2011-2016

This project in philosophy of action criticizes the common assumption that a conception of the subject, i.e. the entity that acts, must figure in the content of every action intention. The project's main goal is to give a clear functional explication of the alternative view that the agent perspective is a feature of the form, quality or mode of intending, rather than an element in the intention's content. This approach generates new ways of clarifying some controversial issues in philosophy of action, and it may help us understand certain empirical findings. The project's most important application of the resulting model concerns the difference between genuinely collective actions and mere sums of individual actions. That difference, in turn, is relevant to questions about distribution of responsibility, and it is a key to the understanding of the status of social institutions. By relating the recent debate about the nature of collective actions to more general discussions about mode and content of intentional states (in philosophy of language, classical phenomenology, and philosophy of mind), and more specifically, to François Recanati's criticism of John Searle's more general thesis about how to delimit the content of intentional states, the project attempts to give a more illuminating picture of what it means to intend in the *we-mode* than the ones previously offered by John Searle, Raimo Tuomela, and others. The general strategy is to give a functional characterization of the we-mode in terms of success conditions and context of evaluation of such attitudes.

The project's overall purpose to clarify the mode/content distinction and its implications for collective and individual agent perspectives has remained unchanged during the project period. However, the project has undergone a slight shift in focus when it comes to an application of the model. An interesting aspect of the we-mode theory concerns its implications for standard social coordination problems, like the Prisoner's Dilemma. This aspect is now discussed in one of the project publications (submitted to Review of Philosophy and Psychology, November 2014) but it was not mentioned in the original project application. This shift in focus was partly inspired by Raimo Tuomela's game theoretical considerations with respect to the we-mode in his book from 2013 (i. e. published during the project period). As a consequence of this shift, less attention has been paid to some empirical applications that were mentioned in the application.

THREE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS
1. There is a viable alternative to the standard positions when it comes to understanding collective agency and intentionality.
According to the standard taxonomy, theories of collective intentionality belong to one of three categories: "Some authors claim that collective intentionality is intentionality with a collective content, others seem to invoke a special mode, while still others claim that what's collective about collective intentionality has to be the subject." ("Collective Intentionality", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). One of the project's findings is that this taxonomy is inadequate, and that there is a plausible view defying the standard distinction between 'mode' and 'subject' approaches. This alternative view is that "the collective subject is immanent in the attitude" without being part of its content. Although this phrase has been used before, e.g. by Hans Bernhard Schmid, the project's contribution is that it gives a clear functionalistic analysis of what this seemingly opaque phrase means, with the aid of Recanati's theory of perspectival thought. This may affect the theoretical landscape in this area. (A condensed version of the project's analysis is presented in Journal of Social Ontology 2014, 1 (1) and a more detailed version with responses to objections is forthcoming.)
2. A functional explication of the we-mode shows that considerations of simplicity need not favor individualistic reductionism about collective agency.
Conceptual and ontological parsimony are undisputable methodological virtues. "Mode" approaches to collective intentionality, like Searle's and Tuomela's, generally at some point introduce some primitive unanalyzable collectivistic element, and this makes them less parsimonious than "content" approaches like Michael Bratman's, in which all claims about collective intentions can be understood in terms of ordinary individual intentions with a certain complex content, without bringing in new conceptual or metaphysical elements. This is a common claim about one methodological advantage of individualistic reductionism about collective agency, and it is the overall theme of Bratman's book from 2014. This claim may be true with respect the specific theories put forward by Searle and Tuomela. However, the we-mode theory resulting from the present project does not rely on any primitive or unanalyzable notion of collectivity. The theory is reductionist in the sense that it explicates collective intentionality in terms of non-collectivistic concepts that we have independent reasons to accept. In terms of qualitative parsimony, it is therefore on a par with theories like Bratman's.
3. The most prominent analyses of collective intentionality fail to capture what Michael Bacharach calls "team reasoning", i.e. the collective agency transformation required to overcome traditional social coordination problems. The project's approach to we-thinking offers a more promising basis for team reasoning.
In a slight deviation from the application's project plan, the project examines the relation between collective intentionality and formal game theoretical models of team reasoning among agents facing standard game theoretical puzzles. Theories of collective intentionality can be regarded as the sort of underpinning that may give the formal theory of team reasoning greater explanatory and normative force. As Bacharach shows, team reasoning requires genuine agency transformations - mere preference transformation is insufficient. As Tuomela has argued, a content approach like Bratman's does not capture this sort of agency transformation. However, one of the project's results is that it is also doubtful whether Tuomela's own analysis of the we-mode can do that, while it is apparent that the perspectival understanding of we-mode proposed in the project describes an agency transformation of the required sort.

NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS GENERATED BY THE PROJECT
A number of issues for possible future research are raised by the project.
Some of them concern challenges to the theoretical framework of the proposed analysis. Two examples: A common challenge for analyses of the concept 'collective action' that appeal to specific kinds of action intentions is to characterize these intentions without referring to collective action in some indirect way, which would create vicious circularity. In the present model, the problem is to describe success conditions for we-intentions - the conditions under which such attitudes are satisfied - without employing the analyzed notion of collectivity in that very description. A tentative suggestion is that we can solve this by referring to a collective act in a more basic causal sense, rather than to an intentional collective action. Another theoretical challenge to be met concerns standard problems about common knowledge, e.g. regress problems, and how the project's model can avoid them.
Other issues are about the wider implications of the analysis. One such implication concerns conditions for co-responsibility and the kind of attitudes that make individuals members of collectively responsible groups. This issue is touched upon in one of the project publications and it will be developed further in a recently started VR project where the project leader is one of the co-applicants. Another issue concerns the model's applicability to intentional states apart from action intentions - whether we can understand talk about collective preferences, beliefs or emotions by similar functionalistic strategies. This relates to the project leader's work in another, recently started, RJ project on the concept of 'harm'.

INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION
Project results have been presented at eight international conferences or workshops. The project leader was an invited speaker at Collective Intentionality IX, University of Indiana 2014, and at the Fourth Conference of the European Network for Social Ontology (ENSO IV), University of Palermo 2015. These two conference series are the most important in the field. Due to cooperation with the International Social Ontology Society, the project leader will host the next ENSO conference in 2017, in cooperation with Department of Philosophy in Lund and the Nordic Metaphysics & Collectivity network - http://www.fil.lu.se/en/research/research-groups/548/ - for which the project leader is the contact person. There are plans for a larger co-European project on social ontology within HORIZON2020 (http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/), section "Europe in a Changing World - Inclusive, Innovative, and Reflective Societies" and the project leader has been asked about participation, due to contacts made at conferences during the project period.

TWO MOST IMPORTANT PROJECT PUBLICATIONS
"Bratman, Searle, and Simplicity : Comments on Bratman, Shared Agency, A Planning Theory of Acting Together" (Journal of Social Ontology 1:1 2014) contains the first published presentation of the project's new model of collective intentions, in a condensed form, and shows that it has advantages in terms of simplicity. "Team Reasoning and Collective Intentionality" (submitted to Review of Philosophy and Psychology, November 2015) discusses important implications of the model in relation to Michael Bacharach's game theoretical analysis of team reasoning.

All published and forthcoming project publications are Open Access.

Publications

Articles
2013 "Co-responsibility and Causal Involvement", Philosophia, 41, 847-866
2014 ”Bratman, Searle, and Simplicity : Comments on Bratman, Shared Agency, A Planning Theory of Acting Together”, Journal of Social Ontology 1(1).
2016 “Team Reasoning and Collective Intentionality” submitted 2015, Review of Philosophy and Psychology
2016 “We-mode Worries”, to be submitted
2016 “A General Sense of Common Interest”, to be submitted

Conference papers
2012 "Overdetermination, responsibility and causal involvement", Ethical Theory and Practical Ethics Workshop, Amsterdam
2012 "Co-responsibility and Causal Involvement", Metaphysics & Collectivity Workshop, Lund
2013 "Co-Responsibility and Causal Involvement", NNPE Conference on Applied Philosophy, Copenhagen (Invited)
2014 "Bratman, Searle, and Simplicity", Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Workshop, Lund
2014 "Bratman, Searle, and Simplicity. A Comment on Bratman's Shared Agency", Collective Intentionality IX (CollInt IX), Bloomington, Indiana (Invited)
2015 "An Ambiguity in Tuomela's 'We-mode'" The Fourth Conference of the European Network on Social Ontology (ENSO IV) Palermo 24-26 september (Invited)
2015 "Moral Progress and Hume's 'General Sense of Common Interest", Moral Progress, Amsterdam 24-25 juni (accepted after review)
2015 "A General Sense of Common Interest", Social Complexes II, Göteborg (Co-organizer)
2015 "A General Sense of Common Interest, Tackling We-Intentionality Workshop, Center for Subjectivity Research, Copenhagen, April (Invited)