Collective intentionality and the development of man

One of the most discussed issues in present philosophy of action is whether some kind of group intention, collective intention, shared intention or how you would call it exists. If an individual plans an action like going to run tomorrow, we say that she intends to do so or has such an intention. But what if several persons plan to do something together like playing tennis or bridge? Since you cannot do this alone, can we say then that there is a kind of common intention and, if so, what is it? Several answers to this question have been proposed. Especially those by Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, John Searle and Raimo Tuomela are considered important.
In Bratman’s approach to common intentionality each individual has the intention to do his part of the shared goal and knows that the other(s) will do her part or their parts, while moreover the individual action plans mesh. According to Gilbert, if two or more individuals plan to do something together, they have a joint commitment. Each individual can cancel the obligation to contribute to the common task only after the consent of all other participants. According to Searle, collective intention transcends the individual minds “and collective intentions expressed in the form ‘we intend to do such-and-such’, and, ‘we are doing such-and-such’ are … primitive phenomena and cannot be analyzed in terms of individual intentions …” According to Tuomela, individual contributors have a kind of we-intention or joint intention to perform a planned joint action together.
All such tries to solve the problem of common intentionality start from two claims. These are (following Schweikard and Schmid in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – SEP):
- Common intentionality is no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive pattern of individual intentionality (the Irreducibility Claim).
- Common intentionality is had by the participating individuals, and all the intentionality an individual has is their own (the Individual Ownership Claim).
As can be seen in the four different approaches just mentioned, the answers to the question what the commonness of common intentionality involves are very different, despite these shared starting points. Again following SEP, some see the commonness in the content of the intention, like Bratman: individual actors strive to do the same together. Others see the commonness in the mode of the intention, like Tuomela: the actor switches from an individual action mode to a we-mode, when he plans to perform an action together with others. Again others see the commonness in the acting subject, like Gilbert: for her a group is a plural subject with its own collective intentional state called joint commitment. Searle’s approach is a kind of mix between the mode-approach and the subject-approach: we-intentions are not individual intentions put together (mode-switch), but the bearer (=subject) of the intention is not the individual but the group.
Most accounts suppose – usually implicitly – that there is one kind of common intentionality and that the question is to find out what it is like. However, the American developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello has put forward a very different idea. For why should there be only one kind of common intentionality and why shouldn’t there be a kind of relationship, for instance developmental relationship, between the different types of common intentionality proposed? From that perspective prehistoric humans long ago first acted only individually together, so to speak: for practical reasons they sought the cooperation of other individuals for performing tasks that together could be done more successfully and effectively than alone (cf Bratman’s approach). Later this developed that way that humans who had made the appointment to work together were obliged to do so in the sense of Gilbert’s joint commitment. One could only withdraw, if the other partners in the job had rescinded the obligation (on sanction of being seen as untrustworthy if one didn’t meet one’s commitments). Later then, more complicated forms of common intentionality as discussed by Searle and Tuomela developed. (by the way, this is my interpretation of Tomasello; he doesn’t exactly say so) Seen this way it’s not the question which approach of common intentionality is the right one, be it the one proposed by Bratman, Gilbert, Tuomela or Searle, or who else has come with an idea what it is like, for the different approaches can be seen in a developmental perspective in the sense that one was followed by another. Moreover, this view on common intentionality makes it quite well possible that currently common intentionality still can have different expressions and can take different shapes. 

Sources
- Schweikard, David P., Hans Bernhard Schmid, “Collective Intentionality”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collective-intentionality/#WhaColAboColInt. See here also for literature on Bratman, Gilbert, Searle and Tuomela.
- Searle, John, “Collective Intentions and Actions”, in: P. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M.E. Pollack, (eds.), Intentions in Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1990; pp. 401-415.
- Tomasello, Michael, A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, Mass. Etc.: Harvard University Press, 2014.
- Zahavi, Dan, Glenda Satne, “Varieties of shared intentionality: Tomasello and classical phenomenology”, in: Jeffrey A. Bell, et.al., Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide. Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2015; pp. 305-325.