John R. Searle (1990), in Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan & Martha E. Pollack (eds.), Intentions in Communication, MIT Press, pp. 401–416 — DOI-10.7551/mitpress/3839.003.0021. Reprinted in Searle, Consciousness and Language, Cambridge University Press (2002), pp. 90–105.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, under the topic
social-ontology that ADR-017 added, as the source of Searle’s account
of collective intentionality.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read
and no NOTE is filed. The record has nothing from the paper’s own text.
What it has is how others in the record use it:
- Searle (2006) (LIT-482, read in NOTE-388) takes collective intentionality as a primitive. He calls it “a genuine biological phenomenon”, “not mysterious or inexplicable”, and refers the reader to this paper for its “complexities” (fn. 3). In 2006 he gives one formula for it, “I am doing something only as part of our doing something”, and no argument that it is irreducible. Whatever argument Searle has for irreducibility is in this paper or in the 1995 book (LIT-485), and the record has read neither.
- Bratman’s précis of Shared Agency (described in LIT-488) names Searle, with Gilbert, as giving accounts “that appeal to basic new elements over and above those involved in individual intentional agency”, and sets his own reductive account against them.
Its rivals in this record are Tuomela & Miller’s “We-Intentions” (LIT-476), Gilbert’s “Walking Together” (LIT-477) and Bratman’s “Shared Cooperative Activity” (LIT-471), all filed the same day.
This is the same Searle as the Chinese Room (LIT-400), on a different subject. Secondary summaries, seen here only as search-result snippets and not read, report that the paper keeps collective intentions in individual heads, so that a brain in a vat could have them. If so, that connects the two: all intentionality stays in individual brains, but not all of it is singular. That is to be checked in a reading.
No instruction for machine-learning practice is known from what was seen. The paper appeared in a volume on intentions in communication that includes AI planning work, so a reading should check whether it says anything about artificial agents; nothing here points to the Anthology of the SOTA until then.
What a reading should check.
- The argument that “we intend” is not reducible to “I intend” plus mutual belief, and which rival analyses it targets.
- Whether the paper does hold that a brain in a vat could have collective intentions, and what that commits Searle to about groups as subjects.
- The formal notation for collective intentions-in-action and how it relates to the singular case.