(forthcoming in " Mind and Society " , in the Selected Proceedings of the Rosselli Foundation Confer- Ence " Cognitive Theory of Social Action " Held in Turin, June 1998) Collective and Joint Intention

There are many kinds of collective and joint activities, as we all know. We can jointly write a paper, carry a table, sing a duet, and perform a toast to somebody. We can collectively conserve energy, vote in elections, love or fear supernatural beings, follow norms, create and uphold social institutions. Furthermore, crowds and organized groups can behave in meaningful ways e.g. a crowd can try to conquer the Bastille or one business company can take over another. Undoubtedly actions of these kinds typically involve, and are performed on the basis of, intentions and often not only individual intentions but also joint or collective intentions. But corresponding to the aforementioned various kinds of collective activities also the joint or collective intentions on the basis of which they are performed are different. I will accordingly argue in this paper that, depending on context, collective intentions of different kinds are needed to account for respectively different collective activities, and I will present a kind of typology of such shared collective or joint intentions. It will also be argued that collective social acting together must rely on joint intentions in the “wemode”, which entails that the participants must have collectively accepted (in some, weaker or stronger sense) the joint intentions in question as their collective intentions and must be collectively committed to them.