Why We Did It: An Anscombian Account of Collective Action

Abstract

In this paper, I am concerned with persons’ capacity for joint action. I start by suggesting that approaches which seek to account for that capacity in terms of collective intentionality face a problem: there are actions that clearly seem to qualify as collective even though the involved persons cannot be said to entertain an overarching ‘We’‐intention (however one characterizes this notion). I then go on to develop an alternative account of action that loosely draws on Elizabeth Anscombe’s action theory and show how this alternative account can be applied to joint action. In so doing, I stress the importance of the phenomenal dimension of agency.

Keywords:

• collective intentionality
• collective action
• Anscombe
• intentionality
• action explanation
• phenomenology

Notes

1 I am grateful to the participants in the conference Collective Intentionality VI in July 2008 at UC Berkeley for helpful comments on this paper. I also wish to thank the participants in John Searle’s Social Ontology Seminar, at which an earlier version of this paper was presented. Thanks are due to Robert Frederick and Joel Yurdin, as well as to two anonymous referees for this journal, for instructive comments. Finally, I am grateful to Bentley University for a summer grant that enabled me to write this paper.

2 See Tollefsen, 2004 for a good overview.

3 By this I do not mean to make the strong claim that we can only think of our doings as intentional if we have a firm grasp of what our intentions are in carrying out a certain action. There may not always be an obvious answer to a ‘Why’‐question about one’s doings (see Hursthouse, 2000: p. 90). The point really is a weaker one: if you have absolutely no idea why you did something, it is dubious whether the event you are trying to account for can be understood as an action at all.

4 Note that James’s concern really is a general point about conscious experience, which I am extending to the phenomenology of action. I must acknowledge my debt to Matthew Soteriou’s paper (2007), which greatly furthered my thinking on content individuation.

5 For an account of the neurological basis of the context‐dependence of action perception, see Iacoboni et al., 2005. For a critical account of the conclusions about the role of mirror neurons in the perception of actions and intentions promoted in that paper, see Borg, 2007.

6 It is worth noting, however, that contemporary accounts of causal explanation in the natural and social sciences tend to deflate the search for this kind of ‘mechanism’: for an overview, see Cartwright, 2006.

7 A reviewer of this paper suggested that one might think of action explanations (that is, responses to ‘Why’‐questions) in narrative terms, and that along those lines intentions with which one acts could be thought of as ‘part of a sequence of events that make up a person’s biography’. On that proposal, such intentions could be seen as ‘historically related’, and hence one might think of them as causally linked to actions in some weak sense. I am, in fact, very sympathetic to the idea that action explanation is a narrative process; but I don’t think that invoking a causalist account of action, however weak, is helpful in fleshing out that idea. While narratives – stories – may present intentions and bodily events as temporally related – ‘I wanted to operate the pump and so I pushed the lever’ – the point of the account presented here has been that different aspects of an agent’s intentional life can be ‘carved out’, so to speak, to make sense of her doings. And what is being so highlighted depends on the ‘Why’‐question one is attempting to answer. But the temporal ordering is imposed only in the construction of the narrative: it isn’t that the action experience itself is presented in a historical sequence. Thinking of the intentions with which one acted and the action itself as temporally related would thus run counter to my proposal.

8 This thought goes back to Strawson, 1959. For a more detailed account, see Seemann, 2008a.

9 This claim goes directly against Jeannerod’s and Pacherie’s (2004) notion of ‘naked intentions’ – the idea that one can be aware of an intention without being aware whose intention it is. See Gallagher, 2006 for a critical evaluation of this idea.

10 Just consider familiar arguments from the philosophy of social science: for a good account, see Kincaid, 1997.