## 1. The Central Problem



Suppose you intend to visit the Taj Mahal tomorrow, and I intend to
visit the Taj Mahal tomorrow. This does not make it the case that
we intend to visit the Taj Mahal together. If I know about your plan,
I may express (or refer to) our intention in the form "we intend
to visit the Taj Mahal tomorrow". But this does not imply
anything collective about our intentions. Even if knowledge about our
plan is common, mutual, or open between us, my intention and your
intention may still be purely individual. For us to intend to visit
the Taj Mahal *together* is something different.



Distributions (summations, aggregates) of individual intentions do not
make for collective intentions, even if combined with common
knowledge, or mutual belief. This is accepted by an increasing number
of contributors to the recent debate. Collectively intentional
attitudes are not just sets of run-of-the-mill individual intentional
attitudes combined with common knowledge or mutual belief. Another way
of putting this is to say that collective intentionality is
*irreducible* to individual intentionality (though this is
generally accepted only insofar as individual intentionality is
narrowly understood). It is only in virtue of its irreducibility that
the intentional state in question can be attributed to the
participants *as a group*.



What does it mean for us to intend *as a group*? Surely, if we
intend to visit the Taj Mahal together, it is you and me who intend
the shared activity, not some third subject over and above our heads,
*the group*. That we intend as a group does not displace you
and me as the intenders of the action in question. To say that the
group intends to go for a walk is *the same as* saying that the
participating individuals intend to go for a walk-- if
"together" is added to the latter clause (and where
exactly it has to be inserted is a crucial philosophical question).
Collective intentions can be attributed to individuals, but only
collectively, it seems, and not distributively. The view that the
intentional attitudes in question are the participant
individuals' collectively rather than distributively, however,
is in tension with the view that even if an individual participates in
collective intentionality, all the intentional attitudes that
individuals has are their own (the Individual Ownership Thesis).



On the naturalist version of the Individual Ownership Thesis, any
(primary) intentional state is a higher order feature of a brain. It
is not the case that in collective intentionality, individual brains
are integrated in a Borg-like manner to form a collective super-brain.
Therefore, it seems that collective intentionality reduces to an
aggregate, or combination, of individual brain states. According to an
internalist version, all the intentionality an individual has is
structurally independent of the existence or non-existence of anything
outside the individual mind. The question of whether or not an
individual's intentional states are collective is therefore
settled by internal features of individual minds. A third version,
that might seem attractive to non-naturalists and externalists,
emphasizes that intentional states are, or involve, commitments. It
seems, however, that only an individual agent's own intentional
states can commit them to a particular course of action, or to
inferences. Other individuals' intentional states may provide an
agent with a reason only on the base of what they themselves believe
or desire. Thus, it seems that the commitments involved in collective
intentional states are the individual commitments of each of the
participants.



In all of these and related versions of the Individual Ownership
Thesis, the basic claim is that each individual has a mind of their
own and has a sort of intentional autonomy that is incompatible with
the view that individual minds are somehow fused when intentional
states are shared. Thus, the Individual Ownership Thesis places tight
restrictions on non-reductivism about collective intentionality. Most
participants in the current debate accept a version of the
Irreducibility Claim, and a version of the Individual Ownership
Thesis, and they set out to show how these could be modified in such a
way as to be mutually compatible.


## 2. History



The label "collective intentionality" is fairly recent (in
its current meaning, it was introduced by John Searle in his 1990
paper "Collective Intentions and Actions"). In contrast to
the label, the concept is not new. The idea of collective
intentionality is implied in such notions as Aristotle's concept
of *koinonia* (common striving), Jean-Jacque
Rousseau's collective will (*volonte*
*generale*), or in notions such as *the spirit
of peoples* and related concepts as developed in German Idealism
or the Historical School of Law. Somewhat more explicit conceptions of
collective intentionality can be found in early social and
sociological theory
 (2.1),
 Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
 (2.2),
 and in the works of Robin G. Collingwood and Wilfrid Sellars
 (2.3).
 These largely independent sources focus on key issues in the analysis
of collective intentionality that persist through history into the
present.


### 2.1 Social and Sociological Theory



Emile Durkheim (1898) and Max Weber (1922) have developed conceptions
of collective intentionality under other labels, and they have come to
quite different and indeed opposite views.



Durkheim claims that social facts have to be accounted for in terms of
*collective consciousness* rather than individual attitudes.
His (1898) example of people who are involved in a mass emotion, of
which they cannot make sense in terms of their own personal views and
feelings, is often quoted as an illustration. Indeed, Durkheim's
view is sometimes even argued to be the direct historical root of the
current debate on collective intentionality (Olen/Turner 2015).
Durkheim's remarks on the role of collective consciousness
suggest a view of the collective "taking over control" and
bypassing individual intentional psychology in the explanation of
action (though Durkheim's views can also be reconstructed along
less collectivist lines; see Turner 1986). Durkheim's work is
one of the historical sources for the analysis of collective emotions
(von Scheve and Salmela 2014).



Weber, by contrast, is famous for assigning the decisive role in the
explanation of social facts to the intentional attitudes of
individuals. He claims that many social situations are situations of
strategic interdependence between individual decisions. In such
situations, fully rational agents choose their preferred course of
action on the basis of what they cognitively expect other agents to
do. However, Weber is well aware of the fact that where dependence of
each participant's choice on his or her expectation concerning
the other's behavior is out in the open, the situation becomes
unstable. In addressing this issue, Weber discusses the case in which
people act on the assumption of being *in agreement* with other
agents, which then enables them to have *normative*
expectations concerning each other's behavior. This is a
decisive step beyond what has later become known as rational choice
theory. Such agents do not choose according to what they think to be
best given what they think others are likely to do; rather, they rely
on others to do what they *ought* to do. This need not, Weber
claims, be a matter of explicit agreement, but may be grounded in a
sense of the agent's shared aims (and thus, we would now say, in
collective intentionality). However, such action orientation appears
as not fully rational in Weber's conception (Weber 1922).
Weber's conception thus foreshadows the neglect of collective
intentions and actions in later rational choice and game theory. 



(Quasi-)Durkheim's and Weber's conceptions mark the Scylla
and the Charybdis of the debate. The Scylla is a straightforward
anti-reductivism about collective intentionality that comes at the
cost of a flat-out rejection of individual intentional autonomy. The
Charybdis is a reductionist attempt that denies collective
intentionality for rational social agents.


### 2.2 Phenomenology



Substantive and concise philosophical analyses of collective
intentionality can be found in early Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy. These contributions have attracted increasing attention in
recent years (Salice & Schmid 2016; Moran & Szanto 2016).
Among the many relevant contributions and contributors (including
Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Jean-Paul Sartre), two stand out as
particularly important: Gerda Walther (1923), and Max Scheler (1954
[1912]). The paradigm case in their (implicit) controversy is shared
experience.



Walther claims that for *A* and *B* to share the experience
of *x*, i) *A* has to experience *x*, and *B* has
to experience *x*, ii) *A* has to empathize with
*B*'s experience and vice versa, iii) *A* has to
identify with *B*'s experience and vice versa, and iv)
there has to be mutual empathetic awareness of the other's
identification (Walther 1923: 85f.). Walther offers substantive
analyses of empathetic experience and identification, but the question
remains why the reciprocal intentional attitudes required from the
participants in shared experience stops at level three (current
accounts that follow similar lines usually require full common
knowledge). How could there be a shared experience between *A*
and *B* if *A* is *unaware* of the fact that *B*
is empathetically aware of *A*'s identification with
*B*'s experience, or some such? It seems easy to develop a
scenario in which Walther's conditions are met, but in which
there is no shared experience for lack of awareness of what the other
takes to be the case. If collective intentionality is analyzed in
terms of a combination of individual intentionality and mutual
recognition of some sorts, it seems that an infinite progress of
reciprocal attitudes is set off.



Scheler's most important contribution to the analysis of
collective intentionality is largely negative. Joint intentionality is
not, Scheler holds, a combination of individual intentionality with a
structure of reciprocal awareness, whatever the structure and kind of
the reciprocal awareness in question may be. From his analysis emerges
the view that when people share an attitude, it is not the case that
each participant has an attitude of his or her own, but that the
intentional attitude at stake here is really one and the same, so that
many minds are in a *numerically identical* state. The most
conspicuous examples Scheler discusses are the experience of grief
which parents, without thinking of each other, share at the deathbed
of their child (Scheler 1954 [1912]: 145), and the chillingly positive
account of the shared national enthusiasm (the August Madness) at the
outbreak of World War One (Scheler 1982 [1914]: 272ff.). Without
mentioning his source, Martin Heidegger follows roughly Schelerian
lines in his discussion of more innocent examples in (1996 [1928/29]).
The idea is that collective intentionality is not a combination of
individual intentionality and reciprocal attitudes, but irreducibly
collective (for a recent re-statement of this point see Searle 1995:
27). A problem of irreducibility-claims of this sort, however, is that
it is hard to believe that the participants in a collective
intentional attitude do not represent, in some way, each other, even
if they need not have occurrent beliefs or conscious empathetic
experience. A participant's intention represents the others as
co-intenders in some way, or so it seems (Searle seems to concede this
point in Searle 2010: 15). An important question to consider is
whether the relation between the co-intenders is of the cognitive,
normative, or rather of the affective kind. Tuomela & Miller
(1988) and Michael Bratman (1999) argue that the participants have to
*know* what the others are up to, Alonso (2009) argues that
they just have to *rely* on them, while Gilbert (1990) claims
that they have to *normatively expect* others to do their
parts. Schmid (2013) argues that the attitude in question is
*trust*, and that this combines cognitive and normative
components*.* The question of how participants in collective
intentionality "represent" each other becomes particularly
pressing if it is assumed that basic cases of shared intentionality
are developed at an age where infants do not have a theory of mind,
such as in Michael Tomasello's (2009) view.


### 2.3 Sellars' Conception of We-Intention



Whereas the mainstream of present debate about collective
intentionality probably has no direct roots in early social theory or
phenomenology, Wilfrid Sellars' concept of we-intention is
widely acknowledged as the point of departure (Tuomela & Miller
1988). We-intentions play a crucial role in Sellars' practical
philosophy. As we-attitudes, normative judgments can both express
people's attitudes, and have a claim to intersubjective
validity. The concept of a we-intention thus bridges emotivism and
intuitionism (Sellars 1974). We-intentions are attitudes, but at the
same time, they are not merely private, but involve a shared point of
view from which the participants may critically assess each
other's contributions.



Sellars argues that even though we-intentions are not private, they do
not involve a group mind. His view is that we-intentions are had by
individuals, but that they differ from individual intentions in their
form. According to the taxonomy developed below, his is a mode-account
of collective intentionality. Sellars' conception of
we-intention can be traced back to Robin G. Collingwood's
*New Leviathan* (1947), where Collingwood defines society as




> 
> 
> the sharing of certain persons in a practical social consciousness
> verbally expressed in a formula like 'We will go for this
> walk' or 'We will sail this boat'. (Collingwood
> 1947: 146) 
> 
> 
> 



In a chapter by the title "Society as joint will",
Collingwood argues that there is nothing mysterious about practical
social consciousness (148). All the individual participant needs to
have is a however vague general idea of the enterprise as a whole, and
a special idea of the part in it allotted to himself. In addition, the
participant must know that there are other agents who are partners
with him- or herself in this common endeavor, without having to know
who exactly they are. As "social consciousness,"
society



> 
> 
> is nothing over and above its members. It has no will but the will of
> its members; no activity but the activity of its members; no
> responsibility but the responsibility of its members. (149ff.).
> 
> 
> 



Sellars' interests differ from Collingwood's, but his
analysis closely follows Collingwood's lines. Sellars agrees
with Collingwood that the attitude in question requires no group mind
capable of belief or intention over and above the heads of the
participating individuals (Sellars 1968: 203). On this account, all
intentionality involved in group intention and group action is had
*by individuals*, but it is conceived as intentionality of a
special sort, which Sellars calls "action we-referential
intention", or, in short, "we-intention". It is thus
*individuals,* and not a group, that intend a joint action
(Sellars 1980: 98). This, however, leads Sellars to one of the deepest
problems in the analysis of collective practical intentionality. One
cannot intend what one takes to be entirely beyond one's
abilities, or beyond one's control (Sellars calls this the
"'up to the agent'ness" [Sellars 1980: 98] of
intention). Objects of intention are taken, by the agent, to be
"up to her", to some degree at least. How, then, can
individuals have we-intentions? It seems plausible to assume that the
behavior of each individual, insofar as it is an action, is up to that
individual him- or herself. An individual who has an
action-we-referential intention, however, does not only intend his or
her own behavior, but also the behavior of the other participants, and
this behavior is not up to him- or herself, but up to others. Thus
we-intention seems to be incompatible with the 'up to the
agent'-ness of intention.



In the current debate, this problem is sometimes bypassed by shifting
from action-referential to propositional intentions. Michael Bratman
analyzes shared intentions in terms of "intention,
*that*" rather than "intention *to*"
(in a closely related vein, Raimo Tuomela distinguishes action
intentions from aim intentions in parts of his work, e.g., Tuomela
2007: 84f.). To intend *that the door be closed* is different
from intending *to close the door* in that in the former case,
the subject having that intention may differ from the subject of the
intended action. Thus, the problem with we-referential intentions seems
to disappear as soon as intention is conceived of in propositional
rather than in action-referential terms. Sellars is fully aware of the
possibility of that move: 



> 
> 
> It is important to see that I can not only intend to do something
> myself, I can also intend that someone else do something, i.e., that
> it be the case that he does it. (Sellars 1968: 184) 
> 
> 
> 



Yet Sellars sees clearly that this apparent escape route is really a
dead end, and again, he follows Collingwood, who argued that
consciousness, insofar it is practical, is not a matter of
"making up your mind *that*", but a matter of
"making up your mind *to*" (Collingwood 1947: 139).
Talk of "intention *that something be the case*",
Sellars argues, may be grammatically correct, but it is understandable
as talk of *practical* commitments only in virtue of its
relation to "intention *to*". When spelled out, the
intention that *p* is really the intention to make it the case
that *p* (Sellars 1968: 184). Thus, a person's intention
that "we" do *x*, or that somebody else does
*x*, is a practical commitment only as an action-referential
intention (intention *to*): one intends to do whatever is
necessary to make it the case that we do *x*, or that somebody
else does *x*. This yields a solution to the problem (which
Sellars later calls "superficial"). A person may simply
assume that it is up to her what other people do because she takes
herself to have an *influence* on these other people (Sellars
1968: 188).



> 
> 
> That we can influence people is as relevant to practical reasoning as
> that we can influence sticks or stones. (Sellars 1980: 88)
> 
> 
> 



An agent who intends to bring her influence on others to bear in such
a way as to make it the case that others do what is necessary for the
intended state to obtain, however, does not have a proper
we-intention. The reason is that such intentionality does not go
beyond an egocentric perspective; it involves an extension of the
range of one's own intentionality into other people's
agency rather than any sense of sharing. Remember that Sellars
develops the idea of we-intention with an eye on making the intuition
that normative judgments express intentional attitudes compatible with
the view that they involve a claim to intersubjective validity. Just
that I intend to influence other people to behave in a certain way, or
to form certain intentions, does not make my attitude intersubjective
in such a way as to provide a stance for mutual critical
assessment.



In *On Reasoning about Values* (1980)*,* Sellars offers
an alternative solution to the 'up to the agent'ness
problem of we-intention: it involves



> 
> 
> the fact [...] that to say that the intendible constituents of an
> intention are those which are present *sub specie* 'up to
> me' is equivalent to accompanying them with the conditional
> 'if it is up to me'. [...] Now 'up to me'
> is the first-person form of 'up to *X*'. [...]
> Thus, the correct answer to the above challenge consists in calling
> attention to the fact that the 'up to the agent'ness of
> action we-referential intention is to be formulated as follows:
> 'Shall [each of us, if it is up to *them,* do
> *A*]' And *this* in no way requires that what others
> do be up to *me.* (1980: 98) 
> 
> 
> 



Thus, Sellars' view is that when individuals we-intend to do
something together, each one has his or her own we-intention.
"[T]he *intendings* are two in number, but the
*content* of these intendings is the *same*"
(1968: 217).



In Sellars' view, we-intentions are intentions had by
individuals; we-intending individuals have their *own*
intention, and the action intended by a we-intending agent is limited
to what the agent takes to be up to him- or herself. This means that
the existence of we-intention does not imply that an intention is
actually *shared,* an idea that resembles Searle's claim
that collective intentionality can be had by envatted brains (1990:
406). This raises the question of what has to be the case for a
we-intending individual actually to intend *together* with
others. One person's we-intention does not make for a collective
intention. Other we-intending individuals need to be around. But is it
enough for an intention to be joint that other individuals happen to
be around who have a we-intention with the exact same content? If one
brain in a vat cannot we-intend alone, can two, if not
*together*? How do the we-intentions of individual participants
have to be *related* to each other in order to constitute a
genuine collective intention? Sellars' analysis may not provide
a conclusive answer, but he presents at least two further insights
that seem highly relevant to the current debate.



First, Sellars emphasizes the difference between two types of
I-referential intentions. *Primary* I-referential intentions
are different from *we-derivative* I-referential intentions in
that the content of the latter are contributions to joint actions. A
great many intentions are we-derivative in that sense. My intention to
move a pawn on the chessboard is derivative from our intention to play
a game of chess.



Second, Sellars leaves ample room for what could be called
*intentional dissidence.* Many current analyses assume that for
us to intend *x*, each of us has to intend to do his or her
share. Sellars is keenly aware that this may not always be the case.
Intentions may be ascribed to groups, as shared, without assuming that
each participant intends to do his or her share. Yet Sellars
acknowledges that the less of our collective intentions and beliefs an
individual shares, the more difficult it becomes to see him or her as
"one of us" (Sellars 1968: 203). We-intentions are a
matter of a "shared point of view" that involves
identification with a group (Sellars 1980: 101). The question of
whether or not group identification needs to be in the individual
participants' self-interest remains open. Whether or not a
situation of choice is looked at in terms of one's
"private" or "shared" point of view depends on
whom one takes oneself to be: a solitary individual or a group member.
Sellars' aim is not to provide a theory of identity selection.
His claim is that the *moral point of view* requires us to
abandon the egocentric perspective, and to conceive of ourselves as
"one of us". The "we" at play here has to be
understood in the least parochial sense. Only such we-intentionality
actually serves the purpose for which Sellars devised the term
"we-intention"; only the we-intentions that are
universally shared, and no parochial group attitudes, constitute the
moral point of view.


## 3. What Is Collective about Collective Intentionality?



A common starting point of the theory of intentionality can be
rendered as follows: (1) intentionality is taken to be a feature of
minds, (2) minds are to be conceived as individual minds (or minds of
individuals), and (3) each individual has his or her *own*
mind. We call this third statement, which is most relevant to the
topic at hand, the Individual Ownership Thesis. But how can
intentional attitudes be *shared* in more than a merely
distributive sense? Or how can what we call the Irreducibility Claim
be true? In meeting the challenge of making irreducibility compatible
with individual ownership, a lot depends on where exactly the
collectivity is placed in the analysis of collective
intentionality.



Intentionality is commonly divided into three constitutive features.
First, intentionality has *content.* The content of an
intentional attitude is whatever the attitude in question is
*about* (e.g., the content of the intention to visit the Taj
Mahal is to visit the Taj Mahal)*.* Second, intentionality has
a *mode.* The mode is what distinguishes a case of fear from a
case of intention, or a belief from a desire. Basic modes are the
modes of conative or practical intentional attitudes (such as
intentions or desires), cognitive or theoretical intentional attitudes
(such as beliefs or perceptions), and affective or emotional attitudes
(such as hopes and fears). And third, intentionality has a
*subject,* that is, an entity whose intentionality it is, and
to whom it can be ascribed as its source or bearer.



Whereas there is a widely shared consensus among the participants in
the debate that there is no straightforward reduction of collective
intentional attitudes to a set of individual intentional attitudes,
the question of what exactly is collective about collective
intentionality is highly controversial. Each of the three components
of intentional attitudes has been quoted as the seat or locus of the
sharedness or collectivity in question. Some authors claim that
collective intentionality is intentionality with a collective
*content,* others seem to invoke a special *mode,* while
still others claim that what's collective about collective
intentionality has to be the subject. Content-accounts claim that for
*A* and *B*'s intention to visit the Taj Mahal
tomorrow to be collective, each *A* and *B* have to intend
to visit the Taj Mahal *together.* Mode-accounts insist that
the element of collectivity has to extend to the intending; in their
view, *A* and *B* have to intend *collectively* to
visit the Taj Mahal (together). Subject-accounts hold that the element
of togetherness is really in the subject; in their view, *A* and
*B* have to form a plural subject or a unified group that is the
subject of--and has--the intention to visit the Taj
Mahal.



The paradigm of collective intentionality in the recent debate is
*joint intention* (collective practical intentionality).
Analyses of joint intention will thus serve as a common reference
point in the following discussion of content-, mode-, and
subject-accounts of collective intentionality.


### 3.1 Content



What do the agents *A* and *B* have to intend for their
intention to go for a walk to be collective? A first approach consists
in saying that the relevant intentions of *A* and *B* do not
refer to their own individual walks, but to their joint walk. Instead
of each intending to go for a walk, *A* and *B* would each
intend the joint walk. This move is crucial to Michael Bratman's
approach to the analysis of what he terms 'shared cooperative
activity' (cf. Bratman 1999, chaps. 5-8, 2006, and 2014).
It is based on the view that action intentions do not just come in the
form "I intend *to* *X*," as when an agent
intends to perform some action. On Bratman's account, intentions
can also take the form "I intend *that* we
*J*" (cf. Bratman 1999, chap. 8), where *J* refers to
a joint activity in which the intending agent participates. This
represents the participating agents as not just intending their
respective contributions, but as intending the joint activity; in the
case at hand, *A* and *B* are said to intend that they go
for a walk together. Although the focus at this point should be on
that core element, it is expedient to cite one version of the entire
analysis.



> 
> 
> We intend to *J* if and only if
> 
> 
> 1. (a) I intend that we *J* and (b) you intend that we
> *J*.
> 2. I intend that we *J* in accordance with and because of 1a,
> 1b, and meshing subplans of 1a and 1b; you intend that we *J* in
> accordance with and because of 1a, 1b, and meshing subplans of 1a and
> 1b.
> 3. 1 and 2 are common knowledge between us. (Bratman 1999: 121)
> 
> 
> 



This gives the structure of what Bratman calls a "shared
intention," which he takes to be an intention to *J* shared
by the participants. It is depicted as consisting in a complex nexus
of interdependent individual attitudes and not as the intention of a
collective agent or as a state of some collective mind (cf. Bratman
1999: 122-3). For there to be a joint activity, Bratman holds,
the participating agents have to intend this activity in such a way
that their so intending is aligned both socially and with other plans
(or subplans) on each side and that it is common knowledge between
them.



Thus, the claim here is that intentions of the form "I intend
that we *X*" are basic to the intentionality of joint
action. Critics have argued that Bratman's account is defective
in so far as it treats intentions of that form as basic, since they
violate either (1) the condition that one can only intend one's
own action, or (2) the condition that one can only control one's
own and no other agent's actions, or (3) the condition that one
can only intend what one can take to be in a position to settle (see
Baier 1997; Stoutland 1997; Velleman 1997). Bratman clarifies in reply
(in Bratman 1999, chap. 8) that intentions of the form "I intend
that we *X*" are formed under the assumption that the
partner in a shared activity does or will come to intend likewise.
Instead of positing that in order to form such an intention an agent
has to be certain about their partner's intentions, Bratman
contends that an agent is typically in a position to reliably predict
whether the other will come to form a corresponding intention. Given
that both agents form their intentions in this manner, whereby a
shared intention comes into existence, they can both regard themselves
as having partly settled the issue in question. On this account,
neither of the agents controls for the other's intention
formation or action as their intentions are each understood as
partially constitutive of the shared intention.



Another charge against Bratman's and other accounts that ground
an understanding of collective intentionality in individual
agents' intentions is that such intentions are circular (cf. the
discussion of Tuomela 2005 below). The idea behind this criticism is
that such intentions presuppose rather than constitute collective
intentionality (cf. Schmid 2005; Petersson 2007). For how can an
individual refer to a joint activity without the jointness, i.e., the
'we,' already being in place? How can an agent assume that
others will intend likewise without presupposing the collectivity of
their so intending? Instead of being foundational for shared
intentions or collective intentionality, such intentions might turn
out to be redundant expressions of an already existing collective
intentionality.



A reply available within Bratman's account may refer to a
presupposition of the formation of a shared intention. According to
Bratman (1999, chap. 5), shared agency requires that the individual
agents involved be mutually responsive, i.e., that each seeks to be
responsive to the other's intentions and actions and that each
seeks to guide their own behavior with an eye to the behavior of the
other. It is in this sense, and the phrase "in accordance with
and because of" in the scheme given above signals this, that the
ways the agents involved form their respective intentions can be said
to interconnect. Hence the idea behind this reply would be to ground
the intentional reference to the joint activity in mutual
responsiveness. (Bratman 2014, chapter 2, offers more reflections of
the charge of circularity; cf. Petersson 2015 for discussion.)



It is not clear whether this response can successfully deal with the
charge of circularity. Whereas it may be that in some scenarios the
agents involved actually realize that they want to cooperate so that
their processes of intention formation interconnect and they come to
have intentions as Bratman specifies them, the problem of circularity
may just crop up again with respect to the required interconnection.
It could be that instantiating interconnected processes of intention
formation just presupposes the collectivity it is meant to
constitute.



The merits of Bratman's approach clearly lie in its highlighting
that whatever joint intentions are, they do involve interrelated
intentional attitudes on the part of the individual agents involved.
However, many critics think that treating reference to the joint
activity as central and at the same time retaining the
'I'-form of the constitutive individual intentions makes
for a fundamental problem of circularity.



Before turning to a different type of account in which this particular
problem of circularity is (at least apparently) circumvented, it
should be noted that Bratman's adherence to the
'I'-form of intentions is expressive of the individualism
underlying his approach. Already in the first statement of his account
he points out that it is "reductive in spirit" (Bratman
1999: 108) and clarifies that the core "claim [...] is that
shared intention consists primarily of attitudes of individuals and
their interrelations" (1999: 129). Even though Bratman has
specified the dimensions of the interrelations between the attitudes
of the individual agents involved (cf. Bratman 2006), some critics
have taken issue with the claim that the attitudes constitutive of
shared intentions have to stand in the singular, i.e., the
'I'-form (cf. Baier 1997; Stoutland 1997; Schmid 2009;
Schweikard 2011). This line of criticism pertains to the picture thus
drawn of shared intention as a social phenomenon that is constructed
out of I-form-attitudes as building blocks, a picture that understates
the relevance both of relations between the individuals involved and
of the role of social identification expressed by the use of
'we.'


### 3.2 Mode



Other contributors to the analysis of collective intentional states
claim that the collectivity resides not just in the content of the
intentionality but also in a specifically collective mode or we-mode.
If individuals share an intention, it is not just the case that they
each intend a joint action; rather, they intend the joint action
*collectively.*



This shift of focus is best grasped by noticing two main elements:
first, mode accounts include the claim that the attitudes that
constitute shared or joint attitudes are to be verbalized using the
plural pronoun "we," as in "we intend to go to the
Taj Mahal" or "we believe that the Taj Mahal is in
India." Second, (some) mode accounts emphasize that such
attitudes are not just verbalized in a certain way but are expressive
of the particular and fundamental sociality of their bearers. Raimo
Tuomela (2007, 2013) suggests distinguishing between (different
strengths of) I-mode and we-mode, picking out different ways of having
intentional attitudes, where having an attitude in the I-mode means
having it 'as a private person' and having it in the
we-mode means having it 'as a group member' (cf. Tuomela
2007: 46).



The distinctions between attitudes verbalized in the singular form and
attitudes verbalized in the plural form, and between I-mode and
we-mode, are not to be conflated with the distinction between modes of
intentionality introduced above. Instead, the idea underlying mode
accounts is to spell out a distinction that can be applied to
practical (or conative), to cognitive, and to affective intentional
states, yielding a conceptual framework for analyzing the entire
spectrum of collective intentional states. The idea is that the
participating agents have attitudes of a special *kind* or
*form*.



A direct and explicit predecessor of mode accounts is Wilfrid Sellars,
to whom, as was noted above, Tuomela and Miller refer as a source of
their original account of we-intentions (cf. Tuomela & Miller
1988). Focusing on cases of joint action and the respective
intentional states, they analyze an individual agent's
we-intention regarding a joint activity as consisting of (1) the
intention to do her part, (2) a belief that others will to their
parts, and (3) a belief that there is (or will be) mutual belief among
the agents involved that the relevant opportunities for performing the
joint activity obtain (cf. Tuomela & Miller 1988: 375; see also
Tuomela 1991: 252; Tuomela 2005: 340-41)



In conceiving of we-intention as a special kind of intention had by an
individual agent, the analysis is true to Sellars' understanding
of we-intentions (cf.
 section 2.3
 above). As Tuomela and Miller put it, an individual agent can be said
to 'we-intend' the joint action *X* if she has a
respective individual intention regarding her contribution and certain
beliefs about the actions and beliefs of the other agents involved.
Such a we-intention is not in itself an action intention on a par with
the participatory intention of a single agent, it is an 'aim
intention' directed at the joint action (cf. Tuomela 2005;
329-30). By contrast to content accounts, this account posits
that the intentionality of joint action consists in a particular form
of intending instantiated by the individual agents involved. If the
members of a group perform a joint action together, then this is in
virtue of each of them having a we-intention of the form given here;
e.g., their joint action of going to the Taj Mahal is performed in
virtue of each having the we-intention to go to the Taj Mahal.



In his first contribution to this debate, John Searle criticized
Tuomela's and Miller's account as typical "in that
it attempts to reduce collective intentions to individual intentions
plus beliefs" (Searle 1990: 404; cf. Searle 2010: 46). In
particular, Searle rejects the idea of reducing
'we'-attitudes to 'I'-attitudes. But he does
not understand the reverse claim, according to which collective
intentionality is irreducible or "primitive" (Searle 1990:
404), as having an impact on the internalist claim that all
intentionality "has to exist inside individuals'
heads" (Searle 2010: 44; cf. Searle 1990: 406). From
Searle's perspective, Tuomela and Miller are right in not
positing the existence of a form of intentionality that somehow
transcends individuals' minds, but they go wrong in claiming
that we-intentions can be reduced to I-intentions plus beliefs. Such a
reduction fails, Searle holds, because thinking and conceiving of a
joint action in the "we"-form is the core characteristic
of cooperation. When *A* and *B* go to the Taj Mahal
together, Searle's account has it that each of them has the
thought "We are going to the Taj Mahal" in his head; and
this is what makes theirs a joint action, since each derives his
contributory or participatory intention from his collective intention,
assuming that the respective other will perform his contribution (cf.
Searle 2010: 52-53).



Searle's account of the structure of collective intentionality
has been criticized precisely with respect to the combination of the
claim that the 'we' is irreducible with the claim that all
intentionality resides in individual minds. Some critics have noted
that Searle embraces a solipsistic and individualistic methodology
(see Searle 1990: 415 and Searle 2010: 47) that makes it impossible to
account for the intersubjective or interpersonal relations that
characterize joint activities and social communities (see e.g.,
Meijers 1994, 2003; Schmid 2003, 2009; Zaibert 2003). Such relations
are explicitly bracketed out in Searle's account. But it seems
plausible to hold that successful coordination of efforts in pursuit
of shared goals requires that the relations between the agents
involved and the attitudes of the respective others figure in the
intentional structure of this social process. For a complex event to
be not just a coincidentally matching pattern of actions by individual
agents but an intentional joint action, it needs a complex structure
of attitudes in which the agents involved refer to one another. The
only reference to a collectivity Searle incorporates into his account,
the plural indexical 'we,' is taken to be primitive and
accessible to a solipsistic analysis (cf. Searle 1990: 415). Although
this insistence on the we-form of the intentionality allows
classifying Searle's conception as a mode-account, its
elaboration does not look convincing. His conception renders
collective intentionality distributive in the sense that the
distinctive mark of the phenomena in question is claimed not to be
instantiated by individuals together, by individuals-in-relations, by
plural subjects or groups, but to the full by each of the individuals
involved.



The description of this strand of the debate sidesteps the fact that
it is not entirely clear whether the point of Tuomela's and
Miller's analysis of we-intention is to provide a reductive
account of collective intentionality. In fact, Tuomela has repeatedly
rejected this interpretation of the analysis (see, for instance
Tuomela 1995, chap. 9; Tuomela 2005: 342). He clarified that his
analysis of we-intention, which remained essentially unchanged
throughout subsequent work of his, "is rather meant to elucidate
the irreducible notion of we-intention in a functionally informative
way" (Tuomela 2005: 358) and grounded in an "ontically
individualistic or, better, interrelational" framework (2005:
342). This suggests reading the analysis not as reductive but as
explicative in the sense that it explicates the complex structure of
attitudes that constitutes an individual agent's we-intending.
This again provides the core element of Tuomela's conception of
the intentionality that guides joint action, i.e., the analysis of
what he calls 'joint intention:'



> 
> 
> (*JI*) Agents *A*1, ...,
> *A**i*, ..., *A**m*
> have the *joint intention to perform a joint action* *X*
> if and only if
> 
> 
> 1. these agents have the we-intention (or are disposed to form the
> we-intention) to perform *X*; and
> 2. there is a mutual belief among them to the effect that (a).
> 
> 
> 
> In the case of joint intention the conatively used 'We will do
> *X*' is true of each participant
> *A**i*. (Tuomela 2005: 342)
> 
> 
> 



This scheme not only makes explicit that on Tuomela's account
each participant in a joint action is viewed as having a we-intention
in the sense specified above, it also highlights important
similarities between this conception and Bratman's conception of
'shared intentions.' However, as signaled by the
respective choice of terminology, Tuomela thinks of the intentional
structure of collective action as consisting in individual attitudes
*joined together*, whereas Bratman conceives of it as being
*shared* among the participants. According to both accounts it
is a core element of collective intentionality that each of the
individual agents involved refers to the others' intentions and
beliefs regarding the joint activity. However, even if it is granted
that the crucial difference between these accounts regards the mode of
the constitutive attitudes, it needs to be seen whether the charge of
circularity discussed above also affects Tuomela's account of
we-intentions (cf. Miller 2001 and Schmid 2005).



The charge of circularity targets the element of Tuomela's (and
Miller's) analysis of we-intentions according to which the
we-intending individual agent refers to her part of the joint action
*X* and has beliefs regarding others' contributions and
beliefs. If the agent is to intend to do her part of *X* and if
she is to be able to refer to others' contributions and beliefs,
so the objection goes, then the collectivity that is meant to be
constituted by we-intentions has to be presupposed. Tuomela's
reply to this objection has the following three elements: first, the
point of the analysis is not that collectivity is *constituted
by* but that it *consists in* the participants'
having we-intentions, where this crucially depends on their
satisfaction of what Tuomela calls the 'collectivity
condition,' i.e., the condition that one participant can only
have a we-intention if others have an isomorphic we-intention (cf.
Tuomela 2005: 333 and 339). Second, Tuomela takes the analysis of
we-intention not to be an instance of vicious circularity (cf. Tuomela
2005, sec. VI.), since from the pre-analytic perspective of the
participant the performance of the joint action, including an
allocation of contributions, is presumed and anticipated but not
presupposed. Third, Tuomela does not view we-intentions and other
elements of his account as independent building blocks but only as
analytically isolatable parts of a complex whole (cf. Tuomela 2007:
125-6); once again, the guiding idea is not to track the
composition of collectivity from basic and independent elements, but
to elucidate what collectivity consists in.



In his more recent work on collective intentionality, Tuomela has
generalized the idea underlying his analysis of we-intention to a
differentiated conception of the socially shared point of view that
underlies social and collective phenomena (see especially Tuomela
2003, 2007, and 2013; for a critical discussion see Schmitz 2017). At
the core of this conception lies a fine-grained distinction between
variations of what he calls the 'I-mode' and the
'we-mode,' all of which specify ways in which individuals
have attitudes relative to a group whose member they are. When an
individual reasons or has attitudes in the 'I-mode,' she
does function as a group member but her commitments relative to the
respective attitudes are private, i.e., they regard her goals
*qua* private person. When she reasons or has attitudes in the
'we-mode,' she functions as a group member and conceives
of herself as being bound by and committed to what is collectively
accepted and subject of collective commitment within the group.
Spelling out the details of this conception--especially the
notions of collective acceptance (see Tuomela 2002 and 2007, chap. 6)
and collective commitment as well as the so-called group ethos (see
Tuomela 2007, chap. 1)--would exceed the scope of the present
discussion. But the contours of the approach should have become clear:
according to Tuomela, collective intentionality resides in a specific
mode of having attitudes, and collective phenomena are individuated in
terms of complex intentional structures that involve such specific
attitudes.



A more general criticism of the content accounts and mode accounts of
collective intentionality discussed in this and the previous section
aims at the individualist framework within which they are formulated
(see, e.g., Baier 1997; Stoutland 1997; Meijers 2003). More
specifically, some authors have called for overcoming the
*intentional individualism* the most prominent approaches to
collective intentionality adopt (cf. Schmid 2009 and Schweikard 2011).
This move involves leaving behind the view that all attitudes are
(reducible to) attitudes by individuals, taken in isolation, and are
to be verbalized in the 'I'-form; this does away with the
problem of circularity. The alternative here is to acknowledge that
some attitudes take a genuine 'we'-form and are rightly
attributed to individuals standing in certain social relations. The
point of such a non-individualist line is not to posit mysterious
supra-individual forces or to undercut the intentional autonomy of
individual agents, where these are the worries that seem to motivate
the individualistic stance. It is, rather, to treat collective
intentionality as irreducible with respect to its content and mode,
and relational with respect to the structures that ground
individuals' reference to plural contents and their
self-conception as subject-in-relations. A non-individualist account,
according to which collective intentionality is irreducible and
relational, relies on an analysis of the specific relations
individuals are in when they share intentional attitudes with one
another. One aspect--whose investigation is still in the early
stages of development--that helps to further illuminate this is
the particular nature of the first person plural indexical
'we' (cf. Gilbert 1989; Nunberg 1993; Pettit 2003; de
Bruin 2009; Schweikard 2011; Schmid 2005).


### 3.3 Subject



The philosophically intriguing issues in the theory of intentionality
are not confined to its content and mode but include the question as
to what sort of entity is or can be a subject of intentionality. This
is obviously another core question in the theory of collective
intentionality, one where philosophical analysis meets with the
interests of social science and normative theorizing. Does it ever
make sense to say that a social group is the subject of, or just has,
an intention, a belief, or an emotion? Or are such attributions of
intentionality to groups merely metaphorical shorthand for referring
to the attitudes of their members (Quinton 1975)?



Some authors have developed qualified affirmative responses to the
first of these questions and claimed that groups can indeed be
subjects (or bearers) of intentional states. One apparently
straightforward approach consists in applying the 'intentional
stance' to groups, i.e., in making groups' status as
intentional subjects dependent on whether their behavior can be
interpreted as intentional (cf. Tollefsen 2002a, 2002b, and 2015). For
instance, if I see a number of people trying to pull a car out of a
ditch, I may be warranted in ascribing relevant beliefs and desires to
the group, as in "the group wants to move the car back onto the
road." Cases like this one are familiar from everyday parlance,
in which we often encounter attributions of intentional states to
corporations or governments. In this respect, interpretationism has
the clear advantage of shedding light on the social practice of
ascribing intentionality to groups, but the view needs to integrate an
account of the conditions under which such ascriptions are justified.
It just does not seem to be all there is to being a collective subject
of intentionality that a given group can be viewed as such. What is
needed to establish that groups can be subjects of intentional states
is an elaborate account of their internal structure, i.e., of what
constitutes them as proper targets for ascriptions of intentionality.
Tollefsen's interpretationist account here focuses on the
rational unity certain groups, such as organizations, are capable of
displaying (see Tollefsen 2002a and 2002b, and Rovane 1998).



One influential account along these lines is Margaret Gilbert's
plural subject theory (Gilbert 1989, 1990, 1996, 2000, 2006, 2009, and
2014). Gilbert starts from the basic case of two individuals going for
a walk together. On her account, such an activity requires that they
take on what she calls a 'joint commitment,' which she
explains as 



> 
> 
> a kind of commitment of the will. In this case, the wills of two or
> more people create it, and two or more people are committed by it.
> (Gilbert 2006: 134) 
> 
> 
> 



A joint commitment can, on this account, only be brought about (or
rescinded) jointly. A joint commitment of this kind does not require a
"single centre of consciousness" or a "distinctive
form of 'subjectivity'" (2006: 134), it is the
commitment precisely of those bound by it. According to Gilbert, each
joint commitment is a joint commitment to do *X* as a body, where
substitutions for "*X*" include "intend",
"believe", "accept", and so on. A joint
commitment to believe something as a body, for instance, is a
commitment to constitute as far as possible a single body that
believes that thing, where 



> 
> 
> the concept of a 'single body' is neutral with respect to
> the question whether the body in question is in some sense composed of
> individual human beings. (2006:137) 
> 
> 
> 



Gilbert takes this not to imply that the individuals involved are (or
have to be) personally committed to the attitude in question, e.g.,
that each or any of them believes what they are jointly committed to
believing as a body (cf. Gilbert 2009). However, joint commitments
thus specified imply a normative relationship between the parties
thereby committed: if *A* and *B* are jointly committed in
some way, then each of them is obligated to act accordingly and each
of them is entitled to demand the other's conforming action; in
other words, they owe each other such action (cf. Gilbert 2009).



Gilbert uses this basic structure of joint commitment to define the
type of social group she calls 'plural subject': 



> 
> 
> *A* and *B* [...] constitute a *plural subject*
> (by definition) if and only if they are jointly committed to doing
> something as a body--in a broad sense of 'do'.
> (Gilbert 2006: 145) 
> 
> 
> 



Such plural subjects, as a particular sort of social group, can be
subjects of intentional states such as intentions, beliefs, and
acceptance; this is the point at which the account regards the subject
of collective intentionality.



A number of criticisms can be put forth against Gilbert's plural
subject theory; although they were voiced at earlier stages of the
development of the theory, their target has not decisively been moved.
The first critical point to note is familiar from the discussions in
earlier sections of this entry, as it regards a problem of
circularity. Does the formation of a joint commitment not already
presuppose the sort of joint action by plural subject it is meant to
bring about? It seems to be crucial to the account that when two
agents say, for instance, 'Let's go to the Taj Mahal
together!', they unite in virtue of the joint commitment this
involves. But why start precisely there? Couldn't the two also
say, at an earlier point in time, 'Let's jointly commit to
going to the Taj Mahal together'? There is an apparent danger of
regress or indeed of circularity. However, this objection may rely on
a superficial reading of Gilbert's theory. Already in the first
complete statement of her view (in Gilbert 1989), she elaborated that
the formation of a plural subject, or the entering of a joint
commitment, is preceded by an open display of 'readiness'
on the part of the individual agents. So before they actually become
jointly committed to do such-and-such 'as a body,'
*A* and *B* each indicate that they are ready or willing to
do so. This reply by extended narrative is weaker than it might look,
for *either* this means that joint commitments are, as it were,
put together from personal attitudes of the participants *or*
the respective attitudes instantiate the same sort of circularity that
was to be avoided. A possible resort consists in saying that the
agents themselves do not presuppose the complicated technical
structure termed 'joint commitment' or 'plural
subject,' which renders the alleged problem of circularity one
that exists only for the theorist.



A related critical point is that the process through which joint
commitments are brought about, in Gilbert's analysis, already
involves some form of collective intentionality. This seems obvious in
the case of explicit communication, as any communication is a joint
action. But it is also true in those cases in which the agreement is
tacit rather than explicit, as this implies some form of mutual
understanding between the participants. It seems plausible to assume
that mutual understanding, even if it is tacit, is collectively
intentional. If Gilbert's claim is that *all* collective
intentionality is of the form of a joint commitment, her account of
the process through which joint commitments are generated seems to
presuppose another joint commitment. If individuals already have to be
jointly committed in some way in order to enter into a joint
commitment, however, either a vicious circle or an infinite regress
seems to ensue. A possible solution would be to claim that joint
commitments of the sort that Gilbert envisages are a *special
kind* of collective intention, and that they presuppose more basic
forms of collective intentionality, which are not joint commitments of
the Gilbertian sort (Schmid 2005).



A third critique regards the normative internal structure of plural
subject, i.e., the claims that the parties to a joint commitment
assume mutual obligations and entitlements and that this is
characteristic of the basic phenomenon of joint action. In his
discussion of Gilbert's view, Bratman (1999, chap. 7; 2014,
chap. 5) rejects the claim that mutual obligations and entitlements
are constitutive features of joint action. He deems it part of the
normal etiology of joint activities that the participants create
mutual expectations and take on obligations to fulfill them (cf. also
Alonso 2009, who elaborates a similar point using the concept of
'reliance'). But Bratman regards these as consequences
rather than as constituents of such activities. In support of Gilbert
it should be clarified that she does not speak of the obligations and
entitlements in question as *moral* obligations and
entitlements, but treats them rather as *directed* obligations
and as part of the *social* relationship between the
participants (cf. Gilbert 2006: 155).



A fourth criticism of Gilbert's view targets the scalability of
the conception of joint commitment and plural subjects. Gilbert
affirms this at great length and claims that even political
communities (or societies) can be understood along those lines, thus
arguing for a view of which she takes traditional social contract
theory to be one version (cf. Gilbert 2006, part II). The merits of
such a contractualist approach need not be discussed in the present
context, but the underlying claim that one can extrapolate from the
basic case of joint action runs into difficulties when it is viewed in
combination with Gilbert's claim that joint commitments cannot
be rescinded unilaterally, but only jointly by all of the individuals
who undertake it (cf. Gilbert 2009: 182). This feature of the account
may seem counterintuitive already in cases of rather spontaneous
small-scale joint actions, such as when I meet a colleague on the way
to the lecture hall and we fall into walking together for a bit. But
the larger the scale, the more implausible this implication becomes.
Are we to accept, by way of *reductio*, that one member of a
political community can hold all others to a social contract (Baltzer
2002)?



Although these critical points might affect the overall reception of
Gilbert's theory, it surely provides insights concerning some
features a group is likely to exhibit in order to count as a subject
of collective intentionality. In particular, its members need to
create a structure that turns the group into an unified entity in the
sense that it is made the subject of attitudes they together accept
and are committed to act on. This may, as Hindriks (2008a) notes,
imply that more is needed than the joint commitment that can be
explicated in view of phenomena such as spontaneous joint walks. For
instance, the formation of an effective citizens' movement may
require that the individual agents involved accept the goal of the
joint enterprise *and* an internal structure in which roles,
competencies and decision-making mechanisms are defined (see also
French 1984).



Raimo Tuomela gives a more detailed account of the internal structure
of what he calls 'we-groups,' which he takes to come in
different varieties, depending on the strength of their members'
endorsement of and identification with the respective group's
goals (Tuomela 2007, 2013). He draws an analogy between single agents
and collective agents (cf. 2007: 85-86), thus setting the stage
for the study of the intentionality specific to group phenomena.
Tuomela acknowledges that the most familiar collective agents,
organizations and corporations, require a more detailed internal
structure that encompasses the relationships between their members,
relationships between the members and the respective collective
agents, and a number of organizational characteristics. In summary,
these features comprise members' *collective acceptance*
of and *collective commitment* to the group's goals, a
distinction between *operative* and *non-operative group
members*, the definition of *roles* and *positions*
within the group, and the institution (or even codification) of a
group-internal *authority system* (see also French 1984 for a
similar view of the structure of groups).--It would not pay out
at this point to reiterate the reflections on Tuomela's
individualism and we-mode analysis mentioned above; instead, we do
well to focus on his specification of the status of such groups.



Tuomela explains that his 



> 
> 
> account entails that a we-mode group [...] is a collective
> artefact and indeed an organized institutional entity [...].
> Group members are viewed as functioning in group positions (be they
> differentiated or not). Thus, a we-mode group can indeed be said to
> consist of such positions. (Tuomela 2007: 20) 
> 
> 
> 



Despite the emphasis he puts on the organizational features of groups,
the following statement testifies to the reductionist social ontology
Tuomela adopts:



> 
> 
> We are here somewhat metaphorically viewing groups as analogous to
> individual agents (persons). [...] In a nutshell, my view is that
> groups can but need not be taken as (singular) entities, and they are
> agents and persons only in a metaphorical sense. (Tuomela 2007: 140
> and 145) 
> 
> 
> 



Thus, on this account, the aforementioned analogy between single and
collective agents is not to be overstated and used to infer that
collectives are agents that are (ontologically) on a par with single
agents. But they may, even on Tuomela's account, qualify as
subjects of intentional states, even as autonomous (cf. Tuomela 2007:
234), insofar as they consist in a particular organizational structure
and are upheld by the respective (we-mode-) attitudes of their
members.



A third influential 'subject account' of collective
intentionality was propounded by Philip Pettit (2001a,b, 2003, 2009).
The theory of group agency Pettit has since expounded jointly with
Christian List (see List & Pettit 2011) is not specifically
tailored to this issue or voiced in the respective terminology; the
reconstruction in the following thus concentrates on a brief account
of Pettit's initial statement of his view, as it is (in argument
and terminology) more explicitly stated within a framework that
overlaps with other conceptions of collective intentionality. In
contrast to other accounts, Pettit's does not start from an
analysis of joint action or collective intentional states, thus
treating the issues of joint agency and group agency as
distinguishable (cf. Pettit & Schweikard 2006). Instead, he
approaches the issue of whether groups can be subjects of (or have)
intentions directly by asking whether they can fulfill general
conditions of agency. And he claims that not only can groups fulfill
such conditions, but that such groups fulfill them as collective units
of agency whose attitudes may be discontinuous with the attitudes of
their members (cf. Pettit 2002 and 2003).



In the present context, the latest statement and defense of the entire
argumentation centered on conditions of agency cannot be taken up (see
Pettit 2007a and List & Pettit 2011, chapters 1-3), the
focus will instead be on a partial argument regarding one important
step in the larger argumentation. It concerns the question whether
groups can be subjects of intention. Here it is:



> 
> 
> First premise: there is no intention without a minimum of rationality
> on the part of the relevant agent. Second premise: collectives can
> display that minimum of rationality only insofar as they collectivise
> reason, as I shall put it. Conclusion: only groups that collectivise
> reason can properly have intentions. (Pettit 2001b: 241) 
> 
> 
> 



In short, the argument supports the view that only those groups
qualify as subjects of intentions that instantiate a specific kind of
rationality (see also Tollefsen 2002). In the initial defense of this
view Pettit refers to consistency, closure, and completeness as
requirements of rationality (see Pettit 2001b: 243). By this he means
that in order to be rational an entity has to maintain only co-tenable
attitudes, it forms 



> 
> 
> all those beliefs and intentions, and performs those actions, that are
> rationally required by the things it is rightly said to intend
> (ibid.), 
> 
> 
> 



and it forms attitudes on all matters relevant to what it can rightly
be said to intend. Whether these requirements are really weak enough
to ground only a 'minimum of rationality' is not entirely
clear.



In view of this description of the conditions of rationality it would
not seem as though fulfilling them required a complex form of social
organization. A number of agents, one might say, could simply get
together, jointly pursue a certain goal and decide all relevant
matters by majority voting; it might need some organizational
structure, depending on the size of the group, but the aforementioned
conditions of rationality should be satisfiable in this way. Pettit
rejects this view on the basis of observations about schemes of
majority voting that were first, under the label "doctrinal
paradox," noted in jurisprudence, then generalized under the
label of the "discursive dilemma" and became the starting
point for the 'theory of judgment aggregation' (cf.
Kornhauser 1992; Pettit 2003; List 2012). The central tenet of these
debates is that there is no principled way of securing that
aggregations of consistent sets of votes on interconnected issues are
themselves consistent.



According to a main lesson from the discursive dilemma, a group that
is to count as a subject of intentional states has to implement an
internal structure and in particular a mechanism for decision-making.
If it is to fulfill the requirements initially given by Pettit, it is
"forced to collectivize reason" (Pettit 2001a: 110). This
again means that it has to ensure that the majority votes, which are
each treated as the group's view on the respective question,
form a consistent set of attitudes, even if that implies reconsidering
past or constraining future judgments. So the group has to monitor its
attitudes or it may institute a straw vote procedure, which
facilitates joint awareness of and deliberation about the
group's views (cf. Pettit 2007a). In the case described above,
the only satisfactory strategy, Pettit holds, would consist in
treating the majority votes regarding *p* and *q* as
authoritative, embrace the logical implication and affirm
>*p*&*q*< (cf. Pettit 2001b: 247). In this way,
the group could meet the requirements of rationality. This
concludes Pettit's (early) analysis of the conditions under
which groups can count as subjects of intentional states. It targets
primarily the processes of group-internal reflection and
decision-making.



To conclude this section, it bears mentioning that there is an
important but often neglected alternative to studying the
subject-aspect of collective intentionality with respect to social
groups only. According to this alternative, the subject of
intentionality does not have to be a 'rational unity' of
agents (cf. Rovane 1998; Tollefsen 2002; Pettit 2003). Instead, a
conception of collective intentionality can be open to the view that
two or more individuals jointly form the subject of their collective
intentional attitudes (cf. Smith 2011). At this systematic juncture,
the ontological commitment of an account that specifies the nature of
the subject of collective intentionality takes center stage. Here
again the crucial questions--and the structure is familiar from
the discussion of the other two issues of collectivity--are
whether what one wants to call the subject of an intentional attitude
is irreducible, whether reference to such collective subjects is
merely metaphorical, or whether this particular kind of subjecthood
can be instantiated by two or more agents jointly.


## 4. Specific Issues



Whereas the focus of the discussion about collective intentionality is
mostly within the domain of the philosophy of mind and action, a
series of neighboring philosophical disciplines and social sciences
are highly pertinent to this topic.


### 4.1 Social and Institutional Facts



The interest in the nature of social reality as well as in the
structure and normativity of social practices and institutions had
been part of philosophical debates long before the incipience of
specific debates about collective intentionality. But by now it seems
clear that analyses of collective intentionality provide significant
contributions to the study of social phenomena, and that they form an
important part of the main projects of social ontology (for an
overview see Hindriks 2018).



Take the example of money (see Searle 1995: 1): there is an enormous
practical difference between a blank piece of paper and a five-dollar
bill, but what does this difference consist in? To this some authors,
including Searle (1995, 2010) and Tuomela (2002), have replied that
the existence of money depends at least partly on collective
intentional attitudes, or on a shared practice of treating certain
pieces of paper, and not others, as money. This mechanism, which
according to Searle (2010) involves the imposition of status functions
and specific deontic structures, generalizes to the way communities
create and maintain social institutions, to public offices,
conventions and cultural sites (such as the Taj Mahal); collective
attitudes such as collective acceptance seem to play an ineliminable
role in the constitution of such social and institutional facts. The
precise structure of collective acceptance, however, is not all that
clear. While it is meant to play the role of both creating and
maintaining institutional facts--it is by way of collective
acceptance that we say that such-and-such is (or counts as) money and
it is by way of collective acceptance that we acknowledge of
such-and-such that it is (or counts as) money--, it is not easy
to see how an attitude, whether collective or not, can fulfill these
two functions with opposing directions-of-fit (see Laitinen 2014).



Regardless of these details, integrating a conception of collective
intentionality into the study of collective phenomena, which encompass
institutional phenomena, is promising for the following very
fundamental reason. The central concern of the theory of
*intentionality* is to grasp the unity of, or the interaction
between, the natural and the mental. The central concern of the theory
of *collective intentionality* is to grasp the connections and
interactions between the mental and the social. And this is how the
theory of collective intentionality can be viewed as part of an
encompassing ontological project.



On a more confined terrain, the theory of collective intentionality
raises and contributes to elaborating on several specific issues
in social ontology. As noted in the previous subsection, the theory of
group agency--including the issue of whether collective entities
can count as subjects of intentional states--poses questions
about the ontological status of groups and group agents, and it
invites reiterations of familiar discussions about reduction,
supervenience, constitution, and composition (and more). But the
theory of joint action, especially if it is viewed as involving
questions about the specific relations between cooperators or
co-agents, already raises issues regarding the social identity of
persons. And once intersubjective relations are cast against the
background of joint projects and shared practices, the study of
collective intentionality enters a direct exchange with the analysis
of recognition and recognitive attitudes (cf. Ikaheimo &
Laitinen (eds.) 2011).


### 4.2 Collective Responsibility



The debates about collective responsibility began at least six decades
ago and by now constitute a distinct field of research in moral,
political, and legal philosophy (cf. the entry on collective
responsibility). Accounts of collective intentionality, of joint
action and group agency, can contribute to clarifying the conceptual,
action-theoretic and ontological foundations of the phenomena in
question (cf. May & Tuomela (eds.) 2007). Indeed, some influential
contributions to the study of social phenomena stem from debates about
collective responsibility and they proved to be important points of
reference in discussions about collective intentionality (cf., e.g.,
Copp 1979, 1980; French 1979, 1984; see also May & Hoffman (eds.)
1991 and Barzagan-Forward & Tollefsen (eds.) 2020).



The closest systematic connection between these two fields regards the
preconditions of (ascriptions of) responsibility. Assuming, more or
less uncontroversially, that there is no responsibility without
agency, intentionality, freedom, or autonomy on the part of the entity
to whom responsibility is ascribed or who is held accountable, an
account of collective responsibility will have to include conceptions
of collective agency, collective intentionality, collective freedom,
and/or collective autonomy (see, e.g., Hindriks 2008b, Smiley 2018).
In analogy to the now widely accepted differentiations between joint
action and group agency, one may also ask under what conditions a
number of agents, who do not form or belong to an organized group, can
be jointly responsible for an action they performed jointly, for an
event they brought about through the joint action, or for events that
occurred as a consequence of a joint omission (cf. Petersson
2008).



As with the most discussed issues in the theory of collective
intentionality, there is a fundamental divide between individualist
and non-individualist (or collectivist) conceptions of collective
responsibility (cf. May 1992; Miller & Makela 2005; Miller 2006).
The former hold that only individual agents or natural persons can be
properly held responsible, while the latter hold that some collectives
do count as subjects of responsibility (cf. Mathiesen 2006; Pettit
2007b; Hindriks 2009); depending on context and group size, there may
be a number of tenable intermediate positions on this spectrum. In any
case, it seems plausible to assume that one's account of
collective responsibility should not be starkly discontinuous with
one's account of collective agency. And it seems hardly
spectacular to assume that a differentiated account of collective
intentionality can inform a differentiated account of collective
responsibility. Systematically minded social philosophers are called
upon to take up these challenges.


### 4.3 Team Reasoning



Coordination is a basic social phenomenon. It comes into play when
there are two or more agents each of which has two or more options
which are known to the agents to be interdependent in such a way that
it does not matter so much to any individual participant which option
is chosen, just as long as all agents converge on one option.
Coordination usually involves conventions. Driving on the right side
may not *per se* be seen as preferable to driving on the left
side, but all rational participants in motorized traffic easily agree
that there needs to be some convention here, and observe it in
practice. If in situations of pure coordination (with no conflict of
interest) there is a convention, it seems natural to say that it is
rational for the participants to act accordingly.



Surprisingly, classical game theory fails to support this intuition.
From a classical game theoretical point of view, the fact that the
right-side traffic rule is common knowledge between agents does not
make it rational to act accordingly. All that can be said is that it
is rational for *A* to stick to the convention *if *A*
expects the other to stick to the convention, too.* However, the
same holds true for a violation of the convention. *If *A*
expects *B* to violate the convention,* it is rational for
him to do likewise in order to avoid a collision. As there is common
knowledge of rationality, however, *A* knows that *B* will
stick to the convention only if he or she expects *A* to do
likewise. Thus the condition cannot be settled, and the assertoric
judgment that it is better to stick to the convention cannot be
derived from the hypothetical judgment that this is the thing to do if
the other does so as well. As the rational choice, classical game
theory recommends a mixed strategy in such situations, which is
remarkably bad advice for real life, and luckily descriptively
inadequate.



One might think that rational coordination is made easier for the
agents posited in game theoretic models if deviation from the
convention is sanctioned (e.g., by fines inflicted on those drivers
which violate the traffic rule). In that case, there is typically one
coordination equilibrium which is better for both, and another
coordination equilibrium which is worse for both, but still better as
failures to coordinate. Yet this does surprisingly little to change
the situation from a classical game-theoretic point of view. In fact,
this shifts the recommended mixed strategy somewhat into the direction
of more frequent selection of violation of the convention.



A series of authors have argued that this reveals a fundamental flaw
in the game-theoretic setting and appeals to collective
intentionality have persistently been made in this context. The idea
is that agents may choose from a joint perspective; they do not
consider what's best for them, individually, given the
other's expected choice, but look at such situations with an eye
on what's best for them, *jointly.* One way of putting
this is to say that the failure of the classical model is to assume an
identity of the chooser that is fixed on the individual rather than
seeing the identity of the chooser as variable. Michael Bacharach
(2006), Robert Sugden (1993, 2000) and Martin Hollis (1998) have
developed corresponding accounts*.* In contrast to the
literature on collective intentionality, these accounts focus on ways
of reasoning rather than forms of intention, or mental attitudes.
However, these approaches can be seen as complementary to each other
(Hakli, Miller & Tuomela 2010; see also Petersson 2016). Gold and
Sugden (2007) criticize Tuomela's, Bratman's,
Searle's and Gilbert's accounts of collective
intentionality, arguing that focusing on mental states or attitudes
rather than modes of reasoning makes it impossible to see what is
genuinely collective about collective intentions. In their view,
collective intentions are the product of we-reasoning--a view
that is challenged by the phenomenon of spontaneous joint intentions,
and perhaps by the circularity problem that team reasoning already
supposes some sense of doing something together.


### 4.4 The Mark of Mankind



Collective or shared intentionality has been assigned a prominent role
in recent research in evolutionary anthropology and developmental
psychology. Michael Tomasello and his collaborators have suggested
that our capacity for shared intentionality is the most basic
difference between humans and other primates. The evidence quoted for
this claim is that while other primates seem to be apt strategic
reasoners with an impressively well-developed sense of what other
individuals perceive and want, the propensity to joint attention and
the inclination to cooperation even where this does not immediately
serve one's own purposes is uniquely human. Tomasello argues
that this basic cooperative-mindedness expresses a specifically human
capacity for shared intentionality (Tomasello & Racokzy 2003).
It is only on this base that other distinctively human capacities,
such as the capacity for language and morality, can develop (Tomasello
2009, 2016). Tomasello refers to Searle's, Gilbert's and
Bratman's accounts, but remains largely noncommittal as to the
question of what exactly the conception of shared intention he has in
mind amounts to (Schmid 2012). However, his conception suggests that a
Searlean version may be the basic form of shared intention, and that a
normatively stabilized conception of collective intentionality as
developed by Gilbert may be adequate for the forms of shared intention
coming a later stage in development. If Tomasello is right in claiming
that the basic capacity for shared intention precedes the development
of a full theory of mind, this places tight conceptual restriction on
an adequate analysis of basic shared intention, this seems to rule out
the common knowledge-condition that is implied even in Searle's
(2010) account.