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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schmid, Hans Bernhard, author.
Title: We, together : the social ontology of us / Hans Bernhard Schmid. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022044673 (print) | LCCN 2022044674 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197563724 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780197563748 (epub)
This book is about our being together. But who is “we”? A Tagalog translation of this book would have to be at least somewhat clearer, because Tagalog has three words for different uses of “we”: tayo, kami,and kita.Tayois the inclusiveplural“we,” meaning you,I,and others, as distinguished from the exclusive plural kami (me and others, but not you), and the inclusive dual kita(just you and I). In Tagalog, the title word would be tayo. So you and I are included (kita, justyou and I, will be the topic of Section 2.5)—but about who elsewill it be?
Saying “we” seems like drawing a circle, and the first question you might expect me to answer is how exactly it is drawn and why. Since this is a book in philosophy, you probably expect “we” to be rather inclusively conceived: “we, in general,” a wide category, a big class, a large kind, perhaps a whole species. What category, what class, what species, what kind is “we in general”? Is this going to be about humankind? If so, under what cultural, historical, biological, theological, or perhaps metaphysical conception thereof? And how is this book going to deal with those of us who—as history shows—are excluded or marginalized by those conceptions?
There are good reasons to worry. We are not particularly good at conceiving of who we are. Conceptions of us, however cosmopolitan they aim (and claim) to be, tend to be both parochial and imperialistic. They are parochial in that they fail to recognize some of us as who they are by excluding them from the circle of “we.” And they are imperialistic in that they conceive of “everybody” on the model of just some of us, thus marginalizing “the rest” of us.
Our failing to know who we are has practical consequences for the ways in which we live together. For who we think we are determines how we organize ourselves. Misconceiving of ourselves in parochial, imperialistic, or other ways leads to exclusive and oppressive organizations and organizational failures. Knowing who we are matters for living well together.
So who are we really? If I knew the species, class, category, or kind that is us, I would certainly have named it in the title. But I don’t. And I doubt that anyone else knows either, or even if it is the task of philosophy to “engineer” a conception of who we are. For determining who we are is unlike establishing what anything else is. It is not about registering relevant matters of fact or about tailoring useful concepts according to some pre-set normative standards. Rather, determining who we are is about establishing our identity and about setting our values. And this is up to ourselves to achieve. Who we are is up to us.
This thought is familiar enough in its singular or distributive form from some traditions in the histories of philosophies. Who you are is crucially up to you, and who I am is up to me. In this form, determining who we are is up to eachofus, for and by ourselves, as the individuals we are. The central thought to be developed in this book is that determining who we are is not limited to singular selfdetermination. For we are not just who we are each of us for and by ourselves. We are who we are together with others, too, in the many ways in which we live together. Determining who we are thus involves us plurally. It is up to us—alone as well as together, individually as well as collectively, severally as well as jointly. And insofar as our living together extends beyond any one of our parochial conceptions thereof, determining who we are ultimately involves allofustogether.
Conceiving of ourselves as a species, a class, a category, or a kind thus misses a crucial point about us. Put in traditional terms, we are not objects: we are subjects. We are who we are in virtue of ourselves. Not that we could be whomever we like, if we so wished, or that we actually are whomever we happen to believe ourselves to be. Rather, the claim is that there is no way of accounting for who
we are without holding ourselves accountable in the process. And the central point in this book is that this involves us plurally. Our being who we are in virtue of ourselves crucially involves us as plural subjects and is thus up to us, together.
The pieces of the line of argument developed in this book were originally developed in a series of academic papers. They are referenced in the relevant passages of the text and listed in the references section. The text has been thoroughly rewritten, paying attention to their connecting points.
This book owes much to the people with whom I’ve been discussing related issues over the extended period of time of drafting this book. Special thanks go to my current and former colleagues at the University of Vienna, especially to Michael Schmitz, Leo Townsend, Judith Martens, and Niels de Haan—they may not agree with all that I’m saying or with the way I’m saying it, but without my conversations with them, I would not be saying it in quite this way either. Asya Passinsky, Michael Schmitz, Beatrice Kobow, and Franz Altner have provided feedback to sections of a draft of this book on a workshop organized for this purpose—thanks to them and to the other workshop participants for their suggestions. Nicolai Knudsen has read a draft and provided useful comments.
My outlook on issues concerning social ontology owes much to the current and former co-editors of the JournalofSocialOntology, David P. Schweikard, Frank Hindriks, Arto Laitinen, Heikki Ikäheimo, Alessandro Salice, Gerhard Thonhauser, and Mari Mikkola, as well as, more recently, Katherine Jenkins, Kate Richie, and Glenda Satne. Thanks to Sarah Fisher, whose engagement for the newly funded Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy has made it possible for me to continue working on this project in spite of increasing departmental duties. Michaela Bartsch has been providing administrative and organizational support for exactly a decade. Martin Niederl, Leonie Holzner, and Anna-Maria Edlinger have supported me in teaching and administration over the time of completing this manuscript.
An anonymous referee for Oxford University Press has provided extremely helpful feedback to two previous drafts. Their careful and
thoughtful comments had a deep influence on the way in which the material is presented in this book and led to a large number of improvements. I am grateful to them and to the editor Peter Ohlin for his support of this project.
Special thanks go to Agnieszka Kochanowicz.
—Hans Bernhard Schmid Vienna, June 27, 2022
Introduction
Fundamental Social Ontology
Social ontology, conventionally defined, is not primarily about us. Rather, it is about the social world (or worlds), about social reality (or realities), or about the domain(s) of social facts. Social ontology aims at providing an inventory of the basic kinds of entities that make up the social world(s)—items such as norms, institutions, social practices, status positions, power structures, and artifacts. It is the study of the basic kinds of properties of these entities and of how the social world exists, how it is constituted, or constructed.1 How do we figure in social ontology? We certainly belong to the social world, too, but we’re just a small part of it. We are the denizens of the social world, and it may seem that, in order to understand who we are, we then need to start from an analysis of the social world. As the social world’s population, who we are depends on where in the social world we find ourselves to be. We are people and peoples (though some of us may have to struggle to be recognized and treated as such), we are individuals and groups, we are who we are in virtue of the social status, social identity, and social roles that we have (or on which we have a claim)—the status of being a person, a group, a community, an association, a people, etc. In all sorts of organized or disorganized formations we are those playing by the rules or occasionally violating them; we are those empowered by their social positions or being oppressed or marginalized by them; we are those who find themselves recognized as who they are and those who find themselves misunderstood (or perhaps misconstrued); we are those who self-identify with their status or find themselves marginalized (or oppressed in other ways) by identity ascriptions; we are those who are divided by opposites of structural distinctions of inclusion and exclusion, power and
exploitation, wealth and poverty; we are those involved in the invention, production, use, abuse, consumption, and destruction of artifacts.
However, this may seem to be a superficial way of thinking about ourselves—a way of thinking that does not really cut to the heart of who we reallyare, in a deeper sense of conceiving of ourselves. It is a rather petty thing to think of people in terms of their social status, their place and position in the social world. As much as our place in the social world, our social status and identity, our privileges or social deprivations might be a determining factor of the sort of lives we live, who we really are is a whole different matter (or so one might think). Who we really are is up to ourselves, not to society or the social world. One traditional way of putting this is to say that society may perhaps determine whatwe are, but whowe are is selfdetermined. And it is argued that taking who we are to be determined by how others see us and how they treat us is literally alienation—thinking of oneself as just someone else, thinking of oneself as someone whom one is not.
There is some power of truth in thinking about who we are in terms of self-determination, but there is just as much ideology in it, too—the ideology of liberal individualism, the ideology of the freedom and responsibility of individuals, and the ideology that takes the position of the adult, able, white male property owner as the paradigm for all of us. It is just another conceptually imperialistic conception of who we are. For, quite obviously, the opportunities for living actual self-determined lives are unequally distributed among us. Some of us may have the means and opportunities to live actual self-determined lives, but many of us don’t, and thinking of who they are in terms of powers of self-determination that they do not have tends to blame their condition on them rather than acknowledging that our powers for actual self-determination do not simply accrue to us from ourselves.
Tradition has not been blind to the role of social structure and has preempted this objection. It is argued that the sort of selfdetermination that makes us who we really are is purely internal. We are who we are not in virtue of what we can (or fail to) achieve in
the world but in virtue of our aims and thoughts, our ability to make up our own minds, which is of our own doing, not anybody or anything else’s—no matter how confined our existences may be. It is this internalist view that has shaped our understanding as selfdetermined creatures. Our freedom (and responsibility) is internal, and it is in the “inner sphere” that we are who we are in virtue of ourselves rather than in virtue of our social role, or some such. It is in terms of our attitudesrather than in terms of (external) actionsor our social positions that we have to be taken. In ancient Western philosophy, a Roman emperor has argued that, in terms of selfdetermination, he is really no more powerful than his former slave teacher, having only the “inner citadel” of his own attitudes at his disposal—the only domain where he really is who he is. It is inwardly that anybody is who they are, whether they are socially privileged and free, or enslaved and in fetters. Inwardly, it is claimed, none of us can be determined by anything else unless they let themselves be thus determined, which is of their own doing.2
From the perspective developed in this powerful tradition, believing that who we are is determined by our place in the social world appears not only as superficial, but as an entirely ignorant self-deception. Our places in the social fabric are largely a matter of fate, but, as subjects, we are not our fate but rather those having a mind of their own. Our social roles might be something that we decide to play, where we determine ourselves to be doing so (or perhaps more adequately for most of us in most situations, a way in which we might find ourselves being played with), but not who we really are. For as who we are—where our dignitylies, as it were—we are self-determined; in the roles we play (or in which we find ourselves being played with), however, we are largely determined by scripts that we have not written for ourselves. How could we possibly take our social positions to be a matter of who we are without simply deceiving ourselves, mistaking ourselves for something that we’re not? How is thinking about who we are in terms of those determined by their positions in the social world not just an undignified and alienated way of misconceiving who we are?
But the objection of ideology stands even if self-determination is understood in internal terms. The ideology in the theory of internal self-determination is that however much we might wish it were the case, it is simply not true that our capabilities for psychological selfcontrol, our abilities to be wholehearted and at one with ourselves in our convictions, feelings, and desires have nothing to do with our particular social statuses and places in the social world. Our capabilities for self-scrutiny and achieving internal autonomy involve culture and education, and applying them involves leisure and selftrust that is not easy to secure in precarious positions. Those with the relevant resources at their disposal cannot simply blame those who do not exercise internal self-determination for their own condition. The element of truth in the idea of self-determination cannot survive in the traditional “inner citadel” view (of which so many subsequent conceptions of subjectivity in the history of Western philosophy are variations). Self-determination cannot only be an internal matter that accrues to us solely from ourselves. Psychological research indicates that willpower is a scarce resource and is easily depleted.3 Not only our ability to live actual selfdetermined lives, but our ability to effectively exert internal psychological control, too, largely depend on the lives we live, which obviously involve our places and positions in the social world. What, then, is the power of truth in the idea of our being who we are in virtue of ourselves? It is, first and foremost, in a negative normative claim. Although our capacity for effective self-control depends on the sort of lives we live and on our places in the social world, we can’t blame the social world (or “society”) for whatever it is that we find wrong about who we are. For society is not something that just happens to us. Society is something we do. As it is sometimes put in the literature, the social world is of our own making.4 Nature (and perhaps the gods, too) may set some limitations on our norms, institutions, structures, and ways of production and consumption, but these norms, institutions, structures, etc. are what they are in virtue of usourselves—they are our way of living and living together.
If this is true, our own place in social ontology must be reconsidered. In this view, we are not justthe denizens of the social world—we are the demiurges thereof, too. We are not just those who are determined as who they are by the place to which they are assigned or managed to acquire for themselves in the social world; we are also those who set up the whole structure. We are not just the players in the game, but its authors, too. Whatever norms, institutions, or power structures we identify as the determining factors of who we are, as the denizens of the social world, are of our own making, as its demiurges. We are not just social creatures but creators of society.
As the denizens or creatures of the social world, we might just be a special topic in social ontology. As the demiurges or creators thereof, however, we are clearly much more than just that. If it is indeed true that the social world is “of our own making”—simply as our way of living together, as I shall suggest, or perhaps in some other way—we really need to know who we are in order to understand how the social world is constituted and constructed. The question of who we are is thus both a special issue and the fundamental question of social ontology. Conventional social ontology includes us as the denizens or creatures of the social world. Fundamental social ontology traces the social world back to us as its demiurges or creators.
The idea of the social world being of our own making has intuitive appeal. Part of what makes it so attractive is that it inspires us with a sense of freedom and possibility. If the social world is of our own making, perhaps we can make it better. The flipside of this sense of freedom, however, is responsibility. If we can’t blame how we live and how we’re organized (or disorganized) on nature, on history, on some system of power, or on the gods—if we recognize ourselves behind “society,” the systems and power structures that mark our social world—we have nothing but ourselves to blame for who we have come to be and for how it is that we live together. Or, to put it in more epistemic terms: there is no way of accounting for the social world without holding ourselves accountable in the process. While the social world, conventionally understood, explains who we are, as
its denizens or creatures, the fundamental ontology of the social world boomerangs straight back to us: as the creators of the social world, we find ourselves again in the explaining role —with a lot of explaining to do, indeed, given all that is wrong with the social world.
Thus, a fundamental question arises in social ontology: Who are we, these mysterious plural creator subjects of the social world? The very idea of us ourselves being behind all of it has an almost conspiratorial ring to it. And, then, the worry concerning demarcation reappears: Who is in this “we,” who is not, and why?
Does this creator-we include those of us who find themselves marginalized and oppressed in the social world? Are they implicated in the responsibility for co-constituting their own prison? Or is this creator-we just limited to those of us who find themselves empowered with the means and entitlements to have at least a somewhat credible claim to be living actual self-determined lives?
Neither of these alternatives seems acceptable. The first is conceptually imperialistic at best and outright mean at worst. It is conceptually imperialistic in that it conceives of all of us on the model of just some of us, marginalizing those of us who find themselves oppressed, and it is outright mean by implicating those who are marginalized and oppressed in their own condition because they seem to be partially responsible, with some of the blame diverted from those in power. The second is plain parochial. It claims for some of us what’s not just their own. For the powerful among us are creatures of the social world, too. None of us has built the cottage or house in which they were born themselves (despite of how some politicians like to depict themselves), and what’s true of individuals is true of groups and organizations, too. No individual or group has created their powers or privileges over others all by and for themselves.
How can this dilemma be tackled? A point of departure is in the following idea. The two obvious questions about our apparent double role in the social world—the question of how it is and how it is notthat we are the creatures of the social world, and the question of who is this creator-we of the social world (and how inclusive or
exclusive it is), are versions of one and the same question. The basic question (and thus the topic of fundamental social ontology) is how exactly it is that we make, constitute, or construct the social world.
The answer to the basic question to be developed in this book is that the making, constitution, or construction of the social world is not a matter of some special (however hypothetical or implicit) act of creation, let alone just a matter of how we “see” or “think about” the social world; rather, our creating the social world is a modal feature of our living together. Living together is what we do, and we do it intentionally. We are the plural intentional subjects of our living together, and it is as such that we are the creators or demiurges of our social worlds. The social worlds of norms and institutions, statuses and structures, practices and artifacts are what they are as the ways in which we live together. They are up to us in the sense in which it is up to us to determine how it is that we do the things we do.
Things can’t usually be done in just any way. There are limits to the ways of doing things. But cases in which there is just one way are rare (and those few often involve tight institutional constraints— there is only one way exactly because this is how we live together, and not the other way around). This is not to say, of course, that there aren’t better or worse ways of doing things. But what’s better or worse in terms of ways of living together depends on what we, together, want, as the plural intentional subjects of what we do. Our standards for better and worse, right and wrong are ours to determine, too.
This book thus starts with a discussion of what it means to be acting together (Chapter 1). Shared intention is identified as the feature in virtue of which we can act intentionally together, and a systematic account of alternative possibilities of analyzing shared intention is provided. The central second chapter of this book argues that the right analysis of shared intention involves plural intentional subjects and argues for a specific view of plural intentional subjectivity. In this view, we are plural subjects of an intention in virtue of plural pre-reflective self-awareness or self-consciousness of that intention. The third chapter argues that living well together and
organizing ourselves accordingly crucially involves becoming reflectively clear about who we pre-reflectively are. This final chapter develops the problem of accounting conceptually for ourselves and develops this thought through a series of basic social notions— community, social norms, society, politics, and the idea of radical collective responsibility for who we, together, are.
The answer to the specific question of how we, the creators of the social world, relate to us, the creatures thereof, is this: we, as the plural intentional subjects of our living together, determine the positions in which we, the creatures of the social world, find ourselves by living together in the way we do. It is together (collectively, or jointly) that we are the creators or demiurges of our social worlds that we, distributively or severally, inhabit as its creatures or denizens. Our accountability or responsibility for the social world is collective rather than distributive. It does not, as such, distribute over the creatures or denizens of the social world or particular subgroups thereof. Rather, it is responsibility of the sort that is ours to assume together in determining the ways in which we live together.
The way in which, as plural subjects, all of us are involved in the creation of the social world, neither excuses the powerful and privileged among us, nor does it implicate the oppressed or marginalized in the responsibility for their own condition. Recognizing the collective responsibility for who we, together, are, is not committing to a particular view on the duties and obligations that we have as individuals or as particular groups—for the standards of right and wrong are ours to determine together. But it does capture an important aspect (though certainly not the only relevant one) of what is wrong about oppression and exploitation, which is that they prevent us from doing well what we do: living together.
1 Social ontology is a relatively new label, especially in English (though there are uses of the term in other European languages that date back to the 19th
century; see section 3.5, fn. 1), but there is, of course, social ontology avant la lettre. For an introduction to the history and the most important current research agendas in social ontology see Epstein 2018.
2 For Marcus Aurelius’ conception of the “inner citadel,” see Hadot 1992. For Epictetus’ philosophy, see Mason and Scaltsas 2007.
3 For a psychological account of the capacity of self-control (or willpower) as a scarce resource, see Baumeister and Tierney 2011.
4 Most prominently, this view features in the (sub-)titles of Searle 2010 and Gilbert 2013. Francesco Guala calls the view that the social world is of our own making “the Standard Model of Social Ontology” (Guala 2007, 956, 960–963, with further references; see also Epstein 2015, chap. 4).
CHAPTER 1
ACTING TOGETHER
We are agents, and what we do first and foremost is live together. Living together crucially involves acting together. Acting together thus plays a central role for who we are. But what is the feature in virtue of which it is together that we’re acting when we’re acting together? This first part of the book argues that the decisive element is in sharedintention. What is intention, in what sense is it shared in acting together, and what about shared intention is it that is being shared in this sense? Three alternative possible approaches to the analysis of shared intention are identified, and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach are analyzed.
1.1
Plural Intentional Action
Our living together crucially involves acting together. Indeed, our living together is acting together, for living together is what we do, and insofar as we do it—in parts at least—together, we do it jointly or collectively. But even if we grant that living together involves a great deal of acting together, there might be some unease with the claim that living together is itself acting together. After all, living together is unlike such obvious cases of acting together as sailing a boat together or going for a walk together.1 If living together it is indeed acting together (as I shall argue), it might be too big (and too complex) a joint activity to see it easily and clearly for what it is due to the sheer dimensions of the activity in question in spatial and temporal terms and due to the enormous number of participants.
Also, ours has come to be a strange way of living together. It is part and parcel of how we do it that we think of it in quite different terms—as something we do alongside each other rather than together (“we, those living lives of their own”) or even as something that we do to each other (“we, the oppressed and their oppressors”). It is in turn perhaps indeed easier to see what acting together entails—and to recognize it as such—by focusing on smaller cases such as going for a walk together. Once we see the difference between walking alongside each other and walking together, we might be in a better position to see whether and how far what we do is indeed living together as a joint activity or really just a case of living alongside each other or doing something to each other.
Acting together may perhaps not be the first thing we do and not the last, and certainly our living together, even if it exists, involves a great number of things that are not acting together. But a lot of
what happens before, during, and after acting together is what it is in virtue of its relation to acting together.
When agents act together, they perform plural, joint, or collective actions.2 “Plural actions” is my preferred term, though nothing hinges on the label here. Plural actions involve a plurality of contributions and contributors, but they are not just distributions, aggregates, or summations of participant singular actions. Just that you happen to be doing something and that I happen to be doing something does not make it the case that there is anything we’re doing together. Just that you’re on your walk and I am on mine does not mean that we’re walking together, even if we walk down the same street at the same time. Rather than distributions of singular actions, plural actions are collections thereof (although the term “collection” has unfortunate connotations, as it etymologically suggests an image in which the whole, the collection, is always some gathering of preexistent parts, which may not be the case here— there are similar worries with the adjectives “joint” and “shared”).3
What is the difference between collections and distributions, especially when it comes to distinguishing collections and distributions ofaction? May it suffice for our present purposes to say the following: the relevant difference is between each of us φ-ing by themselves and all of us φ-ing together. The sort of φ-ing that is of interest here is “φ-ing together” rather than “φ-ing separately.” It is φC rather than φD , with “C” standing for “collectively,” “together,” “jointly” and “D” standing for “distributively,” “severally,” “separately,” “apart from each other,” “each by themselves.”
The most obvious difference between the two is that φD is a plurality of token actions the type of which is φ. In φD , the φ-ing is many token actions of a type. ΦC is a distribution of token actions performed by the participants, too, but, in contrast to φD , the token actions need not necessarily be of one type (though they usually are of the same type in the walking case), and φC is itself one token actionthat is performed together. Whether you and I happen to be walking separately or walking together, it involves you walking and
me walking in either case. The question of whether it is us walkingD or us walkingC is the question of whether or not it is just you on your walk and me on mine, or whether there is one walkon which we’re together. (As said, the plurality of contributions may or may not be of the same type, and it is usually the same in our walking together, but it may also involve contributive actions of quite different types, such as you slowing down for me and me speeding up to catch up with you, respectively.)
What is it that makes the activities of many agents one token action? Actions can be individuated in all sorts of ways, and the standard is usually set by what is relevant about the event(s) in question (if actions are indeed events, as I simply assume here). What is relevant about events, in the context of individuation of action, often involves responsibility, at least if responsibility is not merely causal. We’re certainly not just responsible for what we intendto do or not to do. There is a lot we do that we don’t intend to, and, tragically, we even sometimes do things by trying to avoid them. But intention almost always matters for the individuation of action (and assignment of responsibility) in some way. Intention is constitutive for action. Action is intentional “under a description” (a somewhat misleading term since we don’t usually need to describe anything in order to intend, let alone have it be described by others).4 Although what is being done, in terms of action, might be relevant under entirely different descriptions thereof (and thus be “described” accordingly), it matters if the relevant “description” is the “description” under which it was intended or if it was intended under a different “description.” And what is being done, however it is being described, must be intentional under some “description” or at least an attributable consequence of something that was intentional under some “description,” if it is an action.
There is action that is somehow “joint,” and thus a token action of sorts, under other “descriptions” than the one under which it is intentional—as in the case of your introducing me to your favorite 1980s glam rock music band on the car radio and my opening the car’s side window for some fresh air combining to us waking up the
neighbors. In the way in which the events in our car matter for the neighbors from their perspective, there is a token act that happened for which they are very well justified in holding both of us responsible. It is true that you did not intend for me to open the window, and I did not intend for you to play the music, but this is not relevant from the neighbor’s perspective. They will not accept your pointing at me as the culprit, and me pointing back at you. But such cases are failures to get our act together rather than proper joint actions. They are “deficient” cases of joint actions (we should have jointly decided on what we wanted: eitherlisten to your music, or have some fresh air we, together, failed) and thus derivative of joint actions because they would be seen and treated differently were it not for the participants’ capacity for “proper” joint actions— actions that do not just happen to be joint but that are joint under the description under which they are intended. Proper joint actions are actions where the participants contribute willingly and knowingly to the token joint action under a “description” as that token joint action. They are thus intentional token joint actions, and, as such, intentionally joint. The intentionality involved in them is of the form “we intend to φC,” or “we’re intentionally φC-ing.”
The expressions “we intend to φC” or “we’re intentionally φC–ing” (I’ll just mention the first phrase in the following, but it tends to focus on intention of the prior sort; however, the basic form of intention is in action, as it is acting intentionally that we intend in prior intention, while we don’t have to have a prior intention in order to act intentionally) are, of course, linguistic, but as such, they are verbalizations, renderings in words of what might not itself be linguistic in nature or even just a worked-out thought. “We intend to φC” does not presuppose language just because it appears in linguistic form here—rather, it is a presupposition of language, at least if we accept that language is what it is in its use, that the use of language crucially (or essentially) involves communication, that communication is a type of joint action (so that there is something— a token action—that we do together even if you just tell me something), and that it cannot be the first joint action that we
perform together but presupposes a context of joint action. Outside of the context of joint action, you can perhaps do such things as reciting a poem on a lonely stroll through the woods. You would thus perhaps saysomething, but your tellingsomething normally involves me listening—and not listening in the way I might be listening in on (or just overhearing) the neighbor’s conversation through the hedge but listening as my part in what it is we’re doing together when you tell me something (the case of you telling me something withoutme listening usually makes me blameworthy for not doing my part).5 But there are reasons not to focus too much on communication where joint action is concerned. Besides the point that communication is itself a kind of joint action, and a particularly complex form thereof, a strong developmental point can be made that it is only in the context of joint action that developing the capacity for linguistic communication makes any sense.6
1 Different authors use different paradigm cases in the literature. Most authors focus on small-scale cooperations with two participants. The examples mentioned here sailing a boat together and going for a walk together are taken from Robin George Collingwood’s New Leviathan (1942, 20.9, p. 145f.). I mention them partly to honor this largely forgotten direct ancestor of the current debate on shared intention (Collingwood’s work is the source of Wilfrid Sellars’s account of weintention).
2 For more on plural action with some discussion of the relevant literature, see Schmid 2009, especially Chapter 1.
3 Using “joint” rather than “collective” does not help since the word evokes the image of joining preexisting parts. For a more detailed analysis of the relevant concept of sharing, see Section 1.2.
4 The expression “under a description” was introduced into action theory by G. E. M. Anscombe in Intention (1957, p. 11). For Anscombe’s own clarification of possible misunderstandings and for Anscombe’s reaction to Donald Davidson’s influential use of the term, see Anscombe 1979.
5 It is certainly possible that you told me and that I wasn’t listening nevertheless you still told me, which seems to contradict the claim that you telling me involves me listening. To sort this out, it is important to see how the case in which you told me without me having listened is usually different from your just having tried to tell me. It is usually different because if you actually told me
(rather than just having tried to tell me), I clearly failed to do my part in what we still did together. We were communicating, but we failed because of me, because I wasn’t listening. And this still involves me as listening, though in a normative rather than a descriptive sense. An adequate theory of joint action must be able to accommodate such cases if it is to extend to linguistic communication but perhaps linguistic communication is not an ideal paradigm of an analysis of joint action as it might be a particularly complex form thereof (though still much less complex than our living together in its entirety).
6 Strong arguments for this view are presented from the perspectives of developmental psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and primatology by Michael Tomasello, especially in his 2009 book The Origins of Human Communication. For some critical comments on his use of shared intention, see Schmid 2013a. For some critical comments on his use of shared intention as the defining feature of humankind, see Section 3.5.
1.2
What’s Shared in Shared Intention?
That there are things that we do together means, in the sense that is relevant here, that there are token joint actions that are joint in that they are intended as such—or jointly intended by the participants. Not that the difference between these two ways of putting the intention involved in plural actions does not matter (this will be discussed in some detail shortly), but, in any case, the crucial element is attitude of the form “we intend to φC,” where φ is a token joint action rather than just an aggregate of individual actions of one type. The attitude in question is not of the kind of “we intend to brush our teeth,” where what is meant is that each of us intends to brush their teeth (that is, where the content of the intention is a distribution of singular or individual actions). Rather, it is of the kind of “we intend to play a game of chess,” where it is one and the same token game that we intend to play together.
Intentionality of the form “we intend to φC” has come to be called “we-intention,” “collective intention,” “joint intention,” or “shared intention” in the literature (different authors use different labels, some authors use several of these labels either interchangeably or for slightly different forms of “we intend to φC”; in the following, I’ll either list some of the alternative labels where the different nuances of these terms seem to matter or just use “shared”). The controversy in the received debate can be put in either term and is exactly the same in any way of putting it. It is this: whatexactlyis “we-ish” about we-intention, what is collective about collective intention, what is joint about joint intention, what is shared about sharedintention?
A useful way to structure this question and discuss the different approaches to answering it is according to the three features of intentionality often identified in the literature (the word “intentionality” is very close to “intention,” but it is important to recognize that intention is just a particular mode of intentionality, with other modes including belief or hope). Intentionality is usually defined as our capacity to have some content in mind, in some way, or our capacity to have a mental attitude toward something. As such, intentionality is characterized by (i) intentional content or object (something the attitude is about), (ii) intentional subject (somebody whose intentional attitude it is), and (iii) intentional mode (the kind of attitude that is taken by the intentional subject toward the intentional content). In the case of “we intend to φC , ” “φC” is the content, “we” is the subject, and “intend” is the mode. In order to find out where to place sharedness in shared intention (etc.), it is important to know a bit more about each of these features, and about their relations, before turning to the question of how one or several of these features may be “shared,” “joint,” or “collective.”
i. Intentional content (or intentional object) is what intentional attitudes are about. It is whatever we perceive or imagine, believe or desire, intend or fear. Content is a thing or “entity,” a property, an event, a state of affair, a matter of fact, or a value. It is the perceived in perception, the believed in belief, the feared in fear, the desired in desire, and the intended in intention. In some cases, it seems that the content is “illusionary” rather than “real” (after all, mistaken beliefs are still beliefs, and the attitudes that we have in our dreams have content, too); in other cases, it seems that “the world” is part of intentionality (this seems particularly obvious in such cases as perception, where, for us to perceive something, it actually has to be there). Whether it is real or not, content is an element or feature of intentionality and thus not separated from it. Content is often captured in terms of “representation” of “the world”; perhaps a way to avoid this loaded term (more on this in Section 2.1) is to say that intentionality involves some sort of
knowledge of what has to be the case for one’s belief to be true, one’s desire to be fulfilled, and one’s intention to be carried out.
ii. The intentionalsubjectis the believer(s) in belief, the fearer(s) in fear, the desirer(s) in desire, and the intender(s) in intention. One should perhaps avoid characterizing the role of the intentional subject as the believer(s) ofthe belief etc. because this may make it tempting to think that the intentional subject involves a metaattitude (or state) that has the first-order attitude (or state) in its content. Some intentional subjects do sometimes believe that they have beliefs, but they are not intentional subjects in virtue of such meta-attitudes, and meta-attitudes are not the intentional subject. The confusion does not arise in such cases as fear, as it is not usually fear that is feared in typical forms of fear (though such attitudes are certainly possible). The subject is the one(s) whose intentional attitude the attitude in question is, whether or not they have reflective or meta-attitudes as well and however exactly it is that these meta-attitudes relate to first-order attitudes.
It is sometimes said that the subject is the “owner,” or “source,” or “bearer” of the attitude. All of these are metaphors. They are illuminating in many ways, but especially the first and the last one are at least as misleading as they are illuminating. As elements or features of intentional attitudes, intentional subjects are not related to their intentional attitudes in the way in which an owner is related to their property. For the latter (owner and their property) are independent of each other in a way the former (intentional subject and their intentional attitudes) are not. The bluntest argument for this difference is that pieces of property can change hands, or perhaps be relinquished, while our attitudes cease to exist when we don’t have them anymore. When I give up a certain belief and meanwhile you come to adopt it, it is not the case that my belief has changed hands (or heads) or that we have traded it. The metaphor of ownership is rather fit and illuminating, however, in other regards. Ownership is sometimes explained with notions of stewardship of property and the freedom and responsibility to dispose of property in the way the owner sees fit, which in many ways reflects the way in which we tend to think of how intentional subjects are involved in
their intentional attitudes, especially in terms of psychological or evaluative control. The intentional subjects are those who are free to have the attitude that they see fit (though we cannot usually form beliefs at will, and it seems that we can intend only what we have reason to do) and to change their minds accordingly. They are responsible for having the attitudes they have. The metaphor “source” captures the related idea that our attitudes “come from ourselves”—they are what they are in virtue of our making up our minds; however, this is in some ways an understanding of the intentional subject that seems overly activist and conceptually too demanding for basic forms of intentional subjectivity (more on this in Sections 2.1 and 2.9).
Approaching subjectivity through an analysis of the features of intentionality already suggests that the subject is not separated from intentionality (as is perhaps mistakenly suggested in the metaphor of the subjects being the “bearers” of their intentional attitudes) but rather a component thereof. Also, it is probably good advice not to think of the intentional subject as an object even if one has reservations against some or all of the traditional subject/object dualisms in received Western philosophy. Metaphysically speaking, intentional subjects might not be substances, but rather the ways in which intentional attitudes are subjective (more on this in Section 1.6). Put in a pun, they may basically be more like properties of intentionality than the proprietors thereof.
There is a similar problem with the widespread description of intentional attitudes as “states,” in the sense of “intentional states” or “mental states.” This terminology easily suggests that the way in which intentional attitudes are subjective is in terms of a substance being in a certain state, so that whether I believe, desire, or intend is somehow similar to whether water is liquid, solid, or a gas. It is true that “attitude” is not entirely innocent in this regard either, but it is certainly less misleading in terms of mistaken substantialization of the intentional subject.
iii. The intentional mode mediates between subject and content as the way in which the subject’s attitude is “of” or “about” the
