On The Nature Of Collective Intention

Whereas'classical'analytical action theory and philosophy of mind focused exclusively on the analysis of individual intentionality, it has become increasingly clear over the last two decades that in order to account for the social dimension of human action and cognition the analysis has to be extended to shared intentional states. Based on seminal contributions dating from the eighties, the analysis of collective intentionality has gradually evolved into a distinct field of research in Europe and America. In our social life, many human actions are not singular in type. There are actions with one agent and also actions with more than one agent. The first type of action is individual action and the second one is known as collective action, group action or joint action. In philosophy of action, individual intentions are usually used to explain individual actions causally. For example, I eat this apple, because I have an intention to eat an apple. As to collective actions, what kind of intention could be treated as "cause" of them? There are some problems when we try to use individual intentions to explain collective actions. To avoid unnecessary troubles,philosophers have coined the term collective intentionality to explain collective action.The collective intentionalities are psychological states with collective content, such as "we want...", "we belief...", etc. But the nature of collective intentionality is still an unsolved problem. In the philosophy of social science, there are two different modes of explaining social action:individualism and collectivism. The proponents of individualism reject collective intention theory and holds that collective intentions are actually individual ones which take other agents into account when one seeks to realize his own goals. While in the view of collective intention theory, intentions behind social actions are irreducibly in we-mode. However, both of the two modes of explanation failed to provide overwhelming argument for its proposal and against the rival. So, the controversy continues among authors and with practical consequences. For this reason, I make attempt to deal with intention in collective action in terms of philosophy of action, so as to have some insights into the nature of collective Intentionality. This dissertation includes five parts.Chapter one:intentionality, intention, and causal theory of action. Intentionality is a directness property of our mind. The directness is from world to our mind. With this property, there are an aboutness relation between the content of our mind and world. In order to understand "intentionality" concept, we have to know some concept about intentionality:intentional content, psychological mode, condition of satisfaction, direction of fitness, causal self-referentiality, network, and background. Intention is one of the mental states with intentionality. Based on definition of intentionality and intention, I try to introduce the mainstream theory about the relation between intention and action. The causal theory of action advocated by American philosopher Donald Davidson, is like that intentions are cause of actions. That is to say, intentions explain action causally. There are several opponents to causal explanation. But Davidson replies to these attacks successfully.Chapter two:definitions of collective intentionality from different scholars, John Searle,Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomela and Margaret Gilbert; three issues about collective intentionality. Based on two distinctive methodologies in social science, individualism and collectivism, the definitions of collective intentionality fell into individualistic definition and collective definition. Scholars advocating individualistic definition hold that collective intentionality are mental states in our brain with collective content. While collectivism scholars insist that collectives could be subject. There are three issues about collective intentionality:internalism issue, cooperation and duty issue, plural subject issue.Chapter three:The Coordination and Commitment Issue. This controversy is formed between two scholars, sugden and tuomela, on the relation between collective intention theory and game theory. And the controversial issue is whether or not collective action would be explained by game theory. Sugden holds that if we could take game theory replace collection intention theory to explain collective action, then Collective action is a game. Tuomela replies his attack with a clarification about different collective properties in collective intentionality. There are weak collective property and strong collective property. In the case of cooperative game theory, only weak collective actions could be explained. In order to explain those strong collective actions, collective intention theory is still necessary.Chapter four:plural subject issue. This part is linked to American female philosopher Margaret Gilbert and her "plural subject"concept. Gilbert's account of collective intentionality and other intentional states is related to normative principles and group concepts. According to Gilbert, when a large number of participants unite in a particular way and form a group, there is a plural subject. This plural subject could have intentional states like people. Because of these features, Gilbert's definition has solved some problems which individualistic definitions faced. But Gilbert's plural subject concept still have unsolved problem from other philosophers.Chapter five:internalism issue. There are a lot of controversies about collective intention. The one of most controversial issue is whether or not a brain in vat could have collective intentions. This issue started from John Searle, because he declared that all mental state including intentionality is the function of our brains. So collective intentionality can only exist in brain. The author tries to understand collective intention on ontological level and find the intrinsic property of collective intention---collective and intentionality, in order to answer the question about this issue.Chapter six:Based on discussions in chapter three, four and five, we got a conclusion that there are three properties of collective intention:irreducible, intentionality and collective. It is one of necessary conditions that a definition or explanation of collective intention includes these three properties. Another necessary condition is that we can explain most of collective actions in our social life by collective intention concept under such a definition.By contrasting definitions from Tuomela, Gibert and Searle, the author found that most of necessary conditions are satisfied by Searle's collective intention concept. However, there is a gap between individual and collective inside Searle's collective intention theory. If we can explain the process from "I" to "we", then maybe we can give a better definition about collective intention.In sum, this dissertation will start from theoretical background with John Searle's intentionality theory and Donald Davidson's causal action theory, and go further to introduce different collective intentionality theories, clarify the clue of three issues about collective intentionality, analyze the concept "collective intentionality" into a mental state with both "collective"property and "intentionality" property, with a conclusion that a good explanation of collective action should make account to these two properties in the end.