Collective Intentionality and Sociality. Collective joint mental states and activities of a group of people exhibit collective intentionality or “aboutness”. The contents of those mental states and activities are shared by these people. Typical examples of collective intentionality are presented by joint intentions and mutual beliefs.Sociality concerns social relations. People may share collective intentional states or they may take others’ thoughts and actions into account when acting. This indicates two basic kinds of sociality. These kinds of sociality may also occur in codified forms – e.g. in contracts or in relationships between different organizational positions.The Collective Intentionality Group of researchers. This informal group consists of researchers sharing interests in the phenomena of collective intentionality and sociality. Any researcher with these interests is welcomed to participate in the activities of the group.
The term "collective intentionality" in the present context is understood to refer not only to phenomena of collective intentionality (e.g. joint intention and commitment, mutual belief, we-attitudes, collective acceptance and agreement, collective responsibility, and the like) but is also taken to cover collective action, social practices as well as social institutions and organizations.
Our group of researchers is primarily concerned with the philosophical and theoretical aspects of collective intentionality and sociality, thus with the analysis of social mental states and action, social epistemology, and social ontology. However, the term “collective intentionality and sociality” in its widest sense includes social ontology, philosophy of sociality, part of moral and political philosophy and at least parts of social epistemology, and the counterparts to these fields in neighbor sciences (such as psychology, sociology, economics, and political science). Accordingly, such items of study as social interaction, unintended consequences of action, perhaps – depending on one’s philosophical views – social structures and the “architecture of the social world” are also included. Also the philosophical study of normative social structures, especially institutions, and the phenomena of communication are covered. Furthermore, the study of artificial societies can be included, and this relates the group’s interests to problems in Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI).
The topic of the Collective Intentionality and Sociality group accordingly represents at least partly new kind of theorizing in philosophy and the social sciences. To wit, collective intentionality has so far played hardly any role in social science theorizing, although it deserves to be a central object of study and also serves to create explanations for collective action and phenomena generated by it. The group hopes that the contained theoretically central ideas will spread to the different fields working with collective social notions (e.g. within philosophy to social and moral philosophy).
History and past workshops. In 1999 Wolfgang Balzer and Raimo Tuomela organized the first workshop on Collective Intentionality for researchers interested in philosophical and theoretical problems related to “collective intentionality”, broadly understood. After this meeting an e-mail list of people interested in the topic was formed, a bibliography of the topic was prepared, and further meetings and activities were discussed. The second workshop, Collective Intentionality II, took place in Leipzig in 2000, organized by Georg Meggle and Raimo Tuomela. Collective Intentionality III was held at EIPE (of Erasmus University) in Rotterdam in December 2003; the main organizational burden was carried by Uskali Mäki and Frank Hindriks. No printed proceedings were published from the first workshop, but Georg Meggle edited an anthology Social Facts & Collective Intentionality (Dr. Hänsel-Hohenhausen, 2002) based in part on the papers presented at the second meeting. Some selected papers of Collective Intentionality III will appear in the journal Philosophical Explorations.
Aims and functions of the group. As a result of these three meetings and personally made contacts the e-mail list has grown and presently there are members on the list not only from all over Europe but also from the United States and Australia. This group mainly consists of philosophers, but there are also researchers from neighboring areas such as psychology and (Distributed) Artificial Intelligence. What we have here is a kind of small interest group, and the idea is to try to keep this group together in the future. While surely we encourage high-level research in this area, another important goal is to encourage cooperation between the members of the group.
In a nutshell, the aims of the group are to further research and interaction on collective intentionality and sociality, to keep an e-mail list of members, e-bibliography, to inform the members of relevant developments and happenings in the field, to organize workshops on a fairly regular basis (at least biannually).
At the most recent meeting, the problems of administration were briefly discussed and a board of contact persons was established to coordinate the activities of the group and to plan further workshops and meetings. (The next workshop is planned for 2004.)
At the present stage all researchers interested in the theoretical study of collective intentionality and sociality, as characterized above, are encouraged to join the coll-int e-mail list. You can subscribe to the list by sending an e-mail message to the following address:majordomo@helsinki.fi. The message should include (only) the following line
subscribe coll-int your.own@email.address
Afterwards you will receive confirmation concerning your subscription.
The group’s e-bibliography on collective intentionality is available here.