Collective Intentionality

Concept and Origins

Collective intentionality refers to the phenomenon in which two or more agents share mental states—such as beliefs, intentions, desires, or plans—in a way that grounds joint action and social reality. When people walk together, play music in an ensemble, or deliberate as a jury, they often do not merely act in parallel; they act together, guided by a sense of “we” rather than “I.” Collective intentionality seeks to explain what this “we-ness” consists in.

The topic emerges from the phenomenology of social experience and from attempts to understand the foundations of social ontology—the nature of groups, institutions, and social facts. Early roots can be found in the work of Max Scheler and Edith Stein on shared emotions and empathy, and, more systematically, in Raimo Tuomela’s and John Searle’s efforts to analyze “we-intentions.” It has since become a central theme in contemporary philosophy of mind, social philosophy, and philosophy of social science.

A central distinction is between:

• Individual intentionality: attitudes like “I intend to X”
• Collective intentionality: attitudes like “We intend to X”

The key issue is whether “we intend” is simply shorthand for several “I intend” states plus mutual beliefs and coordination, or whether it is a genuinely distinct kind of mental state.

Major Theoretical Approaches

Philosophers have proposed competing models to explain collective intentionality. These views differ mainly on reductionism, the nature of we-intentions, and the role of normativity.

1. Summative or Reductionist Accounts

Summative accounts hold that collective intentionality can be fully explained in terms of individual mental states plus suitable relations among them (such as mutual belief or coordination).

On such views, a group’s intending to perform an action is nothing over and above:

• Each member individually intending to play their part, and
• Each member believing that others also intend and will play their part.

This approach often appeals to game theory and rational choice theory, where coordination arises from individual strategies rather than from any irreducible “we” attitudes. Critics argue that these models struggle to capture the felt unity of shared action, and cannot easily distinguish genuine cooperation from mere parallel individual efforts.

2. Non-Summative and We-Intention Accounts

Non-summative accounts argue that collective intentionality involves irreducibly collective attitudes, sometimes termed we-intentions. According to this view, a person can have an intention that is intrinsically we-directed, such as “We are going for a walk,” where the first-person plural is part of the intention’s content and mode.

Key proponents include:

• John Searle, who claims that we-intentions have a distinctive structure and that they underpin social facts (e.g., money, marriages, institutions) by enabling the assignment of status functions (“X counts as Y in C”).
• Raimo Tuomela, who distinguishes between I-intentions, we-intentions, and we-mode versus I-mode attitudes. We-mode intentions are held as a member of a group and are essentially tied to group goals and group reasons.

Non-summative accounts often emphasize:

• Joint commitment: participation in a single, shared commitment
• Shared perspective: taking up a group standpoint
• Normative expectations: obligations and entitlements that arise among participants

Critics question whether such we-intentions are psychologically realistic or whether they overpopulate our mental ontology with special attitude types.

3. Joint Commitment and Planning Theories

Some accounts focus on joint commitment and shared planning structures.

• Margaret Gilbert argues that collective intentionality is grounded in joint commitments: agreements that bind individuals as a “plural subject.” When individuals jointly commit to doing something as a body, they incur special rights and obligations toward one another (for example, rights to demand conformity or to seek justification for defection).
• Michael Bratman offers a more modest, planning-based model. He analyzes shared intention in terms of:
  • Interlocking individual intentions,
  • Mutual responsiveness in sub-plans and execution,
  • A meshing of sub-plans, and
  • A common knowledge condition about these elements.

Bratman’s approach aims to show how collective agency can emerge from ordinary planning capacities without positing fundamentally new kinds of mental states, yet still capturing the normative and coordinative aspects of joint action.

4. Normative and Institutional Accounts

A further strand, influenced especially by Searle, focuses on how collective intentionality underwrites social institutions and norms. On this view, collective intentionality makes possible:

• The assignment of status functions (e.g., this piece of paper counts as money),
• The creation of deontic powers (rights, duties, permissions),
• The existence of institutional facts (laws, offices, corporations).

Collective acceptance of rules or status assignments—often sustained by shared beliefs and we-intentions—constitutes a central layer of social reality. Critics argue that institutional facts can sometimes be explained by distributed practices and incentives without positing strong forms of collective subjectivity.

Applications and Debates

Theories of collective intentionality have wide-ranging implications.

1. Social Ontology and Group Agency

In social ontology, collective intentionality is used to explain the existence and agency of:

• Groups (teams, committees, movements),
• Organizations (corporations, universities),
• States and political bodies.

Some argue that such entities can be genuine agents with their own beliefs and intentions, grounded in the coordinated attitudes of their members. Others maintain that talk of “group minds” is merely metaphorical, and that only individuals truly have mental states.

2. Moral and Political Philosophy

In moral philosophy, collective intentionality informs debates about:

• Collective responsibility (e.g., for climate change or historical injustices),
• Complicity and participation in wrongdoing,
• The moral significance of acting together versus separately.

In political philosophy, it shapes understandings of:

• Democratic will and popular sovereignty,
• The nature of solidarity and collective action in social movements,
• How public reason or collective deliberation might be possible.

Different accounts of collective intentionality support different views on whether “the people” or “society” can be bearers of obligations and rights.

3. Cognitive Science and Social Cognition

In cognitive science, research on shared attention, joint action, and cooperative communication interacts with philosophical theories of collective intentionality. Developmental studies of infants’ abilities to engage in joint attention and shared goals are often seen as empirical manifestations of emerging “we” capacities.

Debates concern:

• Whether collective intentionality requires sophisticated conceptual resources, or builds on basic interactive routines,
• How far non-human animals or artificial systems can possess collective intentions or only simulate them.

4. Critiques and Ongoing Questions

Critics raise several challenges:

• Ontological parsimony: Do we need irreducible we-intentions, or can everything be explained in individualistic terms?
• Psychological realism: Are the posited collective attitudes genuinely realized in human cognition?
• Normativity vs. mentality: Are some “collective” phenomena better understood as patterns of norm-governed behavior rather than literal shared mental states?

Ongoing questions include how to:

• Distinguish robust collective intentionality from mere coordination,
• Model breakdowns of joint action (defection, misunderstanding),
• Extend accounts to large, diffuse groups and long-term institutions.

Collective intentionality thus sits at the intersection of mind, action, and society, providing a framework for understanding how individuals come to form, and be formed by, enduring “we”-structured forms of life.