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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The Benthamite intuition informs criminal codes around the world, and this is a good indication that it is part and parcel of institutional reality. In criminal law, the sense of [intentional.sub.action/normative] has great importance. The central distinction in culpability (or mens rea, as culpability is also known in Anglo-American legal systems), in other words, in that branch of the criminal law concerned with the apportioning of blame, is marked by the distinction between [intentional.sub.action/normative] and [unintentional.sub.action/normative]. Ceteris paribus, more blame is attached to intentional actions than to unintentional actions, and more blame is attached to directly intentional actions than to obliquely intentional actions.

In the criminal law, then, many actions are called intentional without being the condition of satisfaction of any intention. The discrepancies between intentions and intentional action that arise from considerations regarding the normative aspect of [intentionality.sub.action] are fruitful yet somewhat unexplored issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and theory of action. Those contemporary authors, such as Michael Bratman or Alfred Mele and Paul K. Moser, who believe that having an intention to X is not a necessary condition for doing X intentionally fail to mention that the distinction between [intentional.sub.action/descriptive] and [intentional.sub.action/normative] affords many good examples that support their view. Michael Bratman, for example, has aptly dubbed the view that intending to do X is a necessary condition for doing X intentionally as "the simple view." (12) And while some of his analyses show that it is possible to do X intentionally without having the intention to X, Bratman, like Searl e and many others, seems to be unaware of the way in which the tension between normativity and description cuts across the concept of intentional action.

The realm of social reality is filled with examples of intentional behavior that could be "intentional" both in the normative and in the descriptive sense. Grimes, offenses, insults, lies, instances of cheating, but also agreements, deals, assurances, guarantees, and many other important phenomena in the realm of human institutions are examples of this. (Notoriously, the very term "action" can itself be seen as having two senses stemming from the distinction between normativity and description. (13))

When Searle defends his intuition that "collective intentional behavior is a primitive phenomenon," when he claims that "it is obvious that... collective intentional behavior [is] distinct from individual intentional behavior" (CIA: 401), he is using "intentional behavior" ambiguously. First, it is not clear if he means something close to "[intentional.sub.action/looses]," or [intentional.sub.action/description], or "[intentional.sub.action/normative]." This ambiguity might explain why he thinks that animals behave intentionally. Searle states, "Suppose my dog is running around the garden chasing a ball; he is performing the intentional action of chasing the ball, and the unintentional action of tearing up the lobelias" (I: 101). A recent re-statement of Searle's view that animals can behave intentionally has it that a good example of the "primitiveness" of collective intentionality is given "when hyenas move in a pack to kill an isolated lion" (CSR: 27-28). It seems to me that the most charitable reading of Searle's point in these passages is to see him as simply being ambiguous as to the sense of "intentional" in each case. I do not wish to deny that hyenas or dogs have mental states or that they can engage in cooperative behavior, but I think that animals can hardly intend anything, and so should Searle think in light of his analyses of the uniqueness of intendings.