Castelfranchi, Cristiano

Tummolini, Luca

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Editorial
Introduction to the Special Issue on Cognition, Joint Action
and Collective Intentionality
Action editor: Ron Sun
Luca Tummolini *, Cristiano Castelfranchi
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC-CNR) and University of Siena, Via San Martino della Battaglia 44, 00185 Roma, Italy
Available online 31 March 2006
Many remember an Iron Lady claiming that there is no
such thing as society but only individuals. Considerably
less, we assume, are also aware that the same Lady granted
existence also to families, and hence by extension to
groups. If this Lady were a social philosopher, she could
have continued her inquiry wondering whether families
and groups, like individuals, can have intentional states.
Can a family as such believe something? Can a family
intend to do something as a family? More generally, what
does it mean to ascribe such intentional states to a collec-
tive? What kind of attitudes have the members of a group
when they jointly intend to achieve a certain result? What
does it take to act as a member of a group? This kind of
issues and many others related to the social and institu-
tional reality that surrounds us (pace our Lady) fall within
the scope of a field of research that goes under the rubric of
Collective Intentionality.
Intentionality is a philosophical notion used to refer
to the distinct property of mental states of being about
something; mental states like believing, hoping, fearing,
wanting, intending and so on are about and are directed
towards something. Such intentional states are used to
understand and structure human actions. When I intend
to do a certain action, usually it is because I want to
achieve a certain result on the background of what I
believe about the world and about my capabilities. It is
hardly controversial to claim that such intentional behav-
iour is not only individual. We can intend to do something
together (e.g. go to the movies tonight) because we want to
achieve a certain result on the basis of what we believe.
Joint intentional action is done on the background of such
shared intentional states. The philosophical debate on
these issues is lively and several accounts of how such
shared intentional states should be analysed have been pro-
posed (Bratman, 1992; Gilbert, 1989; Searle, 1990, 1995;
Tuomela, 1995; Tuomela & Miller, 1988). However the
import of this field of research spans well beyond the philo-
sophical arena.
It is often claimed in fact that we, as humans, are a
cooperative species. Our ability to act together with our
conspecifics vastly surmounts that of other animals (includ-
ing our closest primate relatives) both in its scale and its
temporal extension. Only humans are able to engage in
complex collaborative activities that are learned from the
others (cultural learning). Only humans are able to create
complex tools, structured symbol systems (i.e. language)
and social institutions (i.e. government and marriage) as
means to facilitate such coordination and cooperation. It
has been recently proposed that underlying this uniquely
human capability for joint action and cooperation there
is in fact this capacity to share intentional states (Toma-
sello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005).
This special issue has precisely the aim to bring together
researchers from different disciplines (philosophy of mind,
social philosophy, developmental psychology, evolutionary
anthropology, artificial intelligence and ontology) to fur-
ther the understanding of the role of cognition in collective
intentional activities from the micro-level (the cognitive
mechanisms enabling joint activities) to the macro-level
(how large scale cooperation is enabled and sustained).
The conceptual apparatus originally developed in philoso-
phy has in fact the potential to open new exciting directions
of research in the cognitive, computational and social
sciences.
Exploring the lower bound of the relation between cog-
nition and collective intentionality, Pacherie and Dokic
provide a clarifying analysis of the function of mirror
1389-0417/$ - see front matter ! 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.cogsys.2006.01.003
* Tel.: +39 06 44595 248; fax: +39 06 44595 243.
E-mail address: luca.tummolini@istc.cnr.it (L. Tummolini).
www.elsevier.com/locate/cogsys
Cognitive Systems Research 7 (2006) 97–100
neurons in joint action. Arguing against maximalist inter-
pretations of mirror neurons, they explore their role in
the representation of a joint action sequence and in the
online mutual adjustment of participants’ actions. Mirror
neurons are in fact a mechanism we humans have in com-
mon with other species and can account for basic joint
actions based on mutual motor action understanding.
However more complex forms of cooperation need higher
forms of action representation and complex mental atti-
tudes that are unique to our species as it is also shown
by the other contributions of this special issue.
Humans, in fact, are able to engage in such cooperative
activities even very early in their ontogeny. Exploring this
human uniqueness in his contribution Rakoczy shows that
pretend play can be considered as one of the first arenas in
which participants exhibit quite sophisticated abilities of
collective intentionality. Another early cooperative activity
is represented by communication. While the complex mind-
reading abilities necessary for intentional communication
are not available until the end of the first year of life, Tir-
assa, Bosco and Colle argue that infants are notwithstand-
ing able to communicate exploiting an innate capability to
share their own mental states with their caregivers. If the
capacity of sophisticated forms of cooperation is uniquely
human, a developmental approach is needed to understand
how such unique ability gradually appears in our species.
Differently, Tollefsen’s contribution lies at the upper
bound of the relation between cognition and collective
intentionality. Beyond traditional approaches that analyse
collective intentions and collective beliefs as individual men-
tal states owned by group’s members, Tollefsen argues that
groups can literally be ascribed minds of their own. This
challenging argument is defended drawing on an emerging
theoretical framework that considers cognitive processes
as emerging from the interaction of the agent with its
physical and social environment. On a similar background
Bosse, Jonker, Schut and Treur explore, from a computa-
tional and modelling perspective, how tightly interacting
group of agents can share external mental states acquiring
a representational content which is collective in the sense
that it represents something for the group and not necessar-
ily for its members. Even if the issue of a ‘‘collective mind’’
is still controversial, these contributions testify that the
cross-fertilization between themes and approaches from
cognitive science can help in recasting questions and issues
too quickly dismissed by traditional frameworks.
The formal approach is undertaken also by Hulstijn and
Maudet in their contribution. To proceed smoothly a joint
action needs a coordination mechanism to signal when
each agent should do his share or which action should
select. Focussing on conventional situations, Hulstijn and
Maudet extend the use of a mechanism first introduced
to characterize natural language dialogue. They show
how the uptake mechanism can be used as a means for
an implicit negotiation of how to engage in the joint action
and how joint intentions and obligations of mutual support
can unfold during the activity.
As we have seen in our opening paragraph, the research
on joint action and collective intentionality always implies
some ontological assumptions on which entities exist in our
social reality. A foundational problem for example is to
identify the minimal conditions under which a set of agents
can be regarded as a collective or group acting together for
a common goal. The contribution of Bottazzi, Catenacci,
Gangemi and Lehmann tackles a similar problem from a
more general and broad perspective adopting the tools of
applied formal ontology to define the concepts used to
described social reality. Differently from traditional
approaches, the notion of collective is seen as a special kind
of the more general notion of ‘‘collection’’, a notion emerg-
ing when the ‘‘containment’’ cognitive schema is applied.
Agents in a collection become a collective when they are
described from the perspective of a unifying plan.
Once the foundational notion of a collective is clarified,
one can start the investigation of the properties that a
collective can manifest. In their contribution Conte and
Turrini explore precisely one of these properties. Adopting
a formal theoretical approach, the notion of collective
autonomy is investigated and the conditions under which
a collective can become autonomous even from its very
members are explored. The cognitive perspective is partic-
ularly apt for this task due to the fact that the interrelation-
ships between individual and collective autonomy are
mediated by the mental states of the participants. However,
at the same time, such an analysis is of interest also from a
political perspective enabling a classification of different
kinds of collective systems in relation to their level of
autonomy and offering a sound framework to develop test-
able hypothesis about of the evolution of such systems
when their level of autonomy shifts.
Cooperative behaviours however cannot be given for
granted. There is in fact a class of situations in which acting
together is problematic also from a motivational point of
view. It is a longstanding research issue in the behavioural
sciences (psychology, economics, anthropology, etc.) to
provide an explanation of when and why agents choose
to incur in personal costs in order to ‘help’ or benefit
another agent or a group. Henrich and Henrich address
the ‘puzzle’ of cooperation from the perspective of a cul-
ture-gene coevolutionary approach and provide a unitary
framework able to derive the most accredited theories of
cooperation (Kinship, Reciprocity, Reputation, Social
Norms and Punishment and Ethnicity). However beyond
the ultimate evolutionary level this contribution also
derives from such theories a set of proximate cognitive
mechanisms causing the agents to act cooperatively. The
scale of cooperation we find in humans cannot be under-
stood without appealing to the unique adaptation we have
for culture and for cultural learning.
The importance of cultural and social dynamics to
explain human behaviour is underlined also by the next
contribution. Ross advances a model of the dynamics of
self-formation under social pressure. Selves are seen as sta-
bilizing devices for social dynamics facilitating the predict-
98 Editorial / Cognitive Systems Research 7 (2006) 97–100
ability of human behaviour and are at the same time stabi-
lized by those very dynamics. The modelling tools of the
mainstream neoclassical economist are used in an original
way and are able to further the integration of microeco-
nomic theory with the conceptual and empirical results
offered by the cognitive and behavioural sciences. In sharp
contrast with what is often stated, neoclassical economic
formalism and evolutionary game theory do not incorpo-
rate individualistic assumptions and can be adopted to
rigorously model human behaviour even from a non-
individualist perspective.
If economic theory can be adequately interpreted to
incorporate concepts and approaches coming from the col-
lective intentionality debate, Grosz and Hunsberger in their
contribution show how fruitful can be also another kind
of cross-fertilization. From the perspective of Artificial
Intelligence they attack one of the foundational problems.
By offering an operational model and an agent architecture
of how a group decides what to do and how updates (i.e. by
refining them) previously chosen options (intention updat-
ing), Grosz and Hunsberger provide a fresh approach to
the issue of whether collective intentions are reducible to
individual intentions or not. To capture the dynamics of
intention in joint action, two constraints on the reasoning
of the agents are specified (the common content and the
coordinated cultivation requirements) clarifying the specific
role of obligations in mediating group decision-making and
intention update.
The role of obligations stemming from joint decisions,
promises and agreements is unravelled also by Miller in
the next contribution. Miller discusses how obligations as
reasons for action arise from two different sources: the col-
lective acceptance of the group that a joint decision, prom-
ise or agreement has taken place and the collective
acknowledgement of an underlying social norm. In doing
so Miller succeeds in providing an analysis of the charac-
teristic compelling force of obligations and of their role
in the practical reasoning leading to the choice of one’s
share in a joint action.
The importance of the notion of collective acceptance is
also stressed byHakli in his analysis of the notion of beliefs
at the group level. When a group of agents decides to take
something as the view of their group, it is commonly stated
that the group believes something. Given that however
such group exerts a voluntary control on the output of this
epistemic decision, group beliefs should be classified more
correctly as cases of acceptances, or so Hakli argues.
Beyond providing an insightful analysis of a core issue in
the collective intentionality literature, this thoughtful com-
parison between two distinct mental states (belief vs. accep-
tance) is interesting also from a cognitive perspective.
Acceptance in fact is a mental state that is needed for a bet-
ter account of how we act when we act as group members
but it is still neglected in many accounts.
A group attitude can also have ‘‘constitutive’’ conse-
quences. There is a class of situations in which if a group
of agents believes or accept that something is the case then
that something starts to exist in our social reality. Institu-
tional facts and actions are precisely this kind of situations
where a fact or an action depends for its existence on the
shared attitudes of the participants in question (i.e. money,
property and marriages). The last two contributions are
precisely devoted to the analysis of situations of this kind.
Lagerspetz deals with a puzzling issue related to emer-
gence of new institutional facts. It would seem that if insti-
tutions depend on the beliefs of their participants to exist
then for a new institutional fact to emerge, the agents ought
to share false beliefs about its existence in the first place.
Requiring that an agent ought to believe something that
is false at that point in time is contradictory with the con-
stitutive nature of belief that, at least ideally, ought to aim
at truth. To solve this puzzle, Lagerspetz proposes to ana-
lyse the mental attitude the agents share in these situations
as a case of recognition instead of a believing.
The focus on the cognitive process of recognition is also
shared by the last contribution. While institutional actions
are intuitively performed as usual individual practical
actions, Tummolini and Castelfranchi argue that they are
in fact actions done by a collective of agents. However
the fact the attendees ‘recognize’ it, see and treat the action
as the institutional action, empowers the first agent to
achieve a coordinating effect that is actually a co-power
of the whole collectivity.
Acknowledgements
The articles collected in this special issue are a selection
of the papers presented at the Fourth Conference on Col-
lective Intentionality held in Siena (Italy) in October
2004. We thank all the participants at the conference for
their challenging presentations and exciting discussions.
We also thank the international panel of the reviewers
for their help in preparing this special issue. The panel con-
sisted of Alberto Acerbi, Alberto Artosi, Mark Bickhard,
Marco Colombetti, Edoardo Datteri, Antonella Devescovi,
Michele Di Francesco, Maurizio Ferraris, Aldo Gangemi,
Camilla Gobbo, Natalie Gold, Andreas Herzig, Davide
Grossi, Steven Harnad, Frank Hindriks, Marko Janssen,
Barbara Keplicz, Massimo Marraffa, Anthonie Meijers,
Tullia Musatti, Maria Miceli, Timothy Norman, Gloria
Origgi, Elinor Ostrom, Ugo Pagano, Fabio Paglieri, Mario
Paolucci, Alessandro Ricci, Liz Robinson, Daniele Sant-
oro, Giovanni Sartor, Marina Sbisa`, Paul Scerri, Marek
Sergot, Jaime Sichman, Robert Sugden, Milind Tambe,
Deborah Tollefsen, Stefano Vannucci and Brad Wray.
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