Sociologists often treat groups and organizations as if they had collective intentionality – that is, a collective impetus for action that exists semiindependently of the members of the group. At present, however, we lack a sound understanding of how collective intentionality is achieved or maintained. Furthermore, although organizations provide a well-defined and distinctive setting for an emp...

Economic theories of team reasoning build on the assumption that agents can sometimes behave according to beliefs or preferences attributed to a group or a team. In this paper, I propose a different framework to introduce collective intentionality into game theory. I build on John Searle’s account, which makes collective intentionality constitutive of institutional facts. I show that as soon as...

Young children’s pretend play is considered in the context of the development of collective intentionality. It is argued that (i) early pretending is an essentially social and culturally acquired form of action, and (ii) early social pretend play can be considered as the first form of true collective intentionality in ontogeny – involving shared cooperative activities and even some rudimentary ...

There is a well-developed view of artifacts according to which their nature depends on the intentions of their authors or creators. However, in the modern world of artifact design and creation, typically not one but many agents are involved in the process of making an artifact. In this paper, I showhow the intentional view can bemaintained even for ‘collective’ artifacts havingmultiple authors....