Do collective intentions exist?

Or : Can you step twice in the same river?

The IJssel near Kampen, Netherlands

A much-discussed question in the philosophy of action is whether collective intentions exist and if so what they would be like. Some philosophers defend the idea that there are shared intentions (like Bratman), but such intentions are literally shared by the individuals who have them: Each individual involved has the idea to do something together and in this way we can call such intentions shared but in the end they are individually owned. It’s the same for so-called joint intentions (Gilbert), which are owned by the individuals who jointly act. Also what others (like Searle) call collective intentions are individual states. Graduates of a business school who agree to strive for a liberal economy during their careers (Searle’s example) are still individuals with the same aim. They are not a group but simply businessmen (or whatever) who work independently from each other. So, all this cannot be what we rightly can take as “collective intention”. On the contrary, when we talk of collective intention the question is whether there can be a kind of intention in the sense that we say that a football club tries to become the national champion. For in this case we ascribe the aim to the team and not so much to the individual players. And we do not say that John or Pete became national champion if the team succeeds, but that the team did or at most we say that John or Pete became champion with the team.
As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, the central problem can be spelled out as a contradiction between the following two widely accepted claims:
-  Collective intentionality is no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive pattern of individual intentionality (the Irreducibility Claim);
-  Collective intentionality is had by the participating individuals, and all the intentionality an individual has is his or her own (the Individual Ownership Claim).
I gave already an example of the irreducibility claim: We say that the team wants to become champion and not so much that the players want, for isn’t it so that during the season sometimes one or more players leave the team – and may even play then for another team – and are replaced by other players and we still say that the original team wants to become champion? As for the individual ownership claim, generally individual intentions are ascribed to persons, if not to their minds or brains. But where do we locate a collective intention if a team is actually something abstract with a fluid membership? We cannot say that the collective intention is in this or that player or in all players together (for what if someone leaves?), but where then is it?
I think there are several reasons that collective intentions in the sense that they can be ascribed to groups as such do not exist. I have presented already one reason, namely that people can leave or join groups, while this doesn’t influence the collective intention of the group. Generally groups don’t have the same members in the long run, even though they can keep the same goals. Moreover, in a small group one might say that the collective intention is in the heads of John, Mary and Anna, but what about big groups like business concerns? Maybe a company has the aim to maximize profits, but usually the employees only want to earn a decent income (and it is basically difficult to mark off smaller groups from bigger unities). There are more reasons, which I have expounded elsewhere (see my blog dated 27 July 2020), but I think that this is enough to substantiate my view that collective intentions in the right sense do not exist.
If then philosophers think that there is something like collective intentionality, to my mind it is because they confuse levels. By explaining this, let me take the example of a river. A river consists of water and water consists of molecules. So, in the end the molecules make up the river. Nevertheless, when you want to study a river, you are not going to study the behaviour of the molecules, for example by investigating how the separate molecules move from the source of the river to the sea. No, normally rivers are studied in terms of current, fall, erosion, depth of the river, sediment, bed, etc. So, we don’t study rivers in terms of their individual parts (the molecules) but in terms of aggregate concepts; in terms of really collective concepts and not in terms of collective concepts that actually refer to the individual parts that make up the whole. And this is what we must also do if we want to study groups. We must study groups at a group level and individuals at an individual level. There is nothing against speaking of collective intentionality, but if we do we must realize that we are simply using a metaphor, or that we (following Dennett and then Tollefsen) take an intentional stance towards groups: We study groups as if they have intentions, aims, etc. This can be a very useful approach, but we must not think that groups really have intentions, aims, etc.

P.S. All this made me think of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Didn’t he say that you cannot step twice in the same river? However, by saying so Heraclitus confused levels, namely the levels of the river and the water (or molecules), and you can step in a river as often as you like. 

Sources
- My blog “What is a group?”, http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2020/07/everybody-has-same-intention-but-do.html
- David P. Schweikard, Hans Bernhard Schmid, “Collective Intentionality”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collective-intentionality/#WhaColAboColInt
- Deborah Perron Tollefsen, Groups as Agents. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015