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Minimal Forms of Shared Intentionality

In this post, Katja Crone and Max Gab (TU Dortmund) present the Special Issue “Minimal Forms of Shared Intentionality,” which they recently guest-edited for Philosophical Psychology.


Max Gab


Shared intentionality is a ubiquitous, fundamental, and multifaceted phenomenon. People act together, share thoughts, beliefs, and emotional states. It lies at the heart of basic human capacities like joint attention, communication, and social cognition. The concept is also used to explain higher-level forms of human organization, such as corporate agency, political communities, and even monetary systems. This has led to a sprawling field of research that combines ideas and methods from various disciplines, including developmental and evolutionary psychology, neurosciences, phenomenology, and classical analytical approaches in philosophy. 

While debates about shared intentionality have been productive, established approaches to explain it also face problems that motivate an investigation into its most basic forms. Firstly, standard accounts in analytical philosophy assume sophisticated cognitive capacities for shared intentionality that many theorists believe young children and other subjects lack. 

Despite this, we would still grant these subjects forms of shared intentionality. Secondly, many existing approaches have an explanatory problem: in order to account for collective mental states, they draw on phenomena such as joint commitment, which already seem to presuppose collective intentionality. However, this circularity can be avoided by identifying relevant affective “precursors” of collective intentionality, such as a “plural self-awareness” (Schmid, 2014) or a “minimal sense of us” (Crone, 2021). 

Therefore, there is a need to turn to minimal forms of collective intentionality to effectively revise standard accounts. Lastly, standard approaches leave out implicit forms of shared intentionality that may be operative in joint action. It is unclear to what extent standard accounts, with their typical focus on explicit collective intentional attitudes, can do justice to such minimal functions. 


Katja Crone

This special issue originated at a conference we organized at TU Dortmund in 2022. Our core idea was that we should start from the simplest and fundamental forms of shared intentionality to achieve greater clarity and make progress in current disputes. This approach also raises intriguing questions for future research. For example, are there distinctive elements of shared intentionality that can be identified in its simplest forms and underlie and allow for continuous explanations of its more complex manifestations? 

Could a theory of small, dyadic joint action (e.g., a couple taking a walk) inform explanations of large-scale institutional agency (e.g., two nations negotiating a trade agreement)? Alternatively, does a potential lack of such underlying minimal forms suggest pluralism regarding collective phenomena? We believe that a deeper understanding of collective intentionality and shared action requires an exploration of its minimal forms. 

In this spirit, this special issue brings together diverse perspectives and original contributions, highlighting different aspects and functions of minimal forms of shared intentionality.

  • Foundations of joint action: what are minimal forms of shared intentionality? by Katja Crone, Max Gab & Stefano Vincini
  • Three strategies for shared intentionality: plural, aggregate and reductive by Stephen Butterfill
  • Varieties of collective action: a multidimensional paradigmatic methodology for their study by Glenda Satne 
  • Group identification, joint attention, and preferences: a cluster of minimal pre-conditions for joint actions by Alessandro Salice
  • Attending, acting and feeling together by Michael Schmitz
  • The unity and plurality of sharing by Dan Zahavi
  • Joint attention, relationalism, and individuation by Stefano Vincini 
  • Joint perception, joint attention, joint know-how by Axel Seeman


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