scholarly journals Collective Intentionality

Philosophy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marija Jankovic ◽  
Kirk Ludwig
Keyword(s):  
Social Ontology ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Group Agency ◽  
Intentional States ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ontological Question ◽  
Psychological Features ◽  
Action Intention

Collective intentionality concerns the intentionality of groups or collectives. Intentionality is the property of being about, directed at, oriented toward, or representing objects, events, properties, and states of affairs. Examples of intentional states (states with intentionality, not just intentions) are belief, desire, hope, intention, admiration, perception, guilt, love, grief, fear, and so on. Collective intentionality involves joint, shared, or group intentionality and the intentionality of members (qua members) of groups that have joint or shared attitudes. More broadly, the study of collective intentionality concerns forms of intentionality that underpin social reality. What is distinctive about the study of collective intentionality within the broader study of social interactions and structures is its focus on the conceptual, ontological, and psychological features of joint or shared actions and attitudes, that is, actions and attitudes of (or apparent attributions of such to) groups or collectives, their relations to individual actions and attitudes, and their implications for the nature of social groups and their functioning. It subsumes collective action, intention, thought, reasoning, emotion, phenomenology, decision-making, responsibility, knowledge, trust, rationality, cooperation, competition, and related issues, and how these underpin social practices, conventions, institutions, and social ontology. The two main theoretical questions in the study of collective intentionality concern the ontology and psychology of collective agency and collective attitudes. The main ontological question is whether we should admit into our ontology group subjects of intentional states or attribute intentionality only to their members. The main psychological questions are, if we admit group subjects of intentional states, first, how to understand what they come to, whether they are the same or different than the intentional states we attribute to individuals and if different exactly how, and, second, what is special about the attitudes of individuals who participate in group action or whose attitudes underpin attributions of intentionality to groups? More specifically, can we understand what is special about the attitudes of individuals who participate in group agency or sustain the potential for group agency in terms of concepts already available in our understanding of individual agency, or must we introduce new concepts either of the modes of intending, believing, etc., or in the contents of such attitudes? Both questions concern the debate between methodological individualists and holists about the social, the first with respect to its ontology, the second with respect to its ideology.

scholarly journals Collective Attitudes and the Anthropocentric View

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattia Gallotti
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Good Theory ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Social

AbstractThe anthropocentric view holds that the social world is a projection of mental states and attitudes onto the real world. However, there is more to a society of individuals than their psychological make up. In The Ant Trap, Epstein hints at the possibility that collective intentionality can, and should, be discarded as a pillar of social ontology. In this commentary I argue that this claim is motivated by an outdated view of the nature and structure of collective attitudes. If we aim at a good theory of social ontology, we need a good theory of collective intentionality.

scholarly journals Précis of The Ant Trap

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Social World ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
New Model ◽  
The Social ◽  
Basic Facts ◽  
Traditional Approaches

AbstractThis article summarizes The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. The book develops a new model for social ontology, applies it to groups and collective intentionality, and criticizes various forms of individualism. Part One of the book presents two traditional approaches to social ontology and unifies them into the “grounding–anchoring model” for the building of the social world. Part Two shows that individualism is mistaken even for basic facts about groups of people, challenges prevailing views of group intention and action, and illustrates how to approach facts about groups in general.

scholarly journals A model-based approach to social ontology

2021 ◽  
pp. 004839312110569
Author(s):  
Matti Sarkia
Keyword(s):  
Social Ontology ◽  
Social World ◽  
Theoretical Modeling ◽  
Model Construction ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
Analytic Tradition ◽  
The Social

This paper argues for theoretical modeling and model-construction as central (but not necessarily the only) types of activities that philosophers of social ontology (in the analytic tradition) engage in. This claim is defended through a detailed case study and revisionary interpretation of Raimo Tuomela’s account of the we-perspective. My interpretation is grounded in Ronald Giere’s account of scientific models, and argued to be compatible with, but less demanding than Tuomela’s own description of his account as a philosophical theory of the social world. My approach is also suggested to be applicable to many (but not necessarily all) other methodologically naturalist accounts of collective intentionality and social ontology.

scholarly journals Analytic Ecclesiology: The Social Ontology of the Church

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 100-123
Author(s):  
Joshua Cockayne
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Group Agency ◽  
Analytic Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

In this paper, I aim to show that analytic philosophy can contribute to the theological discussion of ecclesiology. By considering recent analytic work on social ontology, I outline how we might think of the Church as one entity, constituted by many disparate parts. The paper begins with an overview of the theological constraints for the paper, and then proceeds to examine recent work on the philosophy of social ontology and group agency. Drawing on this literature, I outline three models of social ontology from the history of philosophy and suggest reasons why all of them fail to provide an account of the Church’s agency. Finally, I develop an alternative model which, I suggest, better fits the conditions stipulated.

scholarly journals The Concept of “Community” in the Social Ontology of J.-L.Nancy and J. Agamben

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-15
Author(s):  
Prokhorov Evgeny A. ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Ontology ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
The City

The article discusses new ontological approaches to the concept of “community” that appeared after the “ontological turn”. If ontotheology (metaphysics) in search of the foundation of the existing (society) takes the existing beyond the limits of the existing, then the new ontology (ontoheterology) based on new methodological premises asserts the difference of being, its multiplicity due to which the being is affirmed in its being. On the basis of new theoretical prerequisites, Nancy and Agamben create new concepts of “community” which are discussed in this article. For Nancy, “community” is, first of all, a shared coexistence of being, where each individual being is manifested in multiplicity. The unitary is singular and displayed in the display to the Other. In co-existence, individuals share the meaning of finite existence, but finiteness (death) is not completeness, it is an immeasurable responsibility for existence constituting a community. In constructing the ontology of the “community”, J. Agamben uses the concepts of dispositive, homo sacer, naked life, state of emergency, and messianic time. According to Agamben, modern society is in a state of emergency, where the rule and law are suspended. In this suspension, a person turns into a homo sacer, and his life turns into a vita sacra (naked life), the city becomes a camp. At the foundation of the coming community, Agamben believes that non-activity is rooted in the Messianic time, which overcoming violence and totality opens the way to a new form-life. Thus, the new concepts of the “community”, overcoming the traditional notions of society, eliminate any form of theoretical (and practical) totality, since they carry the multiple redundancy of social being. Keywords: community, being-together, singularity, dispositive, homo sacer, state of emergency

scholarly journals Collective intentionality and the social status of artifactual kinds

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Suitable Model ◽  
Design Engineering ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Group Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Basic Concepts ◽  
Artifact Design

There is a well-developed view of artifacts according to which their nature depends on the intentions of their authors or creators. However, in the modern world of artifact design and creation, typically not one but many agents are involved in the process of making an artifact. In this paper, I show how the intentional view can be maintained even for ‘collective’ artifacts having multiple authors. My approach is to combine some basic concepts that have been proposed in the study of collective intentionality with a suitable model of artifact creation that takes account of the multiple agents and processes that arise in design, engineering and manufacturing a new or existing product. In this way, we can explain how an artifactual kind can be understood via a form of collective intentionality. For the design sciences, notions such as we-intentionality and group agency can help to model different types of cooperation and, in particular, to reconcile individualism with strong forms of collectivity at a group level.

scholarly journals Collective Intentionality and Causal Powers

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dave Elder-Vass
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Minimal Form ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Entity ◽  
Social Entities ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractBridging two traditions of social ontology, this paper examines the possibility that the concept of collective intentionality can help to explain the mechanisms underpinning the causal powers of some social entities. In particular, I argue that a minimal form of collective intentionality is part of the mechanism underpinning the causal power of norm circles: the social entities causally responsible for social norms. There are, however, many different forms of social entity with causal power, and the relationship of collective intentionality to these causal powers varies, depending on the form of the mechanism underpinning the power concerned. Some powers depend on collective intentionality, and others do not.

Collective Action and Social Ontology in Thomas Aquinas

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Harris
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Group Agency ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Ownership ◽  
The Way

Abstract In this paper I argue that there are resources in the work of Thomas Aquinas that amount to a unique approach to what David P. Schweikard and Hans Bernhard Schmid’s call the “Central Problem” facing theorists of collective intentionality and action. That is to say, Aquinas can be said to affirm both (1) the “Individual Ownership Claim” and (2) the “Irreducibility Claim,” coherently and compellingly. Regarding the Individual Ownership Claim, I argue that Aquinas’s concept of “general virtue” (virtus generalis) buttresses an account of the way in which individuals act collectively qua individuals, i.e., without invoking hive minds or other scientifically problematic phenomena. Further, with respect to the Irreducibility Claim (2), I argue that Aquinas’s concept of “common good” (bonum commune) offers an account of the way in which some powers and acts of social groups are importantly irreducible to those of their members. Considered together, I argue that these two positions in Aquinas are correlative, and therefore amount to a coherent account of collective action and group agency, respectively.

THE ISSUES OF NATIONAL SECURITY AND NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT IN THE WORK OF THE WORLD RUSSIAN PEOPLE'S COUNCIL IN THE 1990-S.

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 111-119
Author(s):  
Yu.Yu. IERUSALIMSKY ◽  
◽  
A.B. RUDAKOV ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
Russian Orthodox Church ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Component ◽  
The One

The article is devoted to the study of such an important aspect of the activities of the World Russian People's Council (until 1995 it was called the World Russian Council) in the 90-s of the 20-th century as a discussion of national security issues and nuclear disarmament. At that time, a number of political and public figures actively called for the nuclear disarmament of Russia. Founded in 1993, the World Russian Council called for the Russian Federation to maintain a reasonable balance between reducing the arms race and fighting for the resumption of detente in international relations, on the one hand, and maintaining a powerful nuclear component of the armed forces of the country, on the other. The resolutions of the World Russian Council and the World Russian People's Council on the problems of the new concepts formation of foreign policy and national security of Russia in the context of NATO's eastward movement are analyzed in the article. It also shows the relationship between the provisions of the WRNS on security and nuclear weapons issues with Chapter VIII of the «Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church».

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