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LIT-1875: Collective Intentions and Collective Intentionality

2 min read

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1431) in full, from the published PDF on the author's faculty page at Union College (https://minerva.union.edu/zaibertl/zaibert%20on%20searle%20and%20collective%20intentions.pdf); worth reading as a secondary report of Searle's unread "Collective Intentions and Actions" (LIT-490), which it quotes page by page (CIA 401–412), and as the argument that the paper gives no analysis of we-intentions: its favoured form is a complex individual by-means-of intention, and Searle concedes he has not shown that reduction to individual intentions fails. Read it knowing that it is a critic's report, not the paper, and that its own positive suggestion, collective desires in place of collective intentions, is one paragraph.
Tagssocial-ontology, agency
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1431 — Zaibert — Collective Intentions and Collective Intentionality

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Zaibert, L. A. (2003). Collective Intentions and Collective Intentionality. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 62(1), 209–232. doi:10.1111/1536-7150.t01-1-00008.

Key takeaways

  • Searle’s “Collective Intentions and Actions” (LIT-490) does not show that collective intentionality is irreducible. On its own words, as Zaibert quotes them, its arguments only “suggest that our intuition is right”, and “I have not demonstrated that no such analysis could ever succeed” (CIA 401, 406).
  • The analysis Searle favours there, “i.a. collective B by means of singular A”, has the same structure as the analysis of one person firing a gun by pulling a trigger, so it states a complex individual intention, not a collective one.
  • Searle’s rejection of Tuomela and Miller rests on one counterexample, which Zaibert finds doubtful (n. 16).
  • Intentions have only actions as their conditions of satisfaction, and one cannot intend what is beyond one’s control. Zaibert argues that this is why groups cannot have irreducible we-intentions, though they may have collective desires or beliefs.

Why this is here

THEORY-625’s promote_when waits on an argument that collective intentionality is irreducible, which Searle’s 2006 paper defers to his 1990 paper (LIT-490), and that paper is Unavailable. This is a published report of the 1990 paper, with page references, by a critic.

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