Notion Of Collective Intentionality Research Articles

Collective intentionality and autism: Against the exclusion of the “social misfits”

The paper aims to shed light on Searle?s notion of collective intentionality (CI) as a primitive phenomenon shared by all humans. The latter could be problematic given that there are individuals who are unable to grasp collective intentionality and fully collaborate within the framework of ?we-intentionality?. Such is the case of individuals with autism, given that the lack of motivation and skills for sharing psychological states with others is one of the diagnostic criteria for Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The paper will argue that exclusion of individuals with autism is not a threat for Searle?s notion of collective intentionality, as the notion can be read as merely a biological disposition that all human beings share. Furthermore, the paper proposes the extension of Searle?s concept of CI so it can include behaviors of individuals who have the disposition towards CI, but which was not evolved through ontogenesis; namely, for individuals with autism.

Steps Towards an Evolutionary Account of Argumentative Competence

In this paper a tentative explanation of the competence of argumentation from an evolutionary point of view is offered. Because in contemporary argumentation theory and the informal logic approach the evolutionary perspective has been neglected, this paper gives an initial overview on the matter with the hope that core aspects of the argumentative faculty—such as argumentative normativity, the function of arguments, or fallacious moves, among others—can be seen differently afterwards. In order to specify the proposal, the main concepts considered are the notion of collective intentionality, cooperation, reputation, niche construction and, of course, basic evolutionary terms.

Expanding on Ceremonial Encapsulation: The Case of Financial Innovation

:The aim of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework for the study and integration of financial innovation in the institutional structures that support the operation of the monetary system. The background of the analysis comes from original institutional economics (Bush and Tool 2003; Foster [1942] 1981, [1949] 1981; Veblen [1914] 1964, [1889] 1996), the state theory of money (Ingham 2004; Papadopoulos 2009), and a specific account of social ontology based on constitutive and normative rules as well as the notion of collective intentionality (Searle 2005, 2010). The aim is a dynamic framework for the analysis of the institutional evolution of money, whereby institutional change comes from technology, and the state acts both as regulator of the institutional adjustment and guarantor of the stability and the efficiency of the monetary system. In that sense, the framework outlines the context and principles for the government regulation of financial innovation.

Is Society Built on Collective Intentions? A Response to Searle

The following considerations belong to what has recently been discussed as “social ontology”. The paper deals with Searle’s understanding of the difference between social and natural reality. The thesis is that this differentiation falls short because it supports a wrong ontological hierarchy. Social ontology is mistakenly, as I want to show, designed by Searle as a domain-specific ontology subjected to the ontology of nature. I will cast doubt on the persuasive power of this idea by dealing with Searle’s notion of collective intentionality, which lies at the very heart of his doctrine of social and institutional facts: social reality shall originate from collective intentionality. But this notion stands for a wrong objectification of the social, for it is highly questionable whether the social is really exhausted by being the content of our action plans and truth-apt thoughts.

Collective Intentionality, Rationality, and Institutions

Collective intentionality is of central importance in social ontology. In this paper, we will discuss its role in Searle’s understanding of social ontology and institutional reality. The first section of the paper will reconstruct Searle’s understanding of social ontology and his identification of necessary elements for constructing institutional reality. In this section, we will discuss the notions of imposition of function, of collective intentionality, and of constitutional rule. The second section will critically re-examine the notion of collective intentionality. The third section will contrast Searle’s understanding of institutional reality with the one based on evolutionary game theory. Taking into account that Searle describes his position as naturalistic, the main task of this section will be to examine to what extent the alternative theory, also naturalistic in its character, can address certain problems, which remain insolvable in the framework of Searle’s theory.

Descrizione e critica del mondo sociale: due compiti della Documentalità

The paper examines the constitutive rule of the Documentality (object = written act), its explanatory power, and the role that writing and relations play in it. The social object is explained as a hybrid object, of higher order, consisting of heterogeneous parts; its identity is determined, amongst other things, by the relations it entertains with other entities. In the second part, after criticizing Searle’s notion of collective intentionality, which fails to explain conflict situations, the article focuses on some political implications of social ontology, examining the role of immigrants sans papiers.

3.1. Intenzionalità e documentalità

On the basis of a critique of the notion of collective intentionality employed by John Searle to explain social reality, the article argues Searle’s constitutive rule that, for social objects “X counts as Y in C” raises more problems than it solves. Searle was perfectly right to say that Derrida’s formula “there is nothing outside the text” is false. But we can vindicate (and emend) Derrida by saying “ there is nothing social outside the text”: social objects are identified with the inscrbed acts that give rise to them.

Institutions, distributed cognition and agency: rule-following as performative action

Aoki recently proposed the concept of substantive institutions, a concept that relates the outcomes of strategic interaction with public representations of the equilibrium states of games. I argue that the Aoki model can be grounded in theories of distributed cognition and performativity, which I put into the context of Searle's philosophical account of institutions. Substantive institutions build on regularized causal interactions between internal neuronal mechanisms and external facts, shared in a population of agents. Following Searle's proposal of conceiving rule-following as a neuronally anchored behavioral disposition, I show that his corresponding notion of collective intentionality can be grounded in recent neuroscience theories of imitation as the primordial process in human learning. I relate this to Searle's concept of status function and the neuronal theory of metaphors. This results in a precise definition of rule-following as performative action. I present two empirical examples of this: (1) the institution of money, and (2) status hierarchies in markets.

Collective Intentionality: A Human – not a Monkey – Business

In Making the Social World Searle makes the same claim he made in 1995: that “Human beings along with a lot of other social animals, have the capacity for collective intentionality” (Searle 2010, 43). In this paper I aim to show that Searle’s “overattribution” of collective intentionality to non-human animals is unjustified. Firstly, I briefly reconstruct and augment Tomasello & Rakoczy’s (2007) criticism that Searle overemphasises the primitiveness of the notion of collective intentionality. Secondly, I will investigate the domain of cooperative behaviour by means of a comparative, crossspecies methodology driven by an enactivist approach. Such an approach can help us to understand (i) why Searle overattributes collective intentionality, (ii) how we can resist such an overattribution, and (iii) why we ought to resist it. Thirdly, I argue that Searle’s six conditions of adequacy for any account of collective intentionality are incompatible with his attribution of collective intentionality to non-human animals. Finally, I conclude by noting that Searle’s overattribution has important consequences for his system, as it implicates that human uniqueness begins with institutional reality rather than with collective intentionality and social ontology.

Joint Motor Action and Cross-Creature Embodiment

The question of what is shared in joint action has been discussed mainly with reference to the notion of collective intentionality. The problem of how to account for intentional states that are shared between two or more jointly engaged creatures is particularly relevant for actions that involve distal intentions. Yet there is another important kind of joint action, which so far has received less interest, at least by philosophers. This kind of action can be described in terms of a shared motor engagement of two or more creatures with their surroundings. In this paper, I address the question of what is shared in such motor engagements. I suggest that joint motor actions come off through sharing particular kinds of feelings. In order to flesh out what it means to share feelings, I introduce the notion of ‘cross-creature embodiment’—the idea that a certain type of embodied mental event is constitutively tied to the body state of another, perceptually present creature in broadly the same way in which it is tied to the experiencing creature’s own. I end by suggesting that this notion makes available a new, albeit tentative, interpretation of recent neuroscientific evidence.

Institutions, Distributed Cognition and Agency: Rule-Following as Performative Action

Recently, Aoki proposed the concept of substantive institutions which relates outcomes of strategic interaction with public representations of equilibrium states of games. I argue that the Aoki model can be grounded in theories of distributed cognition and performativity, which I put into the context of Searle’s philosophical account of institutions. Substantive institutions build on regularized causal interactions between internal neuronal mechanisms and external facts, which are shared in a population of agents. Following Searle’s proposal to conceive rule following as a neuronally anchored behavioral disposition, I show that his corresponding notion of collective intentionality can be grounded in recent neuroscience theories about imitation as the primordial process in human learning. I relate this with Searle’s concept of status function and the neuronal theory of metaphors, resulting in a precise definition of rule-following as performative action. I present two empirical examples, the institution of money and status hierarchies in markets.

Rules, Social Ontology and Collective Identity

Mainstream game theory explains cooperation as the outcome of the interaction of agents who permanently pursue their individual goals. Amartya Sen argues instead that cooperation can only be understood by positing a type of rule‐following behaviour that can be (and often is) out of phase with the pursuit of individual goals, due to the existence of a collective identity. However, Sen does not clarify the ontological preconditions for the type of social behaviour he describes. I will argue that Sen's account of collective identity can be best interpreted in the light of John Searle's notion of collective intentionality, while Sen's explanation of rule‐following behavior and agency is best understood using the critical realist transformational model of social activity.

From extended mind to collective mind

Although the notion of collective intentionality has received considerable attention over the past decade, accounts of collective belief and intention remain individualistic. Most accounts analyze group intentional states in terms of a complex set of individual intentional states and, thus, it is individuals not groups that have intentional states. In this paper, I attempt to undermine one of the motivations for refusing to acknowledge groups as the bearers of mental states. The resistance to collective mental states is motivated by the view that mental states are located in minds and minds are in heads. Since groups do not have heads or brains, they cannot have minds or mental states. There is a significant and important thesis in cognitive science, however, which suggests that the mind is not bounded by skin and bones. If “the mind ain’t in the head”, then this removes a major barrier to the idea of collective minds.

Collective Intentionality, Evolutionary Biology and Social Reality1

The paper aims to clarify and scrutinize Searle”s somewhat puzzling statement that collective intentionality is a biologically primitive phenomenon. It is argued that the statement is not only meant to bringout that “collective intentionality” is not further analyzable in terms of individual intentionality. It also is meant to convey that we have a biologically evolved innate capacity for collective intentionality.The paper points out that Searle”s dedication to a strong notion of collective intentionality considerably delimits the scope of his endeavor. Furthermore, evolutionary theory does not vindicate that an innate capacity for collective intentionality is a necessary precondition for cooperative behavior.1 1Useful comments made by the participants of the Amsterdam seminar in Philosophy and History of Economics (11 November 2002), by the participants of the Third Workshop in Collective Intentionality (Rotterdam, 12-14 December 2002), and by the editors of this special issue are gratefully acknowledged. I also want to thank an anonymous referee for making helpful suggestions.

Searle and Collective Intentionality

ABSTRACT . Several key elements go into Searle's construction of social reality, namely, collective intentionality, constitutive rules, and status functions. But by far the most important and arguably contentious of these is collective intentionality. Searle postulates his notion of collective intentionality as a solution to a conflict between two of his own problematic claims: the irreducibility of collective intentions to singular intentions and what he sees as the requirements of methodological individualism. According to Searle, methodological individualism seems to require that we reduce collective intentionality to individual intentionality; however, this contradicts his claim that collective intentionality is irreducible to individual intentionality plus some mutual beliefs. I will show that at least part of what is really at stake here is Searle's internalism or, as he puts it, his “brain in a vat condition.” My strategy will be to examine his internalism and show that Searle's account is far more radical than other internalists in that he extends internalism beyond its usual domain of the mental to incorporate social facts. While there are no knockdown arguments in favor of either internalism or externalism as normally construed in the philosophy of mind, I will show that Searle's account of collective intentionality introduces an element of privacy to social facts that denies us the public access to the conditions on the basis of which we normally take collective facts to obtain.