Collective Agency

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES, 2003

In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peters (eds.), Social Ontology and Collective Intentionality: Critical Essays on the Philosophy of Raimo Tuomela with his Responses, 37-70, Springer, 2017

This paper discusses Raimo Tuomela's we-mode account in his recent book "Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents" and develops the idea that mode should be thought of as representational. I argue that in any posture – intentional state or speech act – we do not merely represent a state of affairs as what we believe, or intend etc. – as the received view of 'propositional attitudes' has it –, but our position relative to that state of affairs and thus ourselves. That is, we represent the subject through what I call "subject mode" and its position through what I call "position mode". I argue that the key to understanding collective intentionality is to understand how we represent others as co-subjects of positions rather than as their objects. This is shown on various levels of collective intentionality. On the non-conceptual level of joint attention we experience others as co-subjects who we attend with rather than to and who we are at least also disposed to act jointly with. On the conceptual level of the we-mode we represent others as co-subjects of positions of knowledge, intention, belief and shared values. Organizations and thus group agents in Tuomela's sense I propose to understand in terms of what I call "role mode", that is, in terms of the positions individuals and groups take as occupants of certain roles, for example, as committee members, or as chancellor of Germany. I try to show how this account, while very much in the spirit of Tuomela's, can avoid his fictionalism about group agents and some other problems of his account, while steering between the Scylla of excessive individualism and the Charybdis of extreme collectivism.

In this course, we survey contemporary treatments of collective intentionality. Situated amidst discussions of agency and intentionality in a social context, collective intentionality broadly refers to the kind of intentionality that allows people to experience, act, or think about something together, or as a group. Collective intentionality is manifested in a variety of phenomena. For example, joint attention is a basic form of intersubjective awareness of the world as perceptually available in the pursuit of shared engagements. Shared intentions allow people to carry out collaborative activities and tasks in a coordinated and cooperative manner. Collective acceptance is a key mechanism for the creation and maintenance of symbolic realities such as language, institutions, and power relations. Collective beliefs provide a common ground of normative commitments to regulate shared deliberative and evaluative practices. The power of collective emotions to fuel social conflicts, or to unite people, is evident from the history of mass gatherings, public rituals, and political movements. It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which collective intentionality permeates the social and cultural fabric of our lives. But what exactly does it mean to ascribe intentionality to people 'as a group' – provided that collective intentionality is not just a shorthand for the ‘summative’ or ‘aggregate’ intentionality of individuals? The distinctive focus of the philosophical analysis of collective intentionality rests on the conceptual, metaphysical, psychological, and normative features which underlie the 'joint' or 'shared' character of experiences, actions, and attitudes, and the related question of how these features help constitute the social world. The resurgence of interest in collective intentionality began in the late 1980s, and substantially expanded in the 1990s, thanks mostly to the pioneering work of John Searle, Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman, and Raimo Tuomela. Today, collective intentionality is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary area of philosophical research which draws on, and has left its mark on, social ontology and epistemology, phenomenology, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, political science, economics, legal theory, and cultural and evolutionary anthropology. Our goal in this course is to compare and contrast leading theories of collective intentionality by delving into specific debates over the nature of joint attention, collective intentions and beliefs, collective acceptance and shared evaluative attitudes, collective emotions, collective knowledge and rationality, as well as collective agency and responsibility.

Narrative Alternatives to …, 2007

Cognitive Systems Research, 2006

2016

People often do things together and form groups in order to get things done that they cannot do alone. In short they form a collectivity of some kind or a group, for short. But if we consider a group on the one hand and the persons that constitute the group on the other hand, how does it happen that these persons work together and finish a common task with a common goal? In the philosophy of action this problem is often solved by saying that there is a kind of collective intention that the group members have in mind and that guides their actions. Does such a collective intention really exist? In this article I’ll show that the answer is “no”. In order to substantiate my view I’ll discuss the approaches of Bratman, Gilbert and Searle on collective intention. I’ll put forward four kinds of criticism that undermine the idea of collective intention. They apply mainly to Bratman and Gilbert. First, it is basically difficult to mark off smaller groups from bigger unities. Second, most gro...

1977

One of the most powerful theoretical conceptions behind current research in pragmatics1 is the idea that a theory of linguistic communication is really only a special case of a general theory of human action. According to this view, the various linguistic subdisciplines such as phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics should be regarded as the studies of different abstract aspects of underlying communicative actions.

Nous 41:3 355-393, 2007