Co‐Subjective Consciousness Constitutes Collectives

In this article, I introduce and defend what I call the “subject mode account” of collective intentionality. I propose to understand collectives from joint attention dyads over small informal groups of various types to organizations, institutions and political entities such as nation-states, in terms of their self-awareness. On the subject mode account, the self-consciousness of such collectives is constitutive for their being. More precisely, their self-representation as subjects of joint theoretical and practical positions toward the world—rather than as objects of such positions—makes them what they are. Members of such collectives represent each other as co-subjects of such positions and thus represent the world from the point of view of the collective. I will try to show how this account applies at different levels of collective intentionality and how it is preferable to its rivals at each level. At the preconceptual level of joint attention and action, our co-attenders are not what we attend to. They are not the objects of attention, but rather who we attend with. Analogously, at the conceptual level of joint beliefs, intentions, desires, and so on, collectivity is not a matter of what we believe about others and what we intend with regard to them, but who we believe and intend things with. Finally, at the institutional or organizational level, where individuals and groups function in formal roles such as being a manager or a committee, these roles do not, as some philosophers, notably John Searle (1995, 2010), have suggested, exist because people believe that they exist. The primary, collective-constituting intentional phenomena are not beliefs about these roles, but people viewing the world from the vantage point of these roles—and other roles defined relative to them—in a self-aware way, in what I will call “role mode.” For example, a head of a corporation may be aware of giving an order as chairwoman, or committee members of making a recommendation as a committee. It has become standard to distinguish three main philosophical approaches to collective intentionality: content, subject, and mode approaches (Schweikard and Schmid 2013). According to the content approach, collective intentionality can be understood in terms of the content of intentional states, where that content, in the context of the received understanding of propositional attitudes, is taken to be what is believed, intended, and so on. On this perspective, the bestknown representative of which is Michael Bratman (1992, 2014), the we of joint