ABSTRACT
There are many things we do together: we enjoy listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, we paint a house, we discuss a proof of Fermat’s last theorem together. We also share a tradition with our ancestors, the world of nature with people from distant countries we have never met and responsibility with our co-workers for the outcome of a given task. There are many ways in which we can be together, have joint goals, share intentions, emotions and experiences. However, current accounts tend to explain these different ways of being-together in terms of one single form of collective intentionality. In doing so, they endorse three main assumptions:
First, most theories that purport to give an account of collective intentionality assume, even if many times implicitly, a “uniformity thesis,” i.e., they are committed to the idea that all forms of collective intentionality ultimately reduce to one. Some understand it as a form of mutual commitment (Gilbert 2013), others as a state entertained by an irreducible plural subject (Schmid 2009). Some have thought it to be construed out of the individual’s mental states, either as states with an irreducible we-mode (Searle 1995) or as states that, suitably combined, provide the basis for a shared state (Bratman 1992).
