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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Aside from the elegance and the persuasion with which Searle "derived" an evaluative statement from a purely descriptive statement, the paper is important because even though Searle used only one example (that of promises), the powerful suggestion he made is that there is a whole class of examples that would undermine the distinction between descriptive and normative expressions. "It is not of course to be supposed," Searle admits, "that a single counter-example can refute a philosophical thesis" (IOQ: 120). Promises are but one instance of a virtually infinite reservoir of examples: the entire class of institutional facts.

But, merely to show that one of the examples is not ambiguous as to whether it is descriptive or evaluative is insufficient, since this says nothing about other examples of institutional facts. It is as insufficient as Searle admits it would be if he had appealed to an isolated example of deriving a normative statement from purely descriptive premises in order to dispel all doubts regarding the naturalistic fallacy. The power of Searle's point flows from his suggestion that the case of promises is but the tip of the iceberg; in other words, that there are many institutional facts that, like promises, would allow us to derive normative statements from purely descriptive statements. Searle might be right about the specific case of promises; that is, it might be true that this term only has a normative sense. Since it is not of interest for me here to elucidate the nature of promising, I shall sidestep this issue. (It seems to me, at any event, that many of the stock concepts of social and institutional reality- -including promises--have descriptive as well as normative senses. Owner, ruler, guarantor, spouse, debtor, and so on all seem to be susceptible both to normative and to descriptive uses.) There exists, however, an ambiguity between description and normativity in at least one crucial concept in Searle's ontology of social and institutional reality, namely, in the concept of intentional action. This concept is ambiguous in many ways, one of which is precisely along the lines that the objection that holds that Searle equivocates between two senses of promise develops, that is, along the lines of the normative/descriptive distinction.

III

Intentional Alliterations

THERE 15 PLENTY OF AMBIGUITY REGARDING THE TERM "INTENTIONAL" that must be resolved before we can discuss the normative/descriptive ambiguity that also affects this term. There is one sense of "intentionality" and of "intentional" that Franz Brentano made famous in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. (5) Searle has devoted much attention to this sense and he has defined it as follows: "intentionality is that property of many mental states and events by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world" (1: 1). Let us refer to this sense of "intentional" or "intentionality" as ["intentional.sub.mental]" or "[intentionality.sub.mental]" (This is the technical sense of "intentionality" that Searle indicates by using uppercase [see I: 3]. Since I shall argue that there are more than two senses of intentionality, I shall abandon the binary uppercase-lowercase method Searle favors.) There is another sense of "intentionality" that is related, not to mental states and event s, but rather to actions. In this sense, "intentional" is a property of actions and not of mental states. Let us refer to this sense as ["intentional.sub.action]" and ["intentionality.sub.action.]" (6)