On collective intentionality

In my blogs, now and then I have written about the problem of collective intentionality. At the moment it is one of the most discussed themes in the field of philosophy of action. It is discussed so much just because philosophers cannot get a grip on it. The essence of the discussion is: What are collective intentions and actions and how can we explain them? And here the problem starts, for since intentions are in the minds of individuals and actions are performed by individuals, how then is it possible that groups (and collectivities in general) have intentions and perform actions that are not simple aggregations of what the individuals who make up these groups intend and do? What do we mean when we say that the team wins, while there is no team that has kicked the ball for there are only individual players who have done so? But John, one of the players, doesn’t say “I have won”, but he says “We have won”. And here we are at the heart of the problem: How can the I-we distinction be bridged? To my mind, until now no philosopher has convincingly succeeded to do so. And just this made for me the problem intriguing and challenging and it made me – being an action philosopher myself – to give my thoughts to the question and put down my ideas in an essay. My blogs about the theme published here on blogspot are either a kind of prepublications of parts of the essay or they are tryouts that helped me develop my ideas. Last week, then, I uploaded the essay to my website. I hope that it will help bring the discussion on collective intentionality a step further.
Below you find the abstract of my essay. Are you interested in reading the full essay? Don’t hesitate then to go to my website and to download it. And once you have read it, don’t hesitate to send me your comments!
Click HERE in order to go to the full essay.

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Abstract of “Collective intentionality and the constitution view. An essay on acting together”.
One of the currently most discussed themes in the philosophy of action is whether there is some kind of collective intention that explains what groups do independent of what the individuals who make up the group intend and do. One of the main obstacles to solve this problem is that on the one hand collective intentionality is no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive pattern of individual intentionality (the Irreducibility Claim), while on the other hand collective intentionality is in the heads of the participating individuals, so to speak, and so it is owned by each of the separate individuals who make up the group (the Individual Ownership Claim). The claims are contradictory and until now no satisfactory solution how to reconcile them has been found. In this article I argue that the constitution view, like the one developed by Lynne R. Baker, can provide a way to sidestep the contradiction. Just as a statue as such is constituted by the marble it is made of but has characteristics that are different from the marble (a statue has a head and legs, while the marble hasn’t; while the marble is stony and the statue as such isn’t), I argue that a group is constituted by its members and that a group on the one hand and its members on the other hand have different characteristics. This is possible because group and members are on different levels. Then there is no longer a contradiction between the Irreducibility Claim and the Individual Ownership Claim, for the former claim concerns the group level and the latter claim concerns the level of the group members. This explains that a group can have intentions that are no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive patterns of the intentions of its members and that group intentions can be different from if not contradictory to what the individual members taken together intend.

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In fact, the essay just mentioned is my second contribution to the debate on collective intentionality. HERE you find the find my first article, titled “Collective intentionality and individual action”.