Collective Intentionality

In this chapter, we focus on collective action and intention, and their relation to conventions, status functions, norms, institutions, and shared attitudes more generally. Collective action and shared intention play a foundational role in our understanding of the social. The three central questions in the study of collective intentionality are: (1) What is the ontology of collective intentionality? In particular, are groups per se intentional agents, as opposed to just their individual members? (2) What is the psychology of collective intentionality? Do groups per se have psychological states, in particular propositional attitudes? What is the psychology of the individuals who participate in collective intentional behavior? What is special about their participatory intentions, their we-intentions, as they are called (Tuomela and Miller 1988), as opposed to their I-intentions? (3) How is collective intentionality implicated in the construction of social reality? In particular, how does the content of we-intentions and the intentional activity of individual agents create social institutions, practices and structures? We first discuss collective action and shared intention in informal groups. Next we discuss mechanisms for constructing institutional structures out of the conceptual and psychological resources made available by our understanding of informal joint intentional action. Then we extend the discussion of collective action and intention to institutional groups, such as the Supreme Court, and explain how concepts of such organizations are constructed out of the concepts of a rule, convention, and status function. Finally we discuss collective attitudes beyond intention

Decoherence-full subsystems and the cryptographic power of a private shared reference frame

We show that private shared reference frames can be used to perform private quantum and private classical communication over a public quantum channel. Such frames constitute a novel type of private shared correlation (distinct from private classical keys or shared entanglement) useful for cryptography. We present optimally efficient schemes for private quantum and classical communication given a finite number of qubits transmitted over an insecure channel and given a private shared Cartesian frame and/or a private shared reference ordering of the qubits. We show that in this context, it is useful to introduce the concept of a decoherence-full subsystem, wherein every state is mapped to the completely mixed state under the action of the decoherence.Comment: 13 pages, published versio

Creating Shared Value: A How-to Guide for the New Corporate (R)evolution

Creating Shared Value (CSV) requires comprehensive and sustained efforts across a corporation. Drawing heavily on real-life examples, this report identifies ten key building blocks that together form a blueprint for translating CSV into action, and explores how companies can get started on that process

Naming and Framing Difficult Issues to Make Sound Decisions

Outlines how to promote shared decision making and effective collective action by naming divisive community issues in ways that focus on common concerns, deliberating over options, identifying actions citizens can take, and working through disagreements

Proprietary Reasons and Joint Action

Some of the reasons one acts on in joint action are shared with fellow participants. But others are proprietary: reasons of one’s own that have no direct practical significance for other participants. The compatibility of joint action with proprietary reasons serves to distinguish the former from other forms of collective agency; moreover, it is arguably a desirable feature of joint action. Advocates of “team reasoning” link the special collective intention individual participants have when acting together with a distinctive form of practical reasoning that purports to put individuals in touch with group or collective reasons. Such views entail the surprising conclusion that one cannot engage in joint action for proprietary reasons. Suppose we understand the contrast between minimal and robust forms of joint action in terms of the extent to which participants act on proprietary reasons as opposed to shared reasons. Then, if the team reasoning view of joint intention and action is correct, it makes no sense to talk of minimal joint action. As soon as the reason for which one participates is proprietary, then one is not, on this view, genuinely engaged in joint action

Joint action and development

Given the premise that joint action plays some role in explaining how humans come to understand minds, what could joint action be? Not what a leading account, Michael Bratman’s, says it is. For on that account engaging in joint action involves sharing intentions and sharing intentions requires much of the understanding of minds whose development is supposed to be explained by appeal to joint action. This paper therefore offers an account of a different kind of joint action, an account compatible with the premise about development. The new account is no replacement for the leading account; rather the accounts characterise two kinds of joint action. Where the kind of joint characterised by the leading account involves shared intentions, the new account characterises a kind of joint action involving shared goals

Robots, language, and meaning

People use language to exchange ideas and influence the actions of others through shared conceptions of word meanings, and through a shared understanding of how word meanings are combined. Under the surface form of words lie complex networks of mental structures and processes that give rise to the richly textured semantics of natural language. Machines, in contrast, are unable to use language in human-like ways due to fundamental limitations of current computational approaches to semantic representation. To address these limitations, and to serve as a catalyst for exploring alternative approaches to language and meaning, we are developing conversational robots. The problem of endowing robots with language highlights the impossibility of isolating language from other cognitive processes. Instead, we embrace a holistic approach in which various non-linguistic elements of perception, action, and memory, provide the foundations for grounding word meaning. I will review recent results in grounding language in perception and action and sketch ongoing work for grounding a wider range of words including social terms such as "I" and "my"