Between intentionality and documents, an
exploration into the nature of social objects.
Juan Pablo Hernández González
10847421Under the supervision of
dr. Francesco Berto
and submitted to the
Board of Examiners in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Master in Philosophy at Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Having
dr. Robin Celikates as a critical reader. Date of defense:
August 31
st, 2015.
Social ontology as the study of the nature of social objects is still very new. We analyze two positions that have similar influences but who are constructed in a manner that makes contrary. Through a historical analysis and tracing of the notions we will contextualize the present debate so as to encounter John Searle’s account of social ontology. He states that social entities are the case because we believe them to be the case. This is done through collective intentionality. Maurizio Ferraris, on the other hand, takes the documentation of the acts as the mean to bring about collective objects and with them intentionality. To conclude we undertake a critical comparison and propose some considerations on the matter.
1. - Introduction
It’s is not often recognized that so many of the entities that populate our universe come about because of social reality. Over the course of time the iterative patterns of activities and dispositions accumulate in the social body exerting tremendous amount of influence on our overall outlook on reality. Any mature reflection of the world and the things and laws that constitute it are made on top of the platform of interpretations that have been incorporated from the social sphere. The cases of feral children give us a glimpse of the basic constitution of the minds of those who have been despoiled from social reality in the crucial process of childhood. The reality, as we know it, comprised of things like marriages, governments and so on, own their appearance to the coordinated representations of those entities. The influence of the social, however, does not stop there. It transcends de sphere of the social unto the personal relation of one with the world. The ontological cartographical practice draws its traces with ink that is due to reason and nature, yes, but also with the pen that it has been conveyed by the tradition. We are, after all, in Aristotle’s words “Social Animals”1; a condition that is so familiar that usually passes unnoticed yet it transverses all of our considerations.
The study of the naturalization processes of our social practices was not formalized through a corpus of studies until formal academic sociology was established by Durkheim in the 1895 with his Rules of the Sociological Method. Although the subject of our social arrangement had been treated previously by many others, there was not a systematic study of the demeanor of the human organization and institution that were brought about in order to bring a cohesion and structure to society. In a similar fashion, no discipline had emerged, within our intellectual tradition, in order to treat the nature of the set of things that were brought about as a result of our organized interactions. Institutions, kingdoms, contracts and even language, were handled without first discovering its internal structure. As with the fire that was handled by our ancestors long before its chemical mechanisms were scrutinized, the social entities that have accompanied mankind since its social beginnings are just until recently being rigorously inspected. We can mark the beginning of this treatment in 1995 when John Searle published the book The Construction of Social Reality2
.
In the following pages I will explore this subject, namely, what are the mechanisms and constituents by which a social object is. The purpose is to analyze some positions that have been brought forward and contribute in those areas that we find insufficient. I consider it a project of importance for whatever the resolutions and advances on the subject might be, the understanding will improve whatever relation we might have towards them.
1 Aristotle, Politics, 1.1253a.
2 The earliest mention I could find of the phrase social ontology in print was in: Michael Theunissen, Der Andere,
Despite the variety of forms that the social objects take, we presuppose that they have a common structure which we would like to find. The changes that they might suffer along with the reason that drove them to have a given constitution, are of importance, but more relevant for our study is the way in which they come to be and the changes they undertake. Regarding the social reality, the movement of mankind through time is the interplay between the agents, authors and actors of all the change biding and change ensuing initiatives such as conflicts and resolutions. Our social history, in this sense, can be taken as the transformation of the social entities, popping in and out of existence by means of the activity of its constituents, but almost as if they had a life of its own. To draw an analogy with our personal life: we have history that is comprised by with meaningful events such as a joyous birthdays, but we often forget that we are but an organism comprised by other organisms such as osteocytes, neurons, photoreceptors and so on. Despite being, comprised by systems at a lower level, the higher level system seems to have a life of its own. Just like our life does not end if we lose some skin cells, the social reality has a synergy of its own that one is tempted to call it a higher-order organism. Undeterred by the transformation of the social objects, the prevalent (and essential?) commonalities, such as their structural features, can be given as ontological characterizations which we will strive to identify.
It can be hard to think about the human tradition as tradition because it is imbued in the very way we think. There has to be a great deal of reflection In order to trace the social lineage of our thoughts. Conversely, to attempt to see the world in its naked state there needs to be a despoilment of this social legacy by means of abstraction (if it is even possible given that we have been conditioned by it from the earliest stages of life). So much of our human thought and behavior we take for granted without factoring the social endowments. Things that we so naturally register in our ontology such as cups and tables, and even natural ones, such as trees have social elements imbued in them.
Exercises of reason and perception that strive to get rid of the social influence are destined to end up in a dead end because the very act is empowered by the social legacy. So much of our thought is social. Language, as a tool that segments the world into manageable pieces for information processing is an attestation of it. To make a social-free assertion, will take our mind into unexpected nooks that twist and wiggle our endeavors; a frustrating experience as it can be to try to prove an apodictic metaphysical assertion such as Berkeley’s assertion of the inexistence of a tree on a perceiver-free world3. In this present research we will not go into how fathomable it is to give an ontological account of the world without in a social-free consciousness, we are just raising the thorny issue.
Social entities are not trivial things: they play the crucial role of structuring our social life which is a significant chunk of it all. They configure it in functional, structural, symbolic and even cognitively manners, among others. Despite this significant force that they exert on a daily basis, their nature appears to us as mysterious. Any clarification could very well benefit us by allowing a better organization of and around them.
Social ontology as an ontology activity can be taken to have the same big questions as general ontology such as the question for the existence of the universals or of the meaning of existence itself; however they are applied to considerations that touch on the social. It might be tempted to say that social ontology is a sub-discipline of ontology, for it deals with a subclass of entities and because it makes use of its traditions and tools. This, however, is not necessarily the case because of what has been said regarding the influence of the tradition in our coping with the world. We are not here to settle this matter, for now, let us just call it by its technical term: special ontology; and take the relation amid the two as that of two colleagues that share the common interest for the investigation of being and 3 George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1734, section 23.
existence, where the social ontologist happens to take especial interest in the social reality. The relation between ontology and its derived fields, within its varied methodologies, such as the social, scientific or philosophical, is always complicated because of the forever present insufficiencies of our metaphysical horizon4
. This however, should not deter us from striving for rigor and an increasing yield in our endeavors.
One might challenge the very existence of the social entities or the formation of a separate discipline altogether for studying the social entities; after all, they haven’t figured in the tradition in a way that we are about to treat them. If we take a look, for the sake of exemplification, into Plato’s dialogue: The Republic, we can appreciate the dialectic movement of the conceptions that are held by the interlocutors on a subject matter that is deeply social: justice. However, because of his particular way of philosophizing and his quest for the ideas, the social reality is mentioned only insofar as structural characterizations of specific instantiation of social beings. For example, aristocracy is simply the government of the best. Ultimately the mentioning of such instances serves to highlight the differences in perspectives between the people and their communion in sharing the quest for the ideas. The subject of the social beings are treated only as tangent as opposed to a circumscription, this is, touching on the subject as a mere mention and not as the subject of study. In Book VIII Socrates goes over the forms of governments and their transformation as they move through time but there is no sojourn in what it is that social entities are. What we are lacking, is therefore a general portrayal of its being. In any case, a negation or affirmation of such entities should include the corresponding account of the objects features, insofar as it is essential. This is, the quiddity or whatness. This is, in Aristotelian terms,
τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι5
, or οὐσία: what is to be a given thing6
. In any case, any attack or defense of social objects should be accompanied with their corresponding argumentation. Omission isn’t an option because we cannot go around imprecise notions on such rampant matters.
One can make a case for the existence of social entities on fundamental grounds where their differentiation and existence can be grasped by their particular mode of existence. This is what Searle does by making a contrast between social independent processes (such as the pain that I feel when I bump my toe), or from mind independent ones (such as a rock7) from those entities that require a special kind of coordinated relations between representation of individuals (money, governments, language). This is one of the position that we will analyze along with another one that branches out from it. This is the theory of Documentality as it is brought forward by Maurizio Ferraris. Their differences basically lie in the form of understanding the social objects regarding the formal requirements. This snippet of information will be completed further on, the purpose of mentioning it here, is just to serve as an ideological beacon to keep present as we briefly sail on the waters of history. 1.1. – History
Within philosophy, it is until the later portion of the seventeenth century that the social reality was addressed with fair rigor; although always as a part of a bigger project that encompassed it and not as 4 Kant like many others share this treat of metaphysics. Particularly he treats it as the activity that seeks conditions for every condition. Be it in the Trascendental Aesthetic or the Trascendental logic, that is, as Verstand or Vernuf respectively. Metaphysics as the maxims of reason is: to “find for the conditioned knowledge given through the understanding the unconditioned whereby its unity is brought to completion. In The Critique of Pure Reason(A308/B364) 5 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1029b.
6 In this respect I have found several interpretations, some take it to be a mere formal cause, but other the “power” that it maintains it. I will not go unto the problem of the relation between the essence ὄντως and the instantiated being οὐσία or between the εἶδος and the world through μέθεξις; this I leave for the general ontological practice.
an explicit ontological investigation. Its study came along with the awareness of its ubiquitous and powerful character through the identification that was in turn fomented by the growing presence of thoughts that braided ethics, morality and politics. This can be appreciated, for example, in Hegel’s notion of Objective Spirit, where the Concept passes from chaos to self-consciousness, by making the subjective objective through the realization of the multiplicity of consciousness and its constructive capabilities. It is the realization of the “We” in the “I”, and the “I” in the “We” that resembles the notions that we are to explore, such as the we-intentions. Social objects, as being constituted by the dispositions of the individual in a communal manner which is present in time and space. A stage of progression of the spirit (Geist), to the cultural institutions and practices, as objectivity; a sublimation of the mere naturalistic components: containing them but being more than it.
The objective Mind is the absolute Idea, but only existing in posse: and as it is thus on the territory of finitude, its actual rationality retains the aspect of external appearance. The free will finds itself immediately confronted by differences which arise from the circumstance that freedom is its inward function and aim, and is in relation to an external and already subsisting objectivity, which splits up into different heads: viz. anthropological data (i.e. private and personal needs), external things of nature which exist for consciousness, and the ties of relation between individual wills which are conscious of their own diversity and particularity. These aspects constitute the external material for the embodiment of the will.8
Around the same time, we can appreciate how many works of political philosophy started to emerge in ways that assigned more effort to the precise treatments of the terms utilized in their intellectual endeavor that spanned from the natural origins of man all the way to the political structure of our social conglomeration. Efforts were made, for example by Thomas Hobbes who wrote in order to capture the essence of human nature and the inner workings on the state, being ultimately the foundation for previously elusive concepts such as justice. On a similar stream of thought, Rousseau worked on human nature, stating that we are born free and eventually corrupted by our social history. However, he states that it is up to us to reconstitute ourselves, individually and collectively, through democratic principles by invoking our free will in order to carry on a social contract.9 I would place these approaches as the first systematic attempts to account for the origin of the social entities that covers mostly its upbringing and not so much its maintenance or its ontological scaffolding.
As we have said previously, the subject of social ontology has been treated in an indirect manner, perhaps most notably due to the great deal of overlapping that there is in the area of sociology. This is, because sociology attempts to study society in its operations, with a specific methodology that goes in accordance with its theoretical assumptions with little questioning of what it is that the social objects are. There is a presupposition of its existence and no demurring of the grounds of such claims. It can be taken analogously to the presupposition of a methodology of an object of study, say a baseball, such as: the classical physical one, by means of its mass and forces; the chemical one, by means of its composition; and other approaches such as the artistic, phenomenological, etc.; all of which brings us closer to understanding the baseball, but leave aside the encompassing character of an ontological exercise. Notwithstanding this, there are appearances of ontological considerations that tilt the way of 8 George W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences, 1817, pt. 3, section two, the objective spirit.
9 Celeste Friend, "Social Contract Theory", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Accessed on 19/8/15) James Fieser, Bradley Dowden, (ed.) URL = http://www.iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/
studying society. For example, Anthony Giddens carried out an ontological argument, within the sociological school of structural functionalism, in order to make clear that society doesn’t have needs as a human being does; consideration that proved highly influential for his theory of structuration. Structural Functionalism departs from the tenet that society operates like an organism does, by means of its constituents organs, each of which perform a specific function within the organism. Extremities allow the organism to manipulate object to displace himself; eyes provides it with vision; the vascular system irrigates the organism with nutrients and other relevant substances. Similarly, norms and institutions and other components of society should be understood in terms of their function. For instance, traffic rules are for regulating the operation of motorized vehicles; the energy commission regulates and develops what has to do with power and so on:
[Functionalism] looked particularly towards biology as the science providing the closest and most compatible model for social science. Biology has been taken to provide a guide to conceptualizing the structure and the function of social systems and to analyzing processes of evolution via mechanisms of adaptation ... functionalism strongly emphasizes the pre-eminence of the social world over its individual parts (i.e. its constituent actors, human subjects).10
A different approach that is at odds with functionalism is the one proposed by Max Weber. It went against the positivistic convictions by incorporating hermeneutics: investigations of the social should depart from the subjective perspective of these norms, values and institutions; because every social process is ultimately understood from an individual perspective as interpretation. This subjective aspect does not mean nonetheless that they lack the causal explanatory power:
[Sociology is] ... the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of
social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which
the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By 'action' in this definition is meant the human behavior when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful ... the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the 'meaning' to be thought of as somehow objectively 'correct' or 'true' by some metaphysical criterion. This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history, and any kind of prior discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject-matter 'correct' or 'valid' meaning.11
This Weberian way of treating society has its roots in philosophy, specifically phenomenology written by the hand of Alfred Scütz as “Social phenomenology” in his book: The phenomenology of the Social
World (1967); and before him, Edmund Husserl in his Cartesian Meditations (1929) among others. As
developed by Husserl, phenomenology is the ‘science of the essences as presented to the consciousness’ and its methodology is the bracketing of assumptions about the world (ἐποχή) in order 10Giddens, Anthony chapter=The Constitution of Society. Philip Cassell, ed. The Giddens Reader. MacMillan Press. p. 88.
11Max Weber, The Nature of Social Action, in Runciman, W.G.,Weber: Selections in Translation, Cambridge University Press, 1991. p. 7.
be re-interpreted from the whole set of social, individual and cultures acts (Lebenswelt); having as a result an unveiling of the structure of consciousness. When phenomenological exercises were carried out, it was found that the others had a tremendous influence in the type and content of the essences that populated our egological12
universe.
That my own essence can be at all contrasted for me with something else, or that I (who am I) can become aware of someone else (Who is not I but someone other than I), presupposes that not all my own modes of
consciousness are modes of my self-consciousness. Since actual being is
constituted originally by harmoniousness of experience, my own self must contain, in contrast to self-experience, and the system of its harmoniousness (the system, therefore, of self-explication into components of my owness), yet experience united in harmonious systems. And now the problem is how we are to understand the fact that the ego has, and can always go on forming, in himself such internationalities of a different kind, internationalities with an existence-essence whereby he wholly transcends
his own being. How can something actually existent for me-and as that, not
just somehow meant but undergoing harmonious verification in me – be anything else than, so to speak, a point of intersection belonging to my constitutive synthesis? As concretely inseparable from my synthesis, is it peculiar my own? But even the possibility of the vaguest, emptiest intending of something alien is problematic, if it is true that, essentially, every such mode of consciousness involves its possibilities of an uncovering of what is intended, its possibilities of becoming converted into either fulfilling or disillusioning experiences of what is meant, and what moreover, (as regards the genesis of consciousness) points back to such experiences of the same intended object or a similar one.13
Such considerations were adopted by Scütz, not without some criticism14
, and utilized to think reality, as apprehended for the first person perspective and in relation with a social system. It takes Intersubjectivity as the intertwining activity of the intentional structures, and finds a central role in the structuring of our intentional activity. Furthermore, as Husserl mentions most notability in his ‘fifth mediation’, intersubjectivity has the important role of developing empathic relations, making objectivity possible, empowering convergent understanding and as a precondition for interaction15. In summary, it is the faculty that allows us to experience objects as public and to make present the presence of others in our own ego as it makes its apparition in the day-to-day and, as the result of a phenomenological practice16, as a transcendental ego.
Another important notion that is of importance for phenomenology and for our present investigation is that of intentionality. The contemporary attention in philosophy to this attribute of consciousness is due to Franz Brentano as it appears in his work, e.g., Psychology from an Empirical Perspective (1874) when he set out to provide criteria to distinguish mental from physical phenomena, intentionality figured as one of them that was to be developed subsequently by him and others. He explains:
12 The egological sphere is the happening of things as experiences by me. In Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditation, Kluwer Academic, the Netherlands, §8.
13Ibid, p.107.
14Peter J. Carrington, Schütz on Trascendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl, in Human Studies, Springer, Vol2, No.2 (Apr., 1979), pp 95- 110;
15 Alessandro Duranto, Husserl, Intersubjectivity and Anthropology, SAGE, 2010. 16 Husserl, Ibid; on the first meditation, §8.
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself...17
Following the historical timeline and unto the next subject. We are about to explore a proposition to understand made by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, who follows the line of Brentano-Kant-Hume-Aristotle and develops a series of concepts that we are about to explore because of the importance for our investigation for it has set the tone of the current debates on the matter.
1.2 We-intentions
This kind of intentions are plural because it is shared, and individual insofar as is represented. The notion helped Wilfrid Sellars to undertake the challenge of intentionality and intersubjectivity, in a way that accounted for its logical form, as well as its content; in works such as Intentionality and the Mental (1957). As a thinker involved in the philosophy of mind, following Kant (in what is relevant to the present investigation: between thought and sense) and Hume before him (in his moral consideration on the distinction between the is and the ought18).He developed a naturalism that accepts normativity that
goes in alignment with Gilbert Ryle’s logical behaviorism: the human ability to explain behavior and other metalinguistic abilities to ‘describe and prescribe linguistic behavior’. It is said that Sellars claims that a “[…] a community can reasonably increase its explanatory resources by postulating unobservable states internal to each person that modulate that person’s responses to the world. Moreover for Sellars, there is motive to postulate two different kinds of internal states: one kind—thoughts—has properties modeled on the semantic properties of overt linguistic events, while the other—sense impressions— has properties modeled on the properties of perceptible objects. Thoughts are postulated to explain how the members of the community can engage in complex patterns of reasonable behavior even when silent. Sense impressions are postulated to explain why members of the community sometimes behave as if perceiving something that is not there.”1920 Sellar’s personal treatment of intentionality it’s thus, a functionalist treatment of meaning. There is a thought-behavior to carry on a proposition21 that are non-linguistic, yet possessing a logical structure. They have an inferential structure of the ‘Humen kind’: this is through material inferences that have no explicit logical principle, such as moving from “Smoke here” to “Fire Nearby”; and Aristotelian inferences where they are syllogistic and of the sort: “Smoke here. Wherever there’s smoke, there’s fire. So, Fire nearby.”2223
17 Franz Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot, (2nd. ed. by Oskar Kraus, Hamburg:
Meiner 1921.
18 Although their treatments are very similar, I haven’t found any reference to Hume’s work. For example in Wilfrid Sellars, "Ought' and Moral Principles, 1966 in Box 36, Folder 8; Archives of Scientific Philosophy, Special Collections Department, University of Pittsburgh.
19 deVries, Willem, "Wilfrid Sellars", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/sellars/>.
20 I think specifically of instances like when people engage in reading; described in what I once read on the internet: Reading is staring at marked slices of wood for hours while hallucinating vividly.
21 Inferential Relations are always between items with propositional form.
22 “This, Sellars claims, is the crucial difference between animal and human: full-fledged thinkers can recognize conditionality and generality as such, because they possess explicit symbols for if…then, all, and some” in Loc. cit.
23 I wonder if there is treatment, by Sellars of matters like the arity of the operation. That is, in classical logic, would be something of the sort as a polysyllogism. For example a Sorites: a series of syllogisms, that are connected a linear sequence of implicatures where the subject of the following syllogism is the implicature of the antecedent one.
1.2.1 Logic of We-intentions.
As for the logic of intentions, it comes from Sellars action theory (which will be explained in the following section) – it concerns the intelligibility of an action that is imbued with normativity, insofar as it is taken by the participant members of a group through the individual output that is produced in a ‘harmonious manner’; which is the contrary to the general trend of epistemology which is the focus on the input and the different relations and interactions between our cognitive states24. From this perspective, an intentionis thought that motivates one to realize its content. ‘I shall eat a light dinner later’ can be a mere prediction (suppose, e.g., that I know my cupboards are bare), but it can also express my intention, in which case it has motivational force within my behavioral control system. A volition is an intention that has come to fruition: it has an intentional content but also is causally affecting my behavior: ‘I shall eat a light dinner now’ expresses my volition and is usually accompanied by at least the first stirrings of activity”25
All the expressions of intentions are done in a first person mode and are a motivational force. When there is an expression of an intention, it takes the form of ‘Shall’ as ‘I shall do A’ or ‘shall be the case that p’:
Shall (A)’ implies ‘Shall (B)’ iff ‘A’ implies ‘B’.
Logical connectives and operators can also be part of the scope of ‘shall’ but not outside (for they are expressions of intentions):
Shall [Will do A]
This inferential commitments is applied to deontic modalities and they signal an endorsement of certain practical inferences and principles26. For example in the case that:
If X wants A, he ought to do B
It wouldn’t permit an unconditional detachment. Let suppose:
If Harry wants his inheritance now, he ought to kill his father And:
Harry wants his inheritance now. We do not draw the unalloyed conclusion
Harry ought to kill his father.
The reasonableness of killing his father remains strictly relative to Harry’s desire and does not achieve the objective status signaled by unconditional detachment.
We can sum up the apparent moral of our discussion to date by saying that although the 'ought' of
If X wants A, he ought to do B
24 Loc. cit.
25 Loc. cit. 26 Loc. cit.
looks as though it concerned the propriety of doing B on a certain hypothesis, it actually concerns the logical propriety or impropriety of certain complex valuings27
. To offer advice of the form
If you want A you ought to do B is not to offer substantive advice as does
You ought to do X It is to give logical advice28
1.2.1 Content of We-intentions.
Sellars departs from Husserl and makes a series of considerations that are of relevance for a work in social ontology. There is not only a reflection of the interpretations of the lifeworld and on the accessibility of the world; he carries on an inquiry into the structure of the composition of the objectivity that had been suggested by Husserl’s, or more precisely, into the structure of the intentional object, which in this case pertains to the social reality. His notions of We-intentions “[…] are attitudes, but at the same time, they are not merely private, but involve a shared point of view from which the participants may critically assess each other's contributions “29
. It can also be traced back to Robin G. Collingwood's New Leviathan (1947), where he takes society as “the sharing of certain persons in a practical social consciousness verbally expressed in a formula like ‘We will go for this walk’ or ‘We will sail this boat’”30
. These attitudes do not need to be located above the participants in question, as some sort of epiphenomenon; on the contrary, they are all allotted in them: they are had by the individuals and they refer to the activity of the group, especially to the role of the individual in the joint action. Because of this, they are characterized: action we referential intention or simply: we-intentions:
It must also be carefully borne in mind that although the concept of a group intention and a group action is a perfectly legitimate one, the action we-referential intentions we are considering are intentions had by individuals. It is individuals who intend31:
Shall [each of us do A, if in C]
Michael Bratman has criticized that such account implies a transgression of the individual capabilities for the certainty and control of intentionality is a private matter; an assertion of an activity that goes beyond the control of the individual. The difficulties that are pointed out by this observation may be circumvented by adopting minor change:
By substituting the action-referential attitudes as proposed by Sellars:
27 I’m not certain if this word is spelled like this. Is it not valuations? Perhaps appraisal? 28 Sellars, ibid, p.8.
29 David P. Schweikard and Hans Bernhard Schmid, "Collective Intentionality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/collective-intentionality/>.
30 Robin George Collingwood,, 1947, The New Leviathan. Oxford, Clarendon. p.146
31 Wilfrid Sellars, On Reasoning About Values, American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 17, Number 2, April 1980: pp. 81-101. No. 168.
[a person's intention that “we” do x, or that somebody else does x, is a practical commitment only as an action-referential intention (intention to): one intends to do whatever is necessary to make it the case that we do x, or that somebody else does x.32]
For propositional intentions as suggested by Bratman: [Intention, to33]
The resulting change is a shift from having an “intention, that” into having an “intention, to”. This is, an implementation of a condition of agency while retaining the intention of converging on a specific proposition, e.g., to intend that the door be closed. With this perspective we can say that we are intending without breaching the limits of intentionality, yet having this intentionality converge on a subject matter on a coordinated matter that includes its praxis. This, as we will see, will play a difficult to settle in relation to the treatment of language in the Derrida-Searle debate and onwards.
There is a concomitant downside, per contra, that follows consequentially by shifting intention that to intention to: we leave out the practical commitment that intending that entails. Because, we-internationalities have the form of intending X, as to make it the case that X. A first solution to this second quandary would be to consider that when a person intends that we do X there is an intention to carry on whatever is needed so that X takes place (such as influencing others to carry on the proposition in question). However, this first solution has the insufficiency that there is no real sharing of an attitude, thus no real we-intention. What is being suggested is a consequence of one’s own intention so that it prompts the corresponding intentionality to do something. It is an insufficient solution due to the lack of transgression of the egocentric perspective: intentions need to be shared.
An alternative solution that seeks to keep the autonomy of intentionality and the communal convergence it goes as follows: we can include a hypothetical conditional that takes a reflexive instance on the existence of the same hypothetical conditional by the other participants in relation to the activity in question:
The fact […] that to say that the intendible constituents of an intention are those which are present sub specie ‘up to me’ is equivalent to accompanying them with the conditional ‘if it is up to me’. […] Now ‘up to me’ is the first person form of ‘up to X’. […] Thus the correct answer to the above challenge consists in calling attention to the fact that the ‘up to the agent’ness of action we-referential intention is to be formulated as follows: ‘Shall [each of us, if it is up to them, do A]’ And this in no way requires that what others do be up to me.34
The overall position of Sellars can be summarized by stating that in order for the individuals to have a proper we-intention, they must be two or more, and the content of their intention should be the same; 32David P. Schweikard. Loc. cit.
33In “a closely related vein Raimo Tuomela distinguishes action intentions from aim intentions” Loc. cit.
conditions that create a tension that follows from the requirement that we-intentions are individual yet shared (there isn’t brain fusion or an emergence of a super brain). Additionally, the content includes the awareness of the other participant’s activity in upholding the same we-intention. It is not enough that we share the same thought (as when a group is asked to imagine a geometrical figure), there also needs to be a collective identification of the groups endeavor in the communal realization of the activity in question.
Sellar’s we-intentions are the basic of much of today’s debate on collective intentionality. Searle and Ferraris don’t go about discussing intentionality which is surprising, given that they spend so much time criticizing themselves in relation with intentionality. Their discussion sidesteps the whole debate and focus too much on the speech and not so much in what the speech acts are about. What is this aboutness of the phenomena in the first place? 35
Collective intentionality is relevant because many claim that social objects require somehow the coordination between the participants, in order to realize an activity, as a group. It is a requirement that considers simple summations as insufficient for social objects. When two individuals walk alongside along the street in a serendipitous manner, this does not, by itself, constitute collective intentionality or a social activity: there needs to be a common disposition to carry on the action together. The attitudes of the individuals are ascribed as if were a unit. This tension that was mentioned above instantiates a contradiction that is regarded as the central problem of collective in intentionality – the problem that collective intentionality ought to be, but cannot be, something over and above the intentionality of the individuals involved:
Irreducibility claim: Collective intentionality is no simple summation, aggregate or distributive pattern of individual intentionality.
Individual Ownership claim: Collective intentionality is had by the participating individuals, and all
the intentionality has is his or her own.36
Several attempts have been in order to develop an account that is capable of maintaining the autonomy of the participants while at the same time ensuring that they share some specific intentionality: an integration that does not merge unto undifferentiating. Clarification in this subject might very well prove useful for social ontology for the ontological status of a group needs to be clarified and elucidated through discussion that invite us to revisit “[…]familiar discussions about reduction, supervenience, constitution, and composition (and more).”37 We will briefly expose three variances of analysis types in relation with intentional attitudes in order to enrich our subsequent reflections. We will succinctly expose each of them and mention an example along with some of the difficulties and a possible solution.
35 Both go about claiming that they do transcendental philosophy, but while missing the point somehow. The conditions of possibility of knowledge, as applied from the social is something that preceded them all, and to which they had
experience in the first place through the others as Lévinas points out. It is as much structure History as the analysis of
speech acts, insofar as constitution, and for that matter, the culture that bears the expression of it. Searle writes a footnote in his introduction: “Kant did not bother to think about such things because in his era philosophers were obsesses with knowledge, Much later, for a brief, glorious moment, they were obsesses with language. Now this philosopher is at least obsessed with certain general structural features of human culture”. In Searle, Ibid, p.3.
36David P. Schweikard and Hans Bernhard Schmid, Ibid. 37 Loc. cit.
1) The first one focuses on the content, which is basically what the intentional attitudes are about. Because collective intentionality involves the convergence of intentional attitudes, the content must also include a consideration of the involvement of other participants. This is what Michael Bratman’s account highlights: the collective intentional attitudes have in them a consideration of the other subjects that are part of the collectivity. As such, collective intentionality is ‘shared cooperative activity’ where the contributors intend in a joint manner that has the following structure:
We intend to J if and only if:
(a) I intend that we J and (b) you intend that we J.
I intend that we J in accordance with and because of 1a, 1b, and meshing sub plans of 1a and 1b; you intend that we J in accordance with and because of 1a, 1b, and meshing sub plans of 1a and 1b.
1 and 2 are common knowledge between us.38
This particular consideration has the benefit of highlighting the interrelated intentional attitudes of those involved where there is a consideration of the others and of the objective of such collective intentionality. It has been criticized (Baier, 1997)39 by its attempt to take the joint activity as crucial
while simultaneously retaining the ‘I’ form of the constitutive individual intentions. This creates a circular reference between the I and the We. Difficulties that can be circumvented if we consider that the ‘I’-form intentions are only indicative of the perspective from which the participation is made while at the same time considering them as constitutive of the shared attitudes.
2) Another focus that is taken is the analysis by means of its mode which is basically the manner through which a collective intentionality formulation takes place. This approach has the benefit of uncovering the semantic reach that the usage of the plural pronoun “we” has in the context of joint actions as it pertains many individuals. Sellar’s account fits in this category. One of the people who continued along his vein is Tuomela & Miller40 who gives an account of we-intentions where
the individual agent’s intentions involve the referral to others’ intentions. In their analysis of ‘joint intention’ they propose the following structure to the modality:
(JI) Agents A1, …, Ai, …, Am have the joint intention to perform a joint
action X if and only if
a. these agents have the intention (or are disposed to form the we-intention) to perform X; and
b. there is a mutual belief among them to the effect that (a).
38 Michael Bratman, Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
39 For example, Baier, Annette, Doing Things With Others: The Mental Commons, in L. Alanen, S. Heinämaa, and T. Wallgren (eds.), Commonality and Particularity in Ethics, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997, pp. 15–44.
In the case of joint intention the conatively41 used ‘We will do X’ is true of each participant Ai. 4243
Some of the difficulties with this position also involve circularity. The we-intention has to be presupposed at some point in order to be carried on. An answer is that the participation of the individuals is done through the allocation of the contributors, all of which are anticipated but not necessarily presupposed. The designated positions of each of the participants can be settled in order to achieve a goal, under the presupposition that the others will carry their part.
3) The third constellation of positions contemplate the formation of the plural subject as when we say: “That group is trying to unstuck the truck out of the mud”, the group is the subject who is carrying out an action. The analysis of the plural subject ranges range over the scope of the collective intentionality inasmuch as it can be attributed to an entity. Can it be said, for example, that a group has intentionality? If so, in which ways? Is there really a formation of a social subject or is it that, when we speak of a group in manners such as: “the mob wanted to loot”, we are simply utilizing a shorthand that references the attitudes of its members?
Margaret Gilbert44
develops a plural subject theory; she examines the emblematic case of going for a walk together. She claims that the participating individuals in the plural subject must have a joint commitment that involves a commitment to X (intend, believe, accept) as a body. This commitment defines the social group of the ‘plural subject’, and as any subject, they have the capacity to hold intentional states.
A and B […] constitute a plural subject (by definition) if and only if they are jointly committed to doing something as a body—in a broad sense of ‘do’.45 Such account runs into difficulties when examining the ‘moment of instantiation’ of the plural subject. Wouldn’t we, in order to carry on a joint commitment, presuppose some sort of previous understanding? There is the danger of regress and circularity. This in turn can be addressed by taking the formation of the plural, not necessarily being instantiated in a given moment, but arising as a gradual upbringing that is a result of a coordinated behavior through communicative cues that are tacit or explicit; be it in a dialogical manner or other. In cases where the communication is tacit or inexistent as well as when commitments do not seem to be part of the collective subject, it seem challenging to account for a plural subject under the present proposition.
Having gone through some of the current approaches in the matter of collective intentionality we move towards Searle’s proposition of collective intentionality but before that we are to acquaint ourselves with a debate that concerens our understanding of language and its ability to convey information, specifically as it was had by Searle and Derrida.
1.3. The Searle-Derrida debate.
41“The aspect of mental processes or behavior directed toward action or change and including impulse, desire, volition, and striving.” As it appear on the Free Dictionary. URL= http://www.thefreedictionary.com/conative.
42 Raimo Tuomela, We-Intentions Revisited, in: Philosophical Studies, KluwerAcademic, 2005.
43This modalities are also subdivided into 3: Practical (intentions ~ desires), Theoretical (believes ~ perception), Emotional (hopes ~ fears).
44 Gilbert, Margaret, On Social Facts, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.
45Margaret Gilbert, A Theory of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment, and the Bonds of Society; Oxford
The social ontology proposals of Searle and Ferraris that we are to analyze owe their corresponding differences to a disagreement that was manifested previously, when Jacques Derrida and Searle had a debate characterized by a hostile exchange of ideas. It took place during the early 1970s. The debate was over the interpretation of theory of speech acts by John L. Austin, an author that exerted great influence on both authors.
Austin’s theory established the pragmatics of speech acts by making a stratification of the speech acts in three levels that influence each other. One of the main contributions is the attention to the ‘force’ that we exert when we speak, having a direction that is a consequent of the intention (illocution), a repercussion (perlocution), both of which are contained in what we enunciate (locution). The force of our utterances is achieved in its verbalization in a social context. The verbal action takes place when the utterance signifies what was verbalized through the others. What is signified is the force, specifically, the illocutionary force that involves an intention. For example, one of the seven components of the illocutionary force has a sincerity condition:
Many speech acts involve the expression of a psychological state. Assertion expresses belief; apology expresses regret, a promise expresses an intention, and so on. A speech act is sincere only if the speaker is in the psychological state that her speech act expresses.46
Contrastingly to this force, the actual utterances are nothing but the husk that contains the fruits of the semantic implicatures. Finally, the perlocutionary act is the effect that any utterance might have, as when a minister pronounces a couple married; it takes places on the appearance of such enunciation. In Austin own words:
A locutionary act, the performance of an utterance: the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic47 and rhetic48 acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance;
an illocutionary act: the pragmatic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its intended significance as a socially valid verbal action (see below);
and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act: its actual effect, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something, whether intended or not49
The debate sprung upon the interpretation of the speech acts, where the notion of “force” was taken by Derrida in an un-structured manner, comparatively to the normativity that Austin attributed to it: it is uncontained in the speech act, but composed of other speech acts. Derrida argued that speech acts are framed by the actual words that are not said (structure of absence) and by the conditions of usage that come about due to what has been said in the past (iterability). The discussion of speech acts, he argued, shouldn’t be in terms of conjectured intentions, but rather to be restricted to what are the possible intentions, task that is only achieved through the interpretation of what is presented with our previous background, specifically the texts. His maxim has been captured in his most known quote:
46 Mitchell Green, "Speech Acts", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/speech-acts/>.
47 A communication that is used to perform a social function rather of conveying information.
48 A term that stands for the quality of the object.
There is nothing outside the texts.50
Searle, on the contrary, thinks that intentionality can be communicated by means of the normativity that is prevalent on language. The intentional-with-a-t are states that can be communicated by the intentionality-with-an-s of the words.
Intensionality-with-an-s should not be confused with intentionality-with-a-t. Intentionality is that property of the mind by which it is directed at objects and states of affairs in the world. Intensionality is that property of sentences and other representations by which they fail certain test for extensionality. One of the most famous of this is Leibniz’s law: if two expression refer to the same object they can be substituted for each other in a sentence without changing the truth value of a sentence. Sentences that fail this test are said to be intensional with respect to substitutivity. Another expression used to name this sort of Intensionality is “referential opacity”. Typically sentences that are about intentional-with-a-t states are intensional-with-an-s sentences, because in such sentences the way in which an object is referred to affects the truth value of a sentences.51
Searle is convinced that the normative aspects that regulate language allow speech act’s force to be conveyed. This is done through the notion of Background which resembles Wittgenstein’s private language argument which makes a point on the infeasibility of a private language, and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus: the reason why people of a homogeneous social background share similar lifestyles; an act and potency of the embodied social structures, stratified by the upholding of capital of diverse kinds: economic, cultural, symbolic, etc.
Beyond the particular differences that might very well the result of a misunderstanding, the debate is relevant in the comparison of Searle and Ferraris because the later follows Derrida, until a certain point, with his deconstructivism and its hermeneutic relativism. He does so, while at the same time seeking a realistic objectivism. He thus, withdraws himself from the danger of absolute arbitrariness in the interpretation. He does so by having as a foundation the letters and documents. They sediment and makes possible thought and the will: documents. They are the inscriptions of the rules and conventions that are present in any institution. They are the foundation of the spirit (and not the other way around): […] rather than the dead letter is the condition of possibility of the living spirit, because the customs, languages and practices (i.e. documentality) are what allows for the development of intentionality, which would otherwise remain inert. Ultimately, what makes us give intentionality an intrinsic normative value is simply the fact that is accompanied by a form of vitality: the letter is dead, the spirit is alive. But what is alive in the spirit, what makes it effective, is precisely the letter, the iteration. Quite simply: as Wittgenstein noticed, a private language is impossible, therefore the expression of meanings comes from the iterability of the letters – which is equal to saying that the dead documental letter is the condition of possibility of the living intentional agent.52
50Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, 1976. p. 220
51 He is mentioning Leibniz’s law of indiscernible: ∀F(Fx ↔ Fy) → x=y.
What is documented provides a conceptual scheme that is steady and reliable, a contrasting trait in comparison with an apparent unrestricted epistemology. He agrees with Searle in the recognition of a fundamental difference between ontology and epistemology but disagrees in his inclusion of intentionality in the ontological consideration all together. He’s position can be summarize as: “there is nothing social outside the text” which is a reformulation of Derrida’s “il n'y a pas de hors-texte”. The purpose of the inclusion of the word social, is to exclude the cases that are mind-dependent but not social, e.g., pain) by limiting the interpretation of speech acts, only insofar as they are inscribed, and therefore, that concern only the social objects:
2. - John Searle’s Social Ontology 2.1. - Fundamental Ontology
Let us start by Observing that in Searle’s fundamental ontology there is a continuity that goes from the physical to the social. Things, even the mental ones, are fundamentally made of the same kind of stuff as everything else; their different characteristics are due to different arrangements of the same kind of stuff. It is the variance in the configurations that is responsible for the distinct features in the different things. This fundamental constituents of all entities are physical ones. They can be ‘conveniently but not entirely accurately described as particles’. The different arrangements bring about different properties just like the difference of the number of protons, neutrons and electrons give the elements their different properties (elasticity, viscosity, etc.).
Consciousness is no exception. What makes it such, is due to a different construction of the same particles that makes everything else. There is no magical step taken from matter to mind, its features are simply higher order traits. It is a biological phenomenon and it brings with it intentionality: “[…] the capacity of the mind to represent objects and states of affair of the world other than itself”53
. Such position is contraire to the Cartesian dualism because it argues for a single and coherent fundamental ontology that runs uninterrupted from the physical to the mental as opposed to the dualism comprises by the res extensa and the res cogitans.
The existence of this continuity does not impede us from taking the task of classification of the entities. Searle does this by a segmenting the set of entities that exist in virtue of human agreement (the social and institutional) and those that don’t (brutes). Of both type of things there can be objective facts stated. Examples of the social include are the marital status of somebody, their nationality or the points they might score in a game; contrastingly, objective brute facts are those of the sort: Everest has snow near the summit, hydrogen atoms have one electron.
All of these entities reside within the one world which is fundamentally real. External realism, as Searle advocates for it, cannot be invalid because it is the very condition whereby something can be true or untrue. It is not an empirical theory, but a condition of anything to be the case, without the need of a representing consciousness; a condition that empirical idealism do set. It is this real world that is presupposed in our utterances when we attempt to achieve communication.
2.2. - Social entities
Within the class of the real entities, there is the subclass of the social entities which include the institutionalized ones, when there has been socially accepted constitutive rules. Social entities, as such, are simultaneously part of nature and intentional. This characteristics, however, are necessary but not sufficient because, as their name suggest, they require socialization which is in turn achieved through a 53 John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, Penguin Press, USA, 1995. p.6.
specific kind of interplay involving an agreement between the members. The social entities include things like government, marriages, money and game matches, all of which are publicly accessible through language. The constitution of social and institutional entities can be truthfully asserted, thus, objectively grasped through a system of representations.
Social ontology, as all other ontological practices, runs into the difficulties of our fallible cognitive apparatus. Precise distinctions have to be made regards our sensibility and their way of relating to the real things that this sensibility is supposed to inform about in the first place. The following structure is proposed by Searle in order to account for the accessibility and the veracity of ontological claims that involve internationalities.
Let us differentiate two ways of the subjective-objective distinction: the epistemic and the ontological ones:
“Epistemically speaking ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are primary predicates of judgments. We often speak of judgments as being ‘subjective when we mean that their truth or falsity cannot be settles ‘objectively’ because the truth and falsity is not simply a matter of fact but depends on certain attitudes, feelings, and points of view of the makers and the hearers of the judgment. […] In the ontological sense, ‘objective’ and subjective’ are predicates of entities and type of entities, and they ascribe modes of existence”54
With this way of classification, entities can be characterized in terms of its truth and in relation to the existence of intentional bearing creatures55. It is relevant for the present subject because it so happens that social reality is epistemologically objective yet ontologically subjective, which means that it is observer-relative yet prone to be known truthfully.
The observer-relative entities require functions which have a precise mode of operation that will be later explained. Here let us just note that the objectivity is derived from a logical necessity, that of the primacy of the act over the object; this is that observer-relative entities, those that have a function imposed into them, require that the function be imposed in the first place in order to even recognize the object in the first place. There needs to be, thus, a precedent instance where the ascription of a function takes place. An adscription that is a prerequisite for an object to be such:
It is a logical consequence […] that for any observer-relative features F, seeming to be F is logically prior to being F, because—appropriately
understood—seeming to be F is a necessary condition of being F56
It is through the recognition of the functions that the epistemic objectivity can be achieved because they are fundamentally social. The certainty can be achieved through the identification of the functions by means of the normative aspects that are embedded in the language. This normativity is informative and it works in coordination with a set of notions that are operational active in the society: the background. This background shapes the normativity of the functions so that they respond according to it, and all individuals that are sharing a social reality become capable of doing it because they share
54 Ibid, p.8.
55 Regarding true and falsity in relation to intentionality: In phenomenology this is taken as an apopanthic judgment, which in turn depends on the treatment of the subject that is being judged, by means of an intending mind.
the same background and the same functions that respond to it. They are systems of shared representations.
In order to expand on the current account of social reality, let us go over what has been said in the previous paragraph with more detail so that what we analyses the elements of the theoretical apparatus that operate within this naturalistic ontology and that encompass the social reality.
A) The assignment of a function pertains to the ability and practice to impose a function on objects that can be natural or created. The function is captured by all the uses and descriptions that we give of objects that go beyond the mere material constitution: they are the designations of use or roles that the material thing have within a delineated system. Examples of functioned-assigned object would be: “that rock is good to jump from” or “that abacus is useful for performing calculations”. In each case, the thing is taken for its usage, in relation to people and a specific context. This adscriptions are features of intentionality, as intentional activity. They have a usage and a value that is assigned by us, thus, they are never intrinsic to nature. Even emblematic cases of natural occurring objects, such as hearts which we normally understand as having an intrinsic functionality, such as that of pumping blood; do not perform functions as Searle understands it because of the lack of intentionality in a mere physical activity/object. The reason being that what we are doing when we identify this ‘natural occurring function’ is “[…] the discovery of the causal processes together with the assignment of a teleology of those causal processes”57
. Functions unlike causes are always observer relative, this is, they are assigned by the people and are as result of intentionality as opposed to occurring naturally and without a final cause. The range of the activities that the functions undertake is a result of the intensional range of our ascription as present in our intentional apparatus.
Functions are assigned in order for things to serve practical uses, such as when we say: “this stone is a paperweight”, but it can also be the case that the functions are not serving a particular activity in order to achieve something else (like preventing the wind to sway our papers around); this are the cases of functions that we take to “occur naturally” as when we say: “the heart functions to pump blood”. The former are called agentive function and the later nonagentive function. An effective rule of thumb that we can use to distinguish these two is to ask whether the function in question requires a continuous effort by our part in order to maintain it operation, if the answer is negative it is a nonagentive one, and if positive, an agentive one.
Within the agentive functions there is a special kind that needs to be distinguished and mentioned due to the crucial role that is it has in bringing solidity to the social reality and it concerns those functions that are assigned to an object whose role is that of representing something else. It is the case of meaning and symbolism, being language the most remarkable function of this kind. It operates by means of representation of other objects, and because we are using functions to represent objects that are also the result of an adscription of a function, they are functions that represent other functions. Like the circles that are drawn on a chalkboard in order to represent players on a football team, words inflect the representation towards another one. So If I say “car”, the word has the value of the object car, which is in turn the result of a function that could be something of the sort: “mean of motorized transportation”. These are, strictly speaking, objects that are representing other functionally assigned objects, which can be characterized as intentionally imposed intentionality.58
B) Collective intentionality is the result of a cooperative behavior that is characterized by the sharing of intentional states. It is the case of doing something as part of a whole which involves the participants 57 Ibid, P.15.
and their representations. When two persons engage in a game of chess, they can only be engaged in it if it is the case that they are playing it together. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a game of chess, but two dislocated events that do not constitute a common activity. Players can only be playing together if it is the case that they have the share the intentionality of doing the thing in question and involved in a manner that includes the participants in questions. If there is not such coordination, it is but a disjointed occurrence of simultaneous activity. If I say to two people: “think of a circle”, the fact that they are both thinking it at the same time, does not by itself constitute collective intentionality.
One of its formal requirements is the realization of an encounter, between internationalities, in a cooperative manner (at a higher-level) so that the activities that comprise them (lower level) can be said to partake in it. I think this is sensible given that the collective internationalities are often over things that already possess a specific function: like rhetic act: a mere hello has in it the function of greeting59
.
Even the forms of human conflict require collective intentionality. In order that two men should engage in a prizefight, for example, there has to be collective intentionality at a higher level. They have to be cooperating in having a fight in order for each of them to try to beat the other up. In this respect, prizefighting differ from simply beating someone in an alley. The man who creeps behind another man in an alley and assaults him is not engaging in collective behavior. But two prizefighters, […] are engaged in cooperative collective behavior at a higher level, within which the antagonistic hostile behavior can take place. An understanding of collective intentionality is essential to understanding the social facts.
Specifically, Searle’s account rejects the reduction of collective intentionality to individual intentionality with an additional consideration, such as the Sellar’s we-intentions. The specific mode and content of the other person’s intentionality who is also involved in the collective intentionality, as individual intentionality is not relevant. Approaches like this bring about a recursive reliance of beliefs of the sort: “I believe that you believe that I believe that you believe that I believe, ad infinitum”. In his account, rather than reducing collective intentionality to individual intentionality, the individual intentionality is derived from the collective intentionality and this, in turn, is the result of having the intention to do something together.
Searle’s position, thus, recognizes collective intentionality as a primitive phenomenon. Just intentionality happens within the mental life of the participant, this doesn’t mean that the content of this intentionality has to be confined to the private activity of the person. I can intend, for example, to want to drink a glass of water and I can do so, even though this intentionality springs from me. Similarly, I can intend that y intend as when we say: “I hope that you want …”: “[…] It does not follow that that all my mental life must be expressed in the form of singular noun phrase referring to me. The form that my collective intentionality can take is simply ‘we intend’, ‘we are doing so-and-so’ and the like. In such case, I intend only as a part of our intending. The intentionality that is collective does exists in each individual minds and it has the form ‘we intend’”60
and they constitute the social facts when there is a general agreement of them.
59 Although there can be cases of exceptions such as in conceptual explorations, where the domain of something it is not known, as in the real behavior and constitution of the light which was (and is?) still pondered by many; granted that we undertake such activity with previous conceptualization.
