Alessandro Salice

An important idea due to Tomasello and others is that the human capacity as the human capacity for social cooperation is at the heart of the species’ capacity to understand others’ mental states and behavior. Furthermore, they argue that this idea allows for an explanation of how humans came to share thoughts and language. While this is a promising idea, the special attempt to pursue this hypothesis in developmental studies and evolutionary theory developed by Tomasello and his research group faces several problems. This is especially apparent in their attempts to explain helping behavior and joint action in young children. In this paper, we argue that many of these problems result from assuming that the right explanation of joint action and simple forms of shared intentionality is given by Bratman’s theory of shared intentions.

Speech-act theorists generally agree that speech acts require uptake from the addressee. But is a speech act that has not secured uptake still performed? Adolf Reinach answers yes to this question and thereby endorses the view that what the speaker does is not dependent, for its existence as a speech act, on the hearer’s doing. Call this position “internalism about speech acts.” Externalists, by contrast, answer no to the question and thus maintain that what the speaker does is dependent, for its existence as a speech act, on the hearer’s doing. This paper defends Reinachian internalism in two steps. First, it distinguishes between the performance of a speech act and its product: the former being an atomic event, the latter a continuant. Second, it advances three arguments in support of Reinach’s position. It is argued that this view (i) avoids the absurd metaphysical consequence that the nature of an act can change retroactively depending on future events; (ii) correctly distinguishes the performance of a speech act from the attempt to perform one; and (iii) respects the distinction between motivating and normative reasons. The paper maintains that since externalism about speech acts conflicts with these three points, Reinach’s internalism is to be preferred.

The paper compares the two remarkably similar and yet strikingly different theories of promises developed by Adolf Reinach and Margaret Gilbert. Margaret Gilbert claims that promises can be explained in terms of joint commitments borne by the promisor and the promisee to the decision that the promisor will φ. On this view, the promisor's obligation and the promisee's claim are grounded in the commitment they have jointly entered. By contrast, Adolf Reinach submits that promises do not have substantial explanation and that they generate promissory obligation and claim in virtue of their nature. By using insights from Reinach's theory, this paper argues that Gilbert's account of promises is to be rejected and suggests abandoning the idea that progress in our understanding of promises requires submitting them to substantial explanations.

In the last years, one can observe an increasing interest in phenomenological contributions to social ontology and collective or we-intentionality studies. Some of the accounts about we-intentionality that were developed especially within early phenomenology are currently in the process of being rediscovered, reevaluated and reassessed in the light of more recent debates. In this strand of research, the name of Kurt Stavenhagen has largely been neglected. This is unfortunate given that substantial parts of his philosophical production are devoted to foundational issues in the social sciences.The main aim of this paper is to contribute to this line of research by introducing Kurt Stavenhagen’s work on social phenomenology and, in particular, his account of how communities can arise based on shared preferences (Stavenhagen calls communities formed in this way “charismatic unifications”).Stavenhagen’s ideas on social ontology are original and interesting at once. In fact, not only does he offer a description of we-experiences that in many ways is unprecedented within phenomenology, but also he provides an explanation for why individuals identify when they have coincident preferences. According to Stavenhagen, this explanation is to be sought in a difference between two forms of communities or unifications. According to him, “mediate” unifications (the kinds of we that arises from the individuals’ mutual awareness of their overlapping preferences) are grounded in unifications of an “immediate” kind (these are I-Thou relations that rely on reciprocal friendly sentiments) in the sense that the former are weaker – i.e., not yet fully actualized – forms of the latter.

In this contribution we discuss Gallagher's and Zahavi's project of naturalization of phenomenology. In their book The Phenomenological Mind, they aim at intertwining the phenomenological method with a number of results from the field of cognitive sciences. Nevertheless, one could oppose that such a project is based upon a metaphysical assumption: indeed, if mental states belong to nature, they should be approached by natural sciences. This paper replies to this objection by emphasizing how Gallagher and Zahavi opt for a transcendental perspective in order to avoid any ambiguity between their project of naturalization of phenomenology and a naturalistic theory of consciousness.

In a recent paper, Thomas Szanto develops an account of hatred, according to which the target of this attitude, paradigmatically, is a representative of a group or a class. On this account, hatred overgeneralises its target, has a blurred affective focus, is co-constituted by an outgroup/ingroup distinction, and is accompanied by a commitment for the subject to stick to the hostile attitude. While this description captures an important form of hatred, this paper claims that it does not do justice to the paradigmatic cases of this attitude. The paper puts forward a “singularist” view of hatred, the core idea of which is that, in its simpler form, hatred is to aversively target the other qua this individual person, where the adverb “aversively” expresses the subject’s desire for the target to be annihilated. The conclusion develops some general considerations on the distinction between paradigmatic and marginal instances of an attitude by highlighting its importance for the study of affective phenomena.

Within the debate on the ontology of social groups, a prominent view holds that, if one wants to know what a group is and how a group is created or constituted, one has to look at the internal or subjective conditions that either the group’s members or the group as such have to fulfill. This idea is clearly illustrated by a by now rather standard approach to we-ness, which seeks to locate this property either in the subject of a given attitude (which, most perspicuously, is used to being characterized as an intention), or in the mode of the attitude or in its content. This view also suggests that there is one prototypical notion of group which conceptually has to be traced back to one of the three constituents of an intentional attitude and that the main way to access the notion of a group is by means of the concept of intention and/or intentional action.The present paper tackles a fairly divergent approach to the ontology of groups put forward by Dietrich von Hildebrand in his book on the Metaphysics of Community. First, von Hildebrand argues that there are different kinds of social groups and that, accordingly, individuals can be ‘together’ in radically different ways. In particular, he substantially weakens the relevance that contemporary debate ascribes to the notion of shared intention and shared agency. Said another way, the existence of groups does not necessarily require their members to intend to do something together and to act according to this intention. Especially when it comes to communities (understood as a specific kind of group), he suggests a – within social ontology so far relatively unexplored – principle of constitution: instead of looking for the internal and subjective conditions that regulate the group’s constitution, he rather stresses an external one, i.e., the “virtus unitiva” or the unifying virtue that values can exert over individuals and which might bring them to constitute a group.

What kind of reality is legal reality, how is it created, and what are its a priori foundations? These are the central questions asked by the early phenomenologists who took interest in social ontology and law. While Reinach represents the well-known “realist” approach to phenomenology of law, Felix Kaufmann and Fritz Schreier belonged to the “positivist” “Vienna School of Jurisprudence,” combining Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology—and thereby challenging Reinach’s views on how legal reality and the legal a priori were to be conceived. This paper addresses the controversy between these positivist and realist approaches to phenomenology of law, with the goal of introducing the lesser known theories of Kaufmann and Schreier. The special focus on their critique of Reinach’s outline should give us an overview of their positions vis-à-vis the basic and a priori elements of which legal reality consists and the role that phenomenology plays in analyzing them. There is one general tendency to be noted: While the phenomenological legal positivists see the root of legal reality in an act of interpretation according to a “normative scheme of interpretation,” Reinach locates the roots of legal reality in social interaction and argues for the existence of entities independent of any interpretation.

In my paper I investigate a particular class of objects, i.e. the so called “cultural” objects. I argue that all cultural objects are social objects, but not all social objects are cultural. Social objects are observer relative as cultural objects too, but cultural objects show an intrinsic dependence to social groups and their cultures which does not obtain in the case of social objects. The investigation is concerned with concrete cultural objects mainly and its conclusion is that a concrete social object can be characterized as “cultural” if the intentional actions, which produced the object at issue, imply the presence of a cultural meaning. The notion of meaning is conceived phenomenologically as a species that is instantiated in intentional contents. A cultural meaning is a meaning which is instantiated in the intentional contents of a single social group.

In a recent series of important papers, Søren Overgaard has defended a disjunctivist reading of Edmund Husserl’s theory of perception. According to Overgaard, Husserl commits to disjunctivism when arguing that hallucination intrinsically differs from perception because only experiences of the latter kind carry singular content and, thereby, pick out individuals. This paper rejects that interpretation by invoking the theory of intentionality developed by Husserl in the Logical Investigations. It is claimed that this theory not only lacks the notion of singular content, but it also entails the idea that perceptions and hallucinations belong to the same kind of experience. If that is correct, a commitment to conjuctivism on Husserl’s end follows, pace Overgaard.

Based on a qualitative study about expert musicianship, this paper distinguishes three ways of interacting by putting them in relation to the sense of agency. Following Pacherie, it highlights that the phenomenology of shared agency undergoes a drastic transformation when musicians establish a sense of we-agency. In particular, the musicians conceive of the performance as one single action towards which they experience an epistemic privileged access. The implications of these results for a theory of collective intentionality are discussed by addressing two general questions: When several individuals share an intention, does this fact secure plural self-knowledge? And is it possible to have non-observational knowledge about a collective action? It is claimed that the results drawn from the study about expert musicianship supports negative answers to both questions.

Negli ultimi anni, un dibattito sempre più intenso si è sviluppato attorno alla nozione di intenzionalità collettiva o intenzionalità del noi. In questo dibattito, che coinvolge non soltanto la filosofia, ma anche molte discipline empiriche, emergono domande quali la possibilità di condividere attitudini cognitive (credenze, atti di accettazione…) o di natura conativa (intenzioni, desideri…) da parte di una pluralità di individui. Eppure, solo di recente l'interesse si è rivolto verso la condivisione di emozioni, tema peraltro già caro a buona parte della tradizione fenomenologica.Posto però che una molteplicità di individui sia in grado di condividere emozioni, qual è il significato da assegnare al termine di “condivisione”? Deve intendersi letteralmente nel senso che, quando una molteplicità di individui condivide una emozione, tutti i soggetti coinvolti provano una (numericamente, una) emozione? O si tratta di una molteplicità di emozioni di cui i vari soggetti sono mutualmente a conoscenza? O ancora, si tratta forse di una molteplicità di emozioni che stanno in una relazione di interdipendenza fra di loro?In questo articolo si descrivono brevemente alcuni degli approcci sviluppati in materia nella letteratura. Pur mantenendo una posizione neutrale su quale approccio sia il più promettente, si sottolinea che la possibilità di condividere emozioni è di importanza fondamentale per il nostro vivere sociale in quanto potrebbe stare alla base di forme più complesse di intenzionalità collettiva.

Based on a qualitative study about expert musicianship, this paper distinguishes three ways of interacting by putting them in relation to the sense of agency. Following Pacherie, it highlights that the phenomenology of shared agency undergoes a drastic transformation when musicians establish a sense of we-agency. In particular, the musicians conceive of the performance as one single action towards which they experience an epistemic privileged access. The implications of these results for a theory of collective intentionality are discussed by addressing two general questions: When several individuals share an intention, does this fact secure plural self-knowledge? And is it possible to have non-observational knowledge about a collective action? It is claimed that the results drawn from the study about expert musicianship supports negative answers to both questions.

In various ways, schizophrenia seems to involve an anomalous form of collective intentionality. Many patients report notable difficulties in establishing and maintaining relationships to others, which often may lead to social withdrawal, isolation, and pro-found feelings of solitude. What is puzzling is of course not that patients, despite their interpersonal difficulties, participate in or try to participate in various social activities, but that some of these social activities appear quite tolerable to the patients, whereas other activities seem almost unbearable. The aim of this paper is to shed light on this aberrant social behaviour by clarifying the relations between schizophrenia and collective intentionality.

The chapter contextualizes and reconstructs Walther’s theory of social acts. In her view a given act qualifies as social if it is performed in the name of or on behalf of a community. Interestingly, Walther’s understanding of that notion is patently at odds with the idea of a social act originally propounded by Reinach. According to Reinach, an act is social if it “addresses” other persons and if it, for its success, requires them to grasp it. We claim that to explain Walther’s reconfiguration of this concept, one has to look into the use that Husserl makes of it. Husserl adopts this idea from Reinach to tackle a problem that is not discussed by the latter. This is the problem of how communities, by means of social acts, are “constituted” in consciousness. Walther shares with Husserl the concern about the constitution of communities and her radical revision of Reinach’s idea is presented as an attempt to offer an alternative solution to Husserl’s problem.

Phenomenological investigations about social reality could be argued to center around three general concepts: Social and Institutional Facts, Collective Intentionality and Values. Even though it is certainly not possible to speak of one unified theory that phenomenology as such puts forward about social reality, the systematic interconnections between these concepts make the single contributions of phenomenologists tesserae of a larger mosaic. This introduction is an attempt to sketch this mosaic by situating these notions within the debate about social ontology as conducted by phenomenologists roughly from 1910 to 1927. It also highlights the systematic connections between phenomenological insights and contemporary discussions on social ontology.

Mind reading (i.e. the ability to infer the mental state of another agent) is taken to be the main cognitive ability required to share an intention and to collaborate. In this paper, I argue that another cognitive ability is also necessary to collaborate: representing others’ and ones’ own goals from a third-person perspective (other-centred or allocentric representation of goals). I argue that allocentric mind reading enables the cognitive ability of goal adoption, i.e. having the goal that another agent’s achieve p because and as long as another agent has that goal that p. Having clarified the relevance of mutual goal adoption for acting jointly, I argue that when an intention is shared between several agents, each individual has an intention in favour of the joint action and one in favour of a joint mode of reasoning. This mode of reasoning is allocentric reasoning. Finally, I elaborate on the consequences of this view for the scientific study of human collaboration.

When you and I share an experience, each of us lives through a we-experience. The paper claims that we-experiences have unique phenomenality and structure. First, we-experiences’ phenomenality is characterised by the fact that they feel like ours to their subject. This specific phenomenality is contended to derive from the way these experiences self-represent: a we-experience exemplifies us-ness or togetherness because it self-represents as mine qua ours. Second, living through a we-experience together with somebody else is not to have this experience in parallel with the experience of the other. Rather, the paper argues that a we-experience is partly co-constituted by the experience of the other. After offering an account of the phenomenality and constitution of we-experiences, which traces these two elements back to the subject’s self-understanding as a group member, the paper argues for the claim that an experience’s for-us-ness is committal to this experience being co-constituted by another we-experience.

Self-conscious emotions such as shame and pride are emotions that typically focus on the self of the person who feels them. In other words, the intentional object of these emotions is assumed to be the subject that experiences them. Many reasons speak in its favor and yet this account seems to leave a question open: how to cash out those cases in which one genuinely feels ashamed or proud of what someone else does? This paper contends that such cases do not necessarily challenge the idea that shame and pride are about the emoting subject. Rather, we claim that some of the most paradigmatic scenarios of shame and pride induced by others can be accommodated by taking seriously the consideration that, in such cases, the subject “group-identifies” with the other. This is the idea that, in feeling these forms of shame or pride, the subject is conceiving of herself as a member of the same group as the subject acting shamefully or in an admirable way. In other words, these peculiar emotive responses are elicited in the subject insofar as, and to the extent that, she is (or sees herself as being) a member of a group – the group to which those who act shamefully or admirably also belong. By looking into the way in which the notion of group identification can allow for an account of hetero-induced shame and pride, this paper attempts to achieve a sort of mutual enlightenment that brings to light not only an important and generally neglected form of self-conscious emotions, but also relevant features of group identification. In particular, it generates evidence for the idea that group identification is a psychological process that the subject does not have to carry out intentionally in the sense that it is not necessarily triggered by the subject’s conative states like desires or intentions.

This paper is an attempt to build a bridge between the fields of social cognition and social ontology. Drawing on both classical and more recent phenomenological studies, the article develops an account ofgroup-directed empathy. The first part of the article spells out the phenomenological notion of empathy and suggests certain conceptual distinctions vis-à-vis two different kinds of group. The second part of the paper applies these conceptual considerations to cases in which empathy is directed at groups and elucidates the sense in which individuals can empathically target not only other individual’s emotions, but also shared emotions as such. Clarifying the structure of group-directed empathy, it will also be argued that the latter is, by default, more informative than individual-directed empathy. The third and last section of the paper is devoted to one central consequence of the proposed account: if it is possible to empathize with groups as such, and if empathy necessary builds on body-perception, then both ideas seem to be conducive to the claim that groups as such have a body.