Hans Bernhard Schmid

This chapter investigates the idea of collective epistemic commonality suggested by Charles Taylor's example, and contrasts it with a distributive notion of epistemic commonality. It describes a number of accounts of collective epistemic commonality, and then argues that, contrary to what Taylor suggests, conversation is not constitutive of collective epistemic commonality as such, but rather presupposes basic forms of collective epistemic commonality. Taylor's remarks indicate that understanding the consensus is insufficient as whatever proposition people rationally and openly accept in conversation. It is suggested that joint attitudes are irreducible, relational, and pre-reflective, and that such attitudes are joint, in the respect that the participants are aware of themselves as a ‘we’. Highly inferential beliefs need some form of communication, and are probably really some form of joint commitment.

It has been claimed in the literature that collective intentionality and group attitudes presuppose some “sense of ‘us’” among the participants (other labels sometimes used are “sense of community,” “communal awareness,” “shared point of view,” or “we-perspective”). While this seems plausible enough on an intuitive level, little attention has been paid so far to the question of what the nature and role of this mysterious “sense of ‘us’” might be. This paper states (and argues for) the following five claims: (1) it is neither the case that the sense in question has the community (or “us”) in its content or as its object nor does the attitude in question presuppose a preexistent community (or “us”) as its subject. (2) The “sense of ‘us’” is plural pre-reflective self-awareness. (3) Plural pre-reflective self-awareness plays the same role in the constitution of a common mind that singular pre-reflective self-awareness plays in the individual mind. (4) The most important conceptions of plural subjects, collective persons, or group agents in the current literature fail to recognize the nature and role of plural self-awareness, and therefore fall short in important respects. (5) In spite of the striking similarities between the plural and the singular mind, there are important differences to consider. The authority of the singular first person point of view has no equivalent in the plural case

In this paper it is argued that a) altruism is an inadequate label for human cooperative behavior, and b) an adequate account of cooperation has to depart from the standard economic model of human behavior by taking note of the agents' capacity to see themselves and act as team-members. Contrary to what Fehr et al. seem to think, the main problem of the conceptual limitations of the standard model is not so much the assumption of sel shness but rather the atomistic conception of the individual. A much-neglected question of the theory of cooperation is how the agent's social identity is determined, i.e. how individuals come to think of themselves and act as members of a group. Considering as an example one of Fehr et al.'s third party punishment experiments, I shall argue that the agents' identities are strongly in uenced by the way the experiment is presented to the participants, especially by the collectivity-related vocabulary used in the instructions

In this paper, I distinguish three claims, which I label individual intentional autonomy, individual intentional autarky, and intentional individualism. The autonomy claim is that under normal circumstances, each individual's behavior has to be interpreted as his or her own action. The autarky claim is that the intentional interpretation of an individual's behavior has to bottom out in that individual's own volitions, or pro-attitudes. The individualism claim is weaker, arguing that any interpretation of an individual's behavior has to be given in terms of individual intentional states. I argue that individual intentional autonomy implies neither individual intentional autarky, nor intentional individualism, with which it is usually lumped together. I further argue that this insight is the key to an adequate view of an important class of actions, i.e., plural actions.

Abstract The specter of the ?group mind? or ?collective subject? plays a crucial and fateful role in the current debate on collective intentionality. Fear of the group mind is one important reason why philosophers of collective intentionality resort to individualism. It is argued here that this measure taken against the group mind is as unnecessary as it is detrimental to our understanding of what it means to share an intention. A non-individualistic concept of shared intentionality does not necessarily have to get stuck with some collectivist super-agent. Rather, the specter of the group mind arises from a deep-seated ?Cartesian? preconception concerning intentionality, which we should try to overcome. *I am greatly indebted to Raimo Tuomela for his comments. Also, I wish to thank Michael Bratman, Fabienne Peter, Richard Raatzsch and Katrin Meyer

Social Ontology encompasses a wide variety of inquiries into the nature, structure and perhaps essence of social phenomena, and their role and place in our world. Topics of research in Social Ontology range from small-scale interactions to large-scale institutions, from spontaneous teamwork to the functioning of formal organizations, and from unintended consequences to institutional design. Social Ontology brings together theoretical work from a large number of disciplines. This rapidly evolving field of research has attracted increasing attention over the last couple of decades, and the conceptual tools recent research in Social Ontology has provided have proved to be useful in a large number of domains, such as the study of the evolution of communication, the structure of social norms, social structure, and social change, the nature of collective responsibility, and the status of corporate agents. The Journal of Social Ontology aims to further this research. It provides a forum of exchange between scholars of diverse disciplinary, scholarly, and methodological backgrounds, and invites submissions from all branches of Social Ontology. The Journal of Social Ontology adopts strict standards of selection and relies heavily on its carefully selected referees. In a world in which publication strategies and outlets are changing at a tremendous pace, it is difficult to say what the future of scholarly publication will look like. With a generous grant from the University of Vienna for the start-up phase, the Journal of Social Ontology now appears as an Open Access Journal with De Gruyter, thus combining professional support by an established publisher with unlimited accessibility. In addition, the Journal of Social Ontology has been founded together with the International Social Ontology Society (ISOS) that supports the work of this journal. We wish to express our thanks to our supporters, contributors, and referees; we hope that our joint effort will grant the work published in this journal the impact it deserves.

Under normal circumstances, saying that you have a thought, a belief, a desire, or an intention differs from saying that somebody (who happens to be you) has that attitude. The former statement comes with some form of first person authority and constitutes commitments that are not involved in the latter case. Speaking with first person authority, and thereby publicly committing oneself, is a practice that plays an important role in our communication and in our understanding of what it means to be a person. In their Group Agency, Christian List and Philip Pettit argue that some corporations are agents with attitudes of their own, and they claim that they are persons. The question on which this paper is focused is: Can corporations (groups with attitudes and the capacity for linguistic communication) participate in this practice, that is, can they express their attitudes with first person authority, and thereby enter first person commitments? The first section of the paper gives a rough (and, I hope, ecumenical) account of some features of first person authority and commitment. The second section examines if and how this account of first person authority carries over to corporations. It is argued that the possibility for groups to express their attitudes with straightforward first person authority, and thus to enter first person commitments, are extremely limited. The third part of the paper argues that while under normal circumstances, a member’s expression of her group’s attitudes in first person plural terms does not constitute straightforward first person authority, it does come with something resembling some aspects of the first-personal commitments encountered in the singular case