Collective Intentions and Actions

Abstract

This essay begins with an intuition, a notation, and a presupposition. The intuition is: Collective intentional behavior is a primitive phenomenon that cannot be analyzed as just the summation of individual intentional behavior; and collective intentions expressed in the form "we intend to do such-andsuch" or "we are doing such-and-such" are also primitive phenomena and cannot be analyzed in terms of individual intentions expressed in the form "I intend to do such-and-such" or "I am doing such-and-such." The notation is: S (p). The "S" stands for the type of psychological state; the "p" stands for the propositional content, the content that determines the conditions of satisfaction. Like all such notations, it isn't neutral; it embodies a theory. The presupposition is: All intentionality, whether collective or individual, requires a preintentional Background of mental capacities that are not themselves representational. In this case that implies that the functioning of the phenomena represented by the notation requires a set of phenomena that cannot be represented by that notation.