selective pressure against individually powerful fighters. Sophisticated language enabled males of low fighting prowess to cooperatively plan the execution of physically aggressive and domineering alpha males. This system is known today as a leveling mechanism in small-scale societies. Group-structured culture selection possibly accelerated the process.

'We got the power!': the political potential of street choirs Campaign Choirs Writing Collective

This article champions the power of song and looks at the activities of 'street choirs'- groups that sing together with collective political intent in public space, as a form of cultural activism. In addition to a socialist core, street choirs in the UK coalesce around feminism, the peace and anti-nuclear movements and, more recently, environmentalism and LGBTQ activism. The authors discuss the emotions that song and singing release, and the connections and solidarities that may then be created between people. They also explore the wider context of music and emotion, and look at the relationship between words and music and between music and place. They argue that social movements can both learn from and educate through song, and that choirs can engage in acts of citizenship by following up on the emotions released by their performances, and engaging in debate on the issues raised. The article includes excerpts from interviews with choir members.

Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority

This paper examines the ways in which group speech acts involve speakers. Against the view that groups need spokespeople speak for (or on behalf of, or in the name of) them, I argue that groups can speak for themselves. Group speech acts are a special type of joint intentional action. Groups speak when they express their illocutionary intention. Group illocutionary intentions are collective intentions of their members, and they are collective in virtue of the members' plural pre-reflective self-knowledge of what it is they – together – want to say. It is only in virtue of the groups’ ability to speak for themselves that they can authorize individual spokespeople to speak for them.1

Boundary Negotiations in a Self-Organized Grassroots-Led Food Network: The Case of REKO in Finland

Self-organization is a term that is increasingly used to describe how engaged citizens come together to create sustainable food systems at the local community level. Yet, there is a lack of understanding of what this self-organizing activity actually means. While previous literature has addressed self-organization as an outcome of building consensus and a collective intentionality shared by the members of a group, we focus on the complex social processes involved when people with a diverse set of interests and motivations interact in the food network. In this study, we analyze what kinds of boundary negotiations emerge when grassroots-led food networks scale up. Our embedded single case study focuses on a REKO (‘REjäl KOnsumtion’, meaning ‘fair consumption’ in English) network in Finland comprising distributed local food groups and three types of actors: consumers, producers, and local administrators. We examine a conflict that arose within the REKO network in May–June 2016 when a small group of actors demanded that all local groups should implement similar rules, principles, and ethical standards. Our findings illustrate how moral, geographic, market, and power boundaries emerge in a self-organized grassroots-led food network. We further explicate the challenges that may appear within a self-organized grassroots-led food network, as it grows in scale and scope.

Western and East Asian sociocultural learning models: Evidence from cross‐cultural and immigrant research

We review Li's research and theory of cultural learning models in light of Chirkov's (2019) theory of sociocultural models that draw on previous theories and research across social sciences. We recast Li's models as sociocultural learning models (SCLMs) by incorporating Chirkov's three emphases: (a) the inseparability between the social and the cultural, (b) the public versus individuals’ internalization ofSCLMs and their mutual enforcement, and (c) collective intentionality and intersubjectivity as embedded in the enactment ofSCLMs. As an initial attempt to document how publicSCLMs become internalized, we further examine the role of joint intentionality and intersubjectivity at the person‐to‐person level. We use discourse analysis to look at two mother–child conversations about learning from our current European American and Chinese immigrant research data. We show evidence that both joint intentionality and intersubjectivity are prevalently and deeply present in the process of parental socialization (transmittingSCLMs to their young). We conclude that intentionality and intersubjectivity are indispensable to enableSCLMs to exist and to continue by enabling the public to become internalized. The internalization is then enacted and repeated by members across the culture, who in turn function to uphold and renewSCLMs.