On Searle’s Collective Intentionality

Intentionality is an important theoretical issue in philosophy of action and philosophy of mind, Searle is the representative of intentionality researching, his study of intentionality originated on his study of speech act theory, then, he put the intentionality into the study of the theory of speech act, he thought intentionality is based on illocutionary act. According to Searle’s view, although the individual intentionality is an important aspect in the study of intentionality, but he turns to the study of collective intentionality still. This paper discussed Searle’s collective intentionality by the related topics and structure of collective intentionality, social ontology and normative, trying to sort out the rich connotation of collective intentionality.In the analysis of action, intentionality is very important. In Searle’s opinion, individual intentionality really exists, individual has its own mind, collective is different from individual, what’s the existence of collective? So the relationship between collective intentionality and individual intentionality become necessary. Searle resolved these issues mainly by these topics followed:Firstly, Searle proved the existence of collective intentionality is real by comparing the differences between individual intention and collective intention. The collective intentionality exists in the individual’s mind. Secondly, when we understand the collective intentionality there’s a premise that the collective intentionality cannot be reduced to individual intentionality. Thirdly, collective intentionality presupposes a background sense of the other as a candidate. On the question of the structure of collective intentionality, Searle discussed this by the causal by-means-of relation and constitutive by-way-of relation. In addition, in the discussion of social ontology, Searle discussed how the collective intentionality is formed by the differences between prelinguistic intentionality and linguistic forms of intentionality, the relationship between collective intentionality and institutional facts and commitment and deontology.There are some questions for Searle’s collevtive intentionality. In Gilbert’s opinion, the collective coopertive behavior inevitably involve normative, but, Searle’s theory of collective intentionality does not reflect the normative. Although Searle didn’t put forward the normative in collevtive intentionality, but Searle’s collective intentionality contains normative ideas, and Gilbert didn’t specify whether the normative is generated by people’s internal intention states or not.Searle’s theory of collective intentionality is the basis of our discussion about collective action on social behavior. In particular, in the construction of social entities, if there is no collective intentionality, the construction of social entities would not be achieved. As for the dispute in Searle’s theory of the collective intentionality, such as whether the collective intentionality can be reduced, whether the collective intentionality has normative, all these indicate that Searle’s theory of collective intentionality is not perfect, so we need a further research on collective intentionality.