Alessandro Salice

One important application of theories of collective intentionality concerns the evolution of social understanding and even of human thinking (Tomasello M, A natural history of human thinking, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014). A promising idea behind this approach is the Cooperative Evolutionary Hypothesis (CEH), namely, the idea that humans’ capacity for social cooperation is at the heart of their ability to understand others’ mental states and behavior, leading to an explanation of how humans came to share thoughts and language. However, some of the most popular defenses of CEH face important problems. In this paper, we take Tomasello’s account (J Soc Ontol 2(1):117–123, 2016); A natural history of human thinking. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014; Origins of human communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008) as a leading example of the CEH which faces such insurmountable problems. In particular, we argue that Tomasello’s analysis of cooperation and spontaneous help is problematic. We locate a source of such issues in the assumption that the right account of joint action and simple forms of shared intentionality is that which is offered by Bratman’s theory of shared intentions. The second part of the article proposes and defends an alternative framework for understanding shared intentionality that can help substantiate CEH.

Envy is an unpleasant, culturally vilified, and self-threatening emotion that, in many circumstances, tends to mask itself. In other words, due to various factors, envy often exerts some psychological pressure towards self-deception. A domain where this pressure plays an important and underappreciated role is the political and, more concretely, the realm of racism and identity-based discrimination. Despite historical, empirical, and anecdotal evidence indicating that envy can lead to racial hatred, the link between these two emotions, and the role that self-deception plays in this link, remains under-investigated and poorly understood. This chapter aims at remedying this situation by offering an account of the link between envy and racial hatred. After reviewing the evidence available in support of this emotional link, we elaborate on an account of envy we developed in a previous work. We then explain how, why, and under which circumstances envy can transmute into racial hatred by claiming that this transformation process qualifies as an “emotional mechanism”. We conclude by arguing that the envy-racial hatred emotional mechanism is based on self-deception and, as such, is an immature coping mechanism set in motion by the subject to avoid a negative sense of self.

This paper mines, contextualizes, and assesses Wilhelm Schapp’s neglected account of contracts of sale. This account is evaluated against the background of what Emma Tieffenbach and Olivier Massin label as the “Standard Theory of Exchanges [STE]” and the “Action Theory of Exchanges [ATE]” in their recent paper “The Metaphysics of Economic Exchanges” (Journal of Social Ontology, 2017). The first section of the present article introduces STE, its shortcomings, and ATE as a theory of exchanges, which is superior to STE. The second section systematically reconstructs Schapp’s own position. It does so by highlighting the credit Schapp’s position especially owes to Adolf Reinach’s phenomenology. Finally, the third section claims that Schapp’s theory remains largely untouched by the shortcomings that affect STE and that it can be considered as a precursor of ATE, since it shares important insights with that account.

Pride is generally portrayed as an emotion of self-appraisal or as a self-conscious emotion. When feeling pride, one evaluates (and therefore is intentionally directed towards) oneself as commendable in light either of one's achievements (agential pride) or one's identity or character traits (non-agential pride). This account adequately captures a large number of emotional episodes, but it notably leaves aside the social dimensions of pride. This chapter offers a view of pride as social in two senses. First, in its more minimal understanding, pride is a social emotion insofar as it reveals that a dimension of ourselves is exposable to and depends on others. Second, in a more specific sense, some instances of pride can be 'hetero-induced'. Hetero-induced pride is pride that is elicited by significant others, and more specifically, by those others whom we perceive as members of the same group to which we also belong. The aim of this chapter is to map the terrain of current research about pride while putting particular attention on the way in which sociality impacts pride.

The philosophical literature on self-knowledge has up to now paid too little attention to emotional phenomena. Part of the reason for this is that the philosophy of self-knowledge tends to focus on cases of so-called trivial self-knowledge. This volume focuses instead on “substantial” self-knowledge, which is both difficult to get and personally valuable for its subject. As this volume shows, affective states play a crucial role in acquiring substantial self-knowledge. This introduction distinguishes three main kinds of affective states: emotions, moods, and sentiments. It claims that, due to their evaluative character, these phenomena can give us access to what we care about and value, and thereby they can help us obtain knowledge of fundamental aspects of our person like, e.g., our character traits. Finally, the introduction gives an overview of the different chapters in the volume and the main threads that run through it, including what affective states illuminate and what they obstruct about us, which sorts of spaces for self-knowledge they provide, how do they affect the dynamic formation of our self-concepts and self-narratives, through which mechanisms they foster or hinder self-knowledge and which roles do other people play in emotional self-knowledge.

This paper pursues two main aims. First, it distinguishes two kinds of improvisation: expert and inexpert. Expert improvisation is a (usually artistic) practice that the agent consciously sets as their goal and is evaluated according to (usually artistic) standards of improvisation. Inexpert improvisation, by contrast, supports and structures the agentâ s action as it moves them towards their (usually everyday life) goals and is evaluated on its success leading the agent to the achievement of those goals. The second aim is to describe inexpert improvisation as a robustly distributed affair, one that involves the ongoing integration of embodied practices with social and material resources within our surrounding environments. On the wide approach to improvisation fostered in this paper, inexpert improvisation is claimed to be our default way of inhabiting our world.

The aim of this chapter is to mine, reconstruct, and evaluate the phenomenological notion of practical intentionality. It is claimed that the phenomenologists of the Munich and Göttingen Circles substantially modify the idea of practical intentionality originally developed by Franz Brentano. This development, it is further contended, anticipates the switch that occurred within contemporary theory of action from a belief-desire (BD) to a belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of deliberation. While Brentanoâ s position can be interpreted as a variant of the BD model, early phenomenologists propose a general theory of deliberation that, in line with the BDI account, puts the notion of intention at the very core of practical intentionality. On their understanding, the concept of intention points to a primitive kind of mental state that cannot be reduced to a combination of beliefs and desires.

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.

Over the past few years, an increasingly intense debate has developed around the notion of collective intentionality (or we-intentionality). This debate, which involves not only philosophy but also many empirical disciplines, raises questions such as the ability of a plurality of individuals to share cognitive attitudes (beliefs, acts of acceptance...) or attitudes of conative nature (intentions, desires...). Yet, only recently there has been an interest in the sharing of emotions, which is already an important subject to most of the phenomenological tradition. However, assuming that a large number of individuals are able to share emotions, what meaning should be assigned to the term "sharing"? Must it be interpreted literally in the sense that, when a plurality of individuals shares an emotion, all involved subjects feel a (numerically one) emotion? Or is it a multiplicity of emotions that the various parties are mutually aware of? Or, again, is it maybe a multiplicity of emotions in an interdependent relationship with each other? This article briefly describes some of the approaches developed in literature on this subject. While maintaining a neutral position as for which approach is the most promising, I emphasize that the ability to share emotions is crucial to our social life, as it could be the basis of more complex forms of collective intentionality.

The dominant conception of delusion in psychiatry (in textbooks, research papers, diagnostic manuals, etc.) is predominantly epistemic. Delusions are almost always characterized in terms of their epistemic defects, i.e., defects with respect to evidence, reasoning, judgment, etc. However, there is an individualistic bias in the epistemic conception; the alleged epistemic defects and abnormalities in delusions relate to individualistic epistemic processes rather than social epistemic processes. We endorse the social epistemological turn in recent philosophical epistemology, and claim that a corresponding turn is needed in the study of delusions. It is a turn from the (purely) individualistic conception, which characterizes delusions only by individualistic epistemic defects and abnormalities, to the (partially) social epistemic conception, which characterizes delusions by individualistic as well as social epistemic defects and abnormalities. This paper is intended as an initial step toward such a social epistemological turn. In particular, we will develop a new model of the development of delusions according to which testimonial abnormalities, including testimonial isolation and testimonial discount, are a causal factor in the development of delusions.

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.

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.