Collective intentions and collective intentionality - Criticisms and Reconstructions

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Jan, 2003  by L. A. Zaibert

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What are, at any event, the infelicities that Searle has shown to inhere in the attempt to explain we-intentions in terms of individual intentions? Well, he has just attacked one version of this strategy: the Tuomela-Miller account of we-intentions. The reason for focusing on this account is that Searle admits it is "the best he has seen" (CIA: 404). Fair enough; but all Searle does in trying to show the inadequacy of the Tuomela-Miller thesis is to present one counter-example. The example is, in my opinion, of dubious efficacy, as I have indicated above. (17) Even if the example Searle presents were efficacious, Searle has himself been forthcoming in condemning this very maneuver: "It is not of course to be supposed that a single counter-example can refute a philosophical thesis" (IOQ: 120). But this is exactly what Searle has done here--he has presented a single counter-example without offering a theory to back it up, and without explaining why and how it is a counter-example. Thus, Searle's rejection of th is view seems too facile and possibly question-begging.

(III) collective i.a. (this collective i.a. causes: singular i.a., causes: stirred, causes: mixed)

Searle's rejection of this analysis is convincing. "The fact that a separate [singular, individual] i.a. is in the scope of the collective i.a." (CIA: 411) worries Searle, and for good reasons. Collectively preparing hollandaise sauce is not a case in which I have a collective intention (causing me) to have an individual intention, as this solution suggests. Rather, Searle suggests, the individual intention stands in a relation of means-to-end with regards to the collective intention. Keep in mind, however, that we are still in the dark as to the definition of a collective intention. Searle suggests that considering the case of pulling a trigger in order to fire a gun is helpful. In this case, "my intention to fire the gun by means by [sic] pulling the trigger consists in only one complex intention, not two intentions where one causes the other as part of its conditions of satisfaction" (CIA: 411-12). And so Searle thinks that this analysis is wrong in having one intention as a condition of satisfaction of an other intention, and I think he is correct.

But before we turn to the fourth and last analysis, let us summarize the results so far. Of the three analyses Searle has presented, only two ([I] and [III]) are really analyses of collective intentions (or of collective intentionality in general). Both of those analyses Searle rejects. The remaining analysis ([II]) is not an analysis of collective intentions (or of collective intentionality in general), and Searle's rejection of it is not convincing. The bottom line is that so far there is absolutely no analysis of we-intentions. Let us see the fourth analysis, which Searle half-heartedly favors, and try to see if it explains we-intentions, that crucial component of the ontology of social reality.

(IV) i.a. collective B by means of singular A (this i.a. causes: A stirred, causes: B mixed)