Plural Subjects

A good point of departure to tackle this question is the recent debate on joint intentional action. Joint action is where people act together — cooperatively, or sometimes competitively.

The difference at stake here is particularly obvious in small-scale examples of cooperatively neutral action types: It makes a difference whether each of us walks alone — perhaps coinciden­tally alongside each other — or whether we walk together. The difference might be visible in the behavior — e.g., through our mutual adaptation of pace in the case of walking together — but what’s making the difference seems to be a matter of the way individual and joint actions are intended. Individual actions — parallel or not — are individually intended, joint actions are jointly (or collectively) intended, or so it is claimed in the rapidly growing literature (for an overview see Jankovic/Ludwig [eds.] 2018). Joint intention is not just an aggregate of individual prac­tical commitments to individual goals. It is not sufficient for action to be intentionally joint that I intend to do my thing expecting that you intend to do your thing, with higher-order beliefs and an expected accumulative effect of our individual doings that I somehow desire.

Joint actions, where they are intended, are collectively intended. The target phenomenon of an adequate analysis has to be attitude of the form “We intend to J,” where J is a token joint action.

While many current philosophers accept the idea of joint or collective intention of the sort that is not easily reducible to an aggregate or a summation of individual intentions, the disagreement is over what about intention that’s joint or collective. Using the widely accepted analysis of intentional attitudes in terms of subject (in our case, “we”), mode (the kind of atti­tude in question, in our case: “intend”), and content (in our case, the intended joint action J), philosophers of collective intentionality disagree rather fiercely over the question of whether it is just the content that is collective about collective intentionality (as content accounts of collective intentionality claim), or whether the jointness or collectivity affects the subject and mode, too (these are the views endorsed by subject or mode-accounts of collective intention­ality, respectively). I submit that the subject account emerges victorious from this controversy, and the following is why.

Content accounts of collective intentionality have the advantage of being more parsimonious than their competitors — more parsimonious that is, coming from a default understanding of intentionality as individual intentionality. All we need to add to the usual singularist picture of intentionality is collective content. According to this type of account, if we intend to J (where J is a joint action), each of us, for him- or herself, has basically the intention to J. The subject is “us,” but not in the collective (or joint), but in the distributive (or several) sense. It is not about “us, together,” as some sort of unit, but “each of us, for him- or herself,” as an aggregate. There is nothing we need to “be” together in order for us to intend to act together. This content account is most prominently argued for in a current account of shared intention in terms of indi­vidual intentions “that we J” (plus a structure of meshing subplans and common knowledge; see Bratman 1999). This propositional way of putting the content of intention has the advantage to avoiding a problem of the more straightforward way of putting it.

If intention is action-referential, it is therefore action self-referential. The subject of the intention and the subject of the intended action are one and the same. Thus, the subject view suggests itself as the straightforward solution to the problem of content accounts. If it is not the case that when we intend to J, each of us intends to J, because none of us can intend to J — who, then, can intend to J? Given the action self-referentiality of intention, the obvious answer is: us, jointly (or collectively) rather than severally (or distributively). This is the subject view of collective intentionality. We as the plural subject of intention intend our joint action: It is our collective act that we intend, and we intend it collectively, as a plural subject.

In spite of its simplicity, this view has found remarkably few proponents in the recent debate. And from the beginnings of the debate right up to recent contributions, the reason for shying away from the subject account is one and the same: “The We” is spooky. It smacks of mys­terious collectivist emergentism and obscurantist collectivist political ideology. Once “the we” is assumed as a proper subject of intention, the “spirit of the people,” the “class in and for itself,” and other ghosts from the past seem to be right around the corner waiting to come back in.

The worry about the idea of the plural subject that has haunted the recent debate can be spelled out in metaphysical terms. If the two of us are walking together, it is just the two of us out there, and it is not that there is a third subject walking along with us, or pulling the strings over and above our heads.

This worry has driven most recent and current philosophers of collective intentionality to search for a third way between the content account that gives too little by way ofjointness or collectivity, and the subject account, that seems to give too much. According to the position of the intentional mode between the intentional subject and the intentional content, the mode suggests itself as the place to slot in the missing element ofjointness or collectivity. In the case of “we intend to J” — where “we” stands for the intentional subject, “J” for the content, and “intend” for the mode, the subject is distributive, but it is in a special, collective “mode” that each of us intends when we intend to J according to the mode accounts. In this view (which in its varieties seems to receive the most support in the recent debate), the attitude of the form “we intend to J” is really this: “We we-intend to J,” where the first “we” is distributive and thus nothing spooky, while it is collective in the “we-intend” (and thus certainly in need of some clarification). Understandable though this move might seem as a way of solving the shortcomings of content accounts while avoiding the perceived excess ofjointness or collect­ivity of the plural subject, it is rather mysterious what kind of“mode” the alleged “we-mode” is supposed to be. Modes are “kinds” of intentional attitudes.

The most plausible theories of intentional modes in the literature account for modes in terms of formal objects (see the references in Schmid 2017b). A belief is what it is in virtue of the (apparent) truth of its target proposition (or “material object”). A desire captures its target as good or desirable, and so on for other modes (in the case of fear, danger is the formal object). What the intentional mode modifies according to the best theories is thus the con­tent, and it does so in a way that rationalizes, or makes intelligible, the attitude as being of the kind it is. Perceiving a dog as dangerous rationalizes being afraid of it. The I/we-mode distinction, however, does nothing of this sort. It modifies the subject; but how could it rationalize an attitude as being of the kind it is if it were true that the subject could never be collective? Properly understood, the mode account collapses into a subject account (see Schmid 2017b).

This result should not be taken as bad news, for the fear of the big spooky “We” is due to a misconception of subjectivity which in the individual case, we have long overcome. It is true that if the two of us go for a walk together, it is just the two of us out there, and no third subject over and above our heads. But this does not prove that there are no plural subjects any more than the fact that if I go for a walk alone, it is just me out there, and no second subject, “the I,” within me (or over and above my head, for that matter). The lesson which we have learned about the singular subject, “the I,” should be applied to the plural case.

The fact that content accounts of collective intentionality fail, and that mode accounts, understood correctly, collapse into subject accounts, however, does not tell us much about plural subjectivity and whether and how it really exists. Are we, together, the subject of we-attitudes in the same general way we, severally or distributively, are the subjects of I-attitudes? Are there real plural subjects, or just, as some have argued, emulations or fictions thereof?

To answer this question, we have to remember what exactly is at stake here. Above, I characterized subjectivity in contradistinction to being an object. I claimed that subjectivity is self-determination, and that this is the sort of radical responsibility a suitable reconstruction of Sartrean self-choice must mean. I claimed further that this is self-determination, and that it is in the way consciously intending self-identifies, self-commits, and self-authorizes. Are we, the ones sharing attitudes, really of that sort? Is the couple of people who go for a walk or dance a tango together, the team that volunteers to clean up the park, the group that performs a play, or perhaps even a nation that decides on an issue by taking a vote inexplicable and radically responsible in that way? Are we — collectively — the author of what we do and what we are in the same way we are individually self-constituted?

The most straightforward way of accounting for plural subjectivity is to show that in the way singular subjectivity is individual self-awareness, plural subjecthood is collective self-awareness, that is, our pre-reflective awareness of an attitude as ours. The claim is a threefold one (for more on the following see Schmid 2018):

(1) The conscious sharing of a collective attitude self-identifies us, collectively, in the same general way the conscious having of an individual attitude self-identifies me. Though I might be mistaken in having some pre-intentional “sense of us,” where there is really no “we,” the point is that plural subjectivity is not my or anyone’s pre-intentional “sense of us,” but rather ours. The self-awareness in question is plural, and it self-identifies the sub­ject. It is the sense in which there is an expressive rather than demonstrative use of “we” (see Schmid 2014).

(2) “I believe that p, but -p” is logically sound and possibly true, but it is a contradiction never­theless, and it is a contradiction in virtue of the fact that “-p” first-personally expresses one’s belief that -p, which contradicts one’s stated belief that p. “We believe that p, but -p,” expressed by a single member, is not a straightforward contradiction of this sort, but it is still a tension in commitments — I, as that member, should work it out with my group. Our collective expression of “We believe that p, but -p,” however, is the same conflict of commitments as in the singular case. It is the fact that we know of what we think and intend in a first-personal rather than a third-personal way that our attitudes are under the guise of truth and the good, and thus commit us without further reasons.

(3) The sharing of a collective attitude self-authorizes us as those who are in the position of making up our collective mind the same general way in which my conscious having of an attitude self-authorizes me. As the authority in question is of the plural rather than the sin­gular kind, it should not be surprising that under non-dictatorial conditions, we find no sin­gular autocrat in the collective making up of our mind. What we, together, think or intend is not just up to me, or just up to you, unless I fully authorize you to settle these issues for us.

Our cooperative making up of our mind, however, is no structure of mutual authorization, but rather plural self-authorization, in which each of us appears as the co-author of what’s on our collective mind. We are in the best position to know what’s on our mind because we, together, made it up.

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