What is a Mode Account of Collective Intentionality?

Abstract

Many attempts to understand collective intentionality have tried to steer between two extremes. We want to understand how the members of a group are bound together, what turns them into a group, so we don’t want to think of the group as a mere sum of individuals. At the same time, we don’t want the group to be free-floating with regard to the members. It should not come out as just another individual, as an additional person as it were, nor should it be emergent in a radical sense. It’s useful to distinguish attempts to accomplish this balancing act in terms of where they solely or predominantly locate collectivity: in the content of relevant intentional states (or speech acts), in their mode, or in their subject(s) (Schweikard and Schmid 2012). A content approach tries to understand collectivity in terms of the contents of the subjects’ intentionality, where content is understood in the standard fashion, namely as what the subjects believe, intend, hope, feel, and so on. So on this kind of view, collectivity is just a matter of certain kinds of things that individuals believe, intend, and feel with regard to each other. On this perspective, the best-known representative of which is Michael Bratman (1992, 2014), there may be a ‘we’ of joint action as represented in the content of intentions, but these intentions are always of the form ‘I intend that we J’, so that no collective ‘we’-subject of intentional states is represented. Now, this kind of approach is in danger of erring on the side of being too individualistic. Can we really reduce all our practical and theoretical we-thoughts to I-thoughts? Does it make sense to suppose that an individual subject intends a collective action? On the other side of the spectrum, we find those who unabashedly embrace the notion of collective, plural subjects (Gilbert 1992; Schmid 2009) and thus, many will feel, put themselves in danger of erring on the side of being too collectivistic. What can it mean that there is an additional subject here? Do we really have to commit to such an entity just in order to explain joint action?