Michael Schmitz

In this paper I outline the PAIR account of joint attention as a perceptual-practical, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that to explain joint attention we need to leave the received understanding of propositions and propositional attitudes and the picture of content connected to it behind and embrace the notions of subject mode and position mode content. I also explore the relation between joint attention and communication.

Questions are not on all fours with assertions or directions, but higher-level acts that can operate on either to yield theoretical questions, as when one asks whether the door is closed, or practical questions, as when one asks whether to close it. They contain interrogative force indicators, which present positions of wondering, but also assertoric or directive force indicators which present the position of theoretical or practical knowledge the subject is striving for. Views based on the traditional force-content distinction take the indicative mood for granted and therefore do not understand assertion in contrast to direction, but in contrast to questions and other higher-level acts such as logical and fictional acts. But a corresponding sign like Frege's judgement stroke can only redundantly signal the absence of a higher-level act.

In this paper I propose three steps to overcome the force-content distinction and dispel the Frege point. First, we should ascribe content to force indicators. Through basic assertoric and directive force indicators such as intonation, word order and mood, a subject presents its position of theoretical or practical knowledge of a state of affairs as a fact, as something that is the case, or as a goal, as something to do. Force indicators do not operate on truth- or satisfaction evaluable entities as on the traditional view, but complete and unify them. Second, higher-level acts such as interrogative, logical and fictional acts create higher-level unities that may suspend commitment to the assertions and directions they operate on. But they do not cancel their force, but transfer the meaning of force indicators into the new unities they create. For example, in the context of asking a theoretical or practical question, the assertoric or directive force indicator now presents the kind of knowledge the subject is seeking. Third, the Frege point conflates different varieties of force. We neither need Frege’s assertion sign, nor Hare’s neustic, nor Hanks’s cancellation sign, but only ordinary force indicators and interrogative, logical and fictional markers. Propositions are not forceless contents to which a subject commits by forceful acts, but forceful acts put forward by higher-level acts which may suspend commitment to them.

How can the law be characterized in a theory of collective intentionality that treats collective intentionality as essentially layered and tries to understand these layers in terms of the structure and the format of the representations involved? And can such a theory of collective intentionality open up new perspectives on the law and shed new light on traditional questions of legal philosophy? As a philosopher of collective intentionality who is new to legal philosophy, I want to begin exploring these questions in this paper. I will try to characterize the law in terms of the layered account of collective intentionality that I have introduced in some earlier writings (Schmitz 2013; 2018). In the light of this account I will then discuss a traditional question in the philosophy of law: the relation between law and morality.
I begin by giving a brief sketch of the layered account in the next section. Collective intentionality should be understood in terms of experiencing and representing others as co-subjects, rather than as objects, of intentional states and acts on different layers or levels. I distinguish the nonconceptual layer of the joint sensory-motor-emotional intentionality of joint attention and joint bodily action, the conceptual level of shared we-mode beliefs, intentions, obligations, values, and so on, and the institutional level characterized through role differentiation, positions taken in role-mode, e.g. as a judge or attorney, and writing and other forms of documentation. In the third section I introduce a set of parameters for representations such as their degree of richness, of context-dependence, of density and differentiation of representational role and of durability and stability, which can be used to more precisely distinguish different layers. I also put forward the hypothesis that these properties are connected and tend to cluster, and that higher levels can only function and determine conditions of satisfaction against lower level ones. In the fourth and final section I critically discuss the sharp positivistic separation of morality and the law according to which whether something is a law is completely independent of its moral merits. I argue that this only seems plausible if we take an observational stance towards the law, but not towards morality. When we treat them the same way, it rather appears that the moral attitudes of the co-subjects of a society will determine whether and to what extent they will accept its legal order. I conclude by proposing to think of the law as being itself an institutionalized form of morality.

In this paper I argue that in order to properly account for group speech acts, we need to fundamentally reconceptualize, the force-content opposition. This is because in a group speech act, a group presents itself as taking a position such as an assertion, a promise or an order, that is, it presents itself as the subject of such a position. But on the received understanding of the force / mode of speech acts and so-called propositional attitudes and their propositional content, only the latter is representational, so that only what the subject is e.g. asserting is represented, not the subject and the position it takes. Against this I argue for a representationalist account of mode / force, according to which they are to be understood in terms of the self-awareness of subjects. Individual and collective subjects are aware of whether they take a theoretical or practical position towards the reality of a state of affairs and indicate this position in their speech. This often involves pre-conceptual and grammaticalized content, which is importantly different from the conceptual content philosophers have usually focused on. I show that the ‘Frege point’ cannot establish the received force-content dualism and that, on the contrary, the view that force is representational allows a satisfactory response to the puzzles the ‘Frege point’ is based on. In the final section of the paper, I show how on the basis of the account developed we can give a more satisfactory analysis of the speech act of inviting a joint commitment and answer two important questions Bernhard Schmid has raised about group speech acts, namely whether there are 1st person plural Moore-sentences and a 1st person plural form of 1st person authority. I argue that the singular and plural cases can be treated in parallel.

The Frege point to the effect that e.g. the clauses of conditionals are not asserted and therefore cannot be assertions is often taken to establish a dichotomy between the content of a speech act, which is propositional and belongs to logic and semantics, and its force, which belongs to pragmatics. Recently this dichotomy has been questioned by philosophers such as Peter Hanks and Francois Recanati, who propose act-theoretic accounts of propositions, argue that we can’t account for propositional unity independently of the forceful acts of speakers, and respond to the Frege point by appealing to a notion of force cancellation. I argue that the notion of force cancellation is faced with a dilemma and offer an alternative response to the Frege point, which extends the act-theoretic account to logical acts such as conditionalizing or disjoining. Such higher-level acts allow us to present forceful acts while suspending commitment to them. In connecting them, a subject rather commits to an affirmation function of such acts. In contrast, the Frege point confuses a lack of commitment to what is put forward with a lack of commitment or force in what is put forward.

[Published version now available (open access).] In this paper I want to introduce and defend what I call the "subject mode account" of collective intentionality. I propose to understand collectives from joint attention dyads over small informal groups of various types to organizations, institutions and political entities such as nation states, in terms of their self-awareness. On the subject mode account, the self-consciousness of such collectives is constitutive for their being. More precisely, their self-representation as subjects of joint theoretical and practical positions towards the world – rather than as objects of such positions – makes them what they are. Members of such collectives represent each other as co-subjects of such positions and thus represent the world from the point of view of the collective.

A perceptual realism that is naive in a good way must be naive about world and mind. But contemporary self-described naive realists often have trouble acknowledging that both the good cases of successful perception and the bad cases of illusion and hallucination involve internal experiential states with intentional contents that present the world as being a certain way. They prefer to think about experience solely in relational terms because they worry that otherwise we won't be able to escape from radical skepticism. I argue that experiential relations to objects require that their subjects be in internal experiential states. But this does not mean that these states are our epistemological starting point which can be known independently of any knowledge of the external world. We escape the epistemological predicament of radical skepticism because the good cases are primary over the bad ones. But this is not because the good cases alone provide reasons for belief, but because we do not need a reason to think we are in a good case, but do need a reason to think we are not, and such a reason must come from a good case. So bad cases can only be thought of as deviations from good cases. And we can only understand experiences as states with contents distinct from their objects and present in good and bad cases once we understand misrepresentation, that is, bad cases, and therefore only as we ascribe knowledge of the external world to ourselves.

This paper discusses Raimo Tuomela's we-mode account in his recent book "Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents" and develops the idea that mode should be thought of as representational. I argue that in any posture – intentional state or speech act – we do not merely represent a state of affairs as what we believe, or intend etc. – as the received view of 'propositional attitudes' has it –, but our position relative to that state of affairs and thus ourselves. That is, we represent the subject through what I call "subject mode" and its position through what I call "position mode". I argue that the key to understanding collective intentionality is to understand how we represent others as co-subjects of positions rather than as their objects. This is shown on various levels of collective intentionality. On the non-conceptual level of joint attention we experience others as co-subjects who we attend with rather than to and who we are at least also disposed to act jointly with. On the conceptual level of the we-mode we represent others as co-subjects of positions of knowledge, intention, belief and shared values. Organizations and thus group agents in Tuomela's sense I propose to understand in terms of what I call "role mode", that is, in terms of the positions individuals and groups take as occupants of certain roles, for example, as committee members, or as chancellor of Germany. I try to show how this account, while very much in the spirit of Tuomela's, can avoid his fictionalism about group agents and some other problems of his account, while steering between the Scylla of excessive individualism and the Charybdis of extreme collectivism.

In this paper I discuss Michael Tomasello's account of the nature of thought and of its emergence and development in his recent book 'A Natural History of Human Thinking'. I first introduce Tomasello’s notion of thought and his account of its emergence and development through differentiation, arguing that it calls into question the theory bias of the philosophical tradition on thought as well as its frequent atomism. On the basis of this discussion, I raise some worries in the second section that he may be overextending the concept of thought, arguing that we should recognize an area of intentionality intermediate between action and perception on the one hand and thought on the other. In the third section I continue this argument by suggesting that the co-operative nature of humans is reflected in the very structure of their intentionality and thought: in co-operative modes such as the mode of joint attention and action and the we-mode, they experience and represent others as co-subjects of joint relations to situations in the world rather than as mere objects. To capture this I suggest to abandon the traditional understanding of propositional attitudes. In conclusion, I will then briefly comment, in the light of the preceding discussion, on what Tomasello refers to as one of two big open questions in theory of collective intentionality, namely that of the irreducibility of jointness.

In diesem Aufsatz argumentiere ich, dass die Standardauffassung von Propositionen und propositionalen Einstellungen inadäquat ist, ein Artefakt der gegenwärtig herrschenden theorielastigen Auffassung von Intentionalität, Sprache und Rationalität, und skizziere eine alternative Auffassung. Im folgenden Abschnitt belege ich erst einmal die These der Theorielastigkeit anhand einiger Beispiele vor allem aus der gegenwärtigen analytischen Philosophie. Der dritte Abschnitt erklärt, wie diese Theorielastigkeit im Standardverständnis von Propositionen und propositionalen Einstellungen verkörpert ist. Im vierten Abschnitt argumentiere ich, dass dieses Standardverständnis der Proposition zwei unvereinbare Rollen zuweist. Sie kann nicht sowohl einen Sachverhalt repräsentieren, der Gegenstand praktischer genauso wie theoretischer Stellungnahmen sein kann, als auch wie eine theoretische Stellungnahme Wahrheitswertträger sein. In den folgenden Abschnitten versuche ich eine partielle Diagnose, wie es zu dieser Auffassung kommen kann: gewisse Formen der Neutralisierung von Stellungnahmen durch das bloße „in den Raum stellen“ (fünfter Abschnitt), durch fiktionale Kontexte (sechster Abschnitt) und den Kontext logischer Verknüpfungen (der so genannte „Frege-Punkt“; siebter Abschnitt) werden verwechselt mit der Neutralität zwischen dem Praktischen und Theoretischen, zwischen Wollen und Wahrheit, die die Standardauffassung erfordern würde. Der achte Abschnitt skizziert in groben Umrissen ein alternatives Bild. Demnach wird eine Repräsentation eines Sachverhalts erst durch die dazu kommende theoretische oder praktische Position zu einer Stellungnahme und damit zum Träger eines Erfüllungswerts. Die Bereiche des Praktischen und des Theoretischen sind parallel strukturiert und unterschieden sich im Wesentlichen nur durch die Verschiedenheit der Passrichtungen. Grundlegende rationale Operationen wie Deduktion, Abduktion und Induktion können auf praktischen Stellungnahmen genauso ausgeführt werden wie auf theoretischen. Im neunten Abschnitt verorte ich die tieferen Wurzeln der Theorielastigkeit in dem Verlangen, das Praktische an die dem Theoretischen eigene Form der Objektivität zu assimilieren. Dieses Verlangen muss aber fruchtlos bleiben, und die dem Praktischen eigene Form der Objektivität wird so verfehlt. Der letzte Abschnitt deutet an, wie sich Werturteile in dem skizzierten Rahmen deuten lassen.

In this paper I criticize theory-biased and overly individualist approaches to understanding others and introduce the PAIR account of joint attention as a pragmatic, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that this relation obtains in virtue of intentional contents in the minds of the co-attenders, and – against the received understanding of intentional states as propositional attitudes – that we should recognize what I call “subject mode” and “position mode” intentional content. Based on findings from developmental psychology, I propose that subject mode content represents the co-attenders as co-subjects, who are like them and who are at least disposed to act jointly with them. I conclude by arguing that in joint attention we experience and understand affective, actional and perceptual relations at a non-conceptual level prior to the differentiation of mind and body.

The contribution deals with knowledge of what to do, and how, where, when and why to do it, as it is found in a multitude of plans, rules, procedures, maxims, and other instructions. It is argued that while this knowledge is conceptual and propositional, it is still irreducible to theoretical knowledge of what is the case and why it is the case. It is knowledge of goals, of ends and means, rather than of facts. It is knowledge-to that is irreducibly practical in having world to mind direction of fit and the essential function of guiding as yet uncompleted action. While practical knowledge is fundamentally different from theoretical knowledge in terms of mind-world relations, the practical and theoretical domains are still parallel in terms of justificatory and inferential relations, they are like mirror images of one another. It is shown that if this view of practical knowledge is accepted, convincing Gettier cases for practical knowledge can be constructed. An extensive analysis of these cases demonstrates the usefulness of the notions of practical deduction, abduction, and induction.

How can people function appropriately and respond normatively in social contexts even if they are not aware of rules governing these contexts? John Searle has rightly criticized a popular way out of this problem by simply asserting that they follow them unconsciously. His alternative explanation is based on his notion of a preintentional, nonrepresentational background. In this paper I criticize this explanation and the underlying account of the background and suggest an alternative explanation of the normativity of elementary social practices and of the background itself. I propose to think of the background as being intentional, but nonconceptual, and of the basic normativity or proto-normativity as being instituted through common sensory-motor-emotional schemata established in the joint interactions of groups. The paper concludes with some reflections on what role this level of collective intentionality and the notion of the background can play in a layered account of the social mind and the ontology of the social world.

After outlining why the notion of conscious control of action matters to us and after distinguishing different challenges to that notion, the contribution focuses on the challenge posed by the literature on unconscious goal pursuit. Based on a conceptual clarification of the notion of consciousness, I argue that the understanding of consciousness in that literature is too restricted. The possibility that the
behaviors reported can be accounted for by nonconceptual forms of consciousness, such as emotions and motor experiences, rather than by – conscious or unconscious – conceptual level intentions tends to be disregarded, even though it promises to be empirically fruitful.

How can consciousness, how can the mind be causally efficacious in a world
which seems—in some sense—to be thoroughly governed by physical causality?
Mental causation has been a nagging problem in philosophy since
the beginning of the modern age, when, inspired by the rise of physics, a
metaphysical picture became dominant according to which the manifest
macrophysical world of rocks, trees, colors, sounds etc. could be eliminated
in favor of, or identified with, the microconstituents of these entities
and their basic physical properties, plus their effects on human or animal
minds. Against the background of this ontology, the argument from causal
closure, or the causal completeness of physics, exerts strong pressure
to also identify consciousness with microphysical entities—or even to eliminate
it in favor of the latter—the only other options apparently being
either the denial of the causal closure of the physical level, epiphenomenalism
about the mind, or the view that its physical effects are generally
overdetermined. In this paper, however, I want to introduce what I call
the “microstructure view” (MV) of the brain-consciousness relation, and I
want to try to make plausible that the problem of mental causation can
also be solved, or perhaps rather dissolved, on the basis of this account. On
the MV, the minimal neuronal correlates of consciousness—of the global
state of consciousness, or specific states of consciousness such as pain—are
not identical with these states, but rather constitute their microstructure,
or, as I shall also say, equivalently, compose them.

Frege argued for the force-content distinction not only by appealing to the logical and fictional contexts which are most closely associated with the "Frege point", but also based on the fact that an affirmative answer to a yes-no question constitutes an assertion. Supposedly this is only intelligible if the question contains a forceless thought or proposition which an affirmative answer then asserts. Against this I argue that this fact more readily supports the view that questions operate on assertions and other forceful acts themselves. Force is neither added to propositions as on the traditional view, nor is it cancelled as has recently been proposed. Rather higher-level acts such as questioning, but also e.g. conditionalizing, embed and present assertoric or directive acts that are forceful and committal, while suspending commitment to them. The Frege point confounds different varieties of force and the question whether something is merely presented for consideration with the question what is so presented. Force is representational: through assertoric and directive force indicators subjects non-conceptually present positions of theoretical or practical knowledge, while interrogative acts indicate positions of wondering which strive for such knowledge.

In addition to the Frege point, Frege also argued for the force-content distinction from the fact that an affirmative answer to a yes-no question constitutes an assertion. I argue that this fact more readily supports the view that questions operate on and present assertions and other forceful acts themselves. Force is neither added to propositions as on the traditional view, nor is it cancelled as has recently been proposed. Rather higher level acts such as questioning, but also e.g. conditionalizing, embed assertive or directive acts that are forceful and committal, while suspending commitment to them. The Frege point confounds different varieties of force and the question whether something is merely presented for consideration with the question what is so presented. Force is representational: through assertoric and directive force indicators subjects non-conceptually present positions of theoretical or practical knowledge, while interrogative acts indicate positions of wondering which strive for such knowledge.

In this paper I argue that in order to properly account for group speech acts, we need to abandon, respectively to fundamentally reconceptualize, the force-content opposition. This is because in a group speech act, a group presents itself as taking a position such as an assertion, a promise or an order, that is, it presents itself as the subject of such a position. But on the received understanding of the force / mode of speech acts and so-called propositional attitudes and their propositional content, only the latter is representational, so that only what the subject is e.g. asserting is represented, not the subject and the position it takes. Against this I argue for a representationalist account of mode / force, according to which they are to be understood in terms of the self-awareness of subjects. Individual and collective subjects are aware of whether they take a theoretical or practical position towards the reality of a state of affairs and indicate this position in their speech. This often involves pre-conceptual and grammaticalized content, which is importantly different from the conceptual content philosophers have usually focused on. I show that the ‘Frege point’ cannot establish the received force-content dualism and that, on the contrary, the view that force is representational allows a satisfactory response to the puzzles the ‘Frege point’ is based on. I then proceed to extend this account to group speech acts by sketching an account of collective intentionality in terms of representing others a co-subjects of positions taken towards the world. In the final section of the paper, I use the account developed to answer two important questions Bernhard Schmid has raised about group speech acts, namely whether there are 1st person plural Moore-sentences and a 1st person plural form of 1st person authority, arguing that the singular and plural cases can be treated in parallel.

The philosophy of collectivity is still often driven by fear of group minds. Defenders of content accounts like Michael Bratman attempt to analyze away all occurrences of " we " as a subject of intentions, proposing that at least small-scale collectivity can be entirely explained in terms of attitudes of the form " I intend that we J ". Proponents of mode accounts like John Searle reject this and embrace group mindedness as irreducible, but are also dismissive of collective subjects out of fear of group minds. In his recent book, Kirk Ludwig makes valid criticisms of the mode account and of Margaret Gilbert's version of a plural subject account and develops a very rich and improved version of the content account. However, I will argue that this analysis is still inadequate and subject to counterexamples, and that it throws out the baby of the group mindedness essential to understanding joint intention with the bathwater of group minds. I conclude by sketching an account of groups as subjects of intentions that responds to Ludwig's criticisms of Searle and Gilbert. It explains how group mindedness ties the group members together so that they can jointly be the subjects of intentions and other attitudes. A group has minds, not a mind. A subject of we-intentions is essentially plural, while both the notion of a group mind and the content account try to reduce it to something singular. Joint commitment is one form of group mindedness that ties subjects together into collectives, but there are also others such as e.g. joint attention, joint skills, or joint habits.

A strict dichotomy between the force / mode of speech acts and intentional states and their propositional content has been a central feature of analytical philosophy of language and mind since the time of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Recently this dichotomy has been questioned by philosophers such as Peter Hanks (2015, 2016) and Francois Recanati (2016), who argue that we can't account for propositional unity independently of the forceful acts of speakers and propose new ways of responding to the notorious 'Frege point' by appealing to a notion of force cancellation. In my paper I will offer some supplementary criticisms of the traditional view, but also a way of reconceptualizing the force-content distinction which allows us to preserve certain of its features, and an alternative response to the Frege point that rejects the notion of force cancellation in favor of an appeal to intentional acts that create additional forms of unity at higher levels of intentional organization: acts such as questioning a statement or order, or merely putting it forward or entertaining it; pretending to state or order; or conjoining or disjoining statements or orders. This allows us to understand how we can present a forceful act without being committed to it. In contrast, the Frege point confuses a lack of commitment to with a lack of commitment or force in what is put forward.

There is a blind spot in contemporary philosophy for a variety of knowledge that is irreducibly practical and yet knowledge in the same sense in which propositional theoretical knowledge of facts is knowledge. It is usually thought that practical knowledge is either mere non-propositional,  non-intellectual skill (e.g. Ryle 1949), or else must be reducible to theoretical knowledge (e.g. Stanley & Williamson 2001). In this paper I argue that the conceptual knowledge we have of what to do and how, when, where and why to do it, for example, in the form of recipes, instructions, maxims and moral principles, is intellectual, but not theoretical, because it is prescriptive rather than descriptive and because it is knowledge of goals, of ends and means, rather than of facts. It is diametrically opposed to theoretical knowledge in terms of the direction of causation and the direction of fit between mind and world. At the same time this practical knowledge shares the essential properties of theoretical knowledge. It is a well-justified and successful practical state just like theoretical knowledge is a well-justified and successful theoretical state. And just like theoretical knowledge, it can be gettiered.

The dissertation defends the thesis that the mind-body problem arises against the background of the elimination of the manifest physical world, and that the only satisfactory response to it is to take back that elimination and thus to dissolve the problem. Various materialist and dualist responses are shown to be inadequate. They are only different forms of ontological fundamentalism – physics fundamental-ism and consciousness fundamentalism – that lead to ultimately meaningless meta-physical constructions. By contrast, on the ontologically pluralist view outlined here, the fact that the entire spatiotemporal world has a physical microstructure is compatible with a naive realism with regard to both the manifest physical world and to consciousness. We only need to ascribe physical microstructures to both while identifying neither with these structures.
After an introduction that identifies the elimination of the manifest physical world in modernity as the metaphysical background of the mind-body problem and describes the dilemmatic situation created by the typical reactions to it, the first chapter attempts to clarify what consciousness is. The second chapter then discusses some of the standard formulations of the so-called “puzzle” or “mystery” of consciousness. It is shown that these cannot be transformed into a genuine, answerable question. The notion that other macrophenomena can be explained much better than consciousness, perhaps even in a completely transparent way, is revealed to be an illusion, an artefact of the tacit elimination of the manifest physical world. In the third chapter, the thesis that consciousness has spatial properties is defended against various forms of skepticism. The fourth chapter begins the debate with the mind-body identity theory by discussing various positions on identity statements in the philosophy of language. This discussion leads to the conclusion that the idea of informative identity statements is meaningless. On this basis, the notion of an empirically contentful so-called “scientific identification” of consciousness phenomena with their neuronal correlates is criticized in the fifth chapter. The sixth chapter argues that it is possible to dissolve the problem of mental causation if a physiological and ultimately also a microphysical structure is ascribed to consciousness. In a concluding reflection it is explained what it means that the present suggestion amounts to a dissolution rather than a solution of the traditional mind-body problem.

This introduction jointly written with Gottfried Seebaß and Peter Gollwitzer to our co-edited volume situates the topic of intentions and their limits in the history of philosophy and psychology.

Individual intentional action and intentions have been a focus of investigation in philosophy and psychology since their beginning. Recently, collective action and collective intentions are also increasingly coming to the fore. Throughout this history, the limits of intentions have been a central topic in two distinct, but still related respects. First, the boundaries of the concept of intention have shifted at various points in that history. Second, there has always been an interest in the limits of intentions in the sense of the limits of their efficacy in controlling behavior, and of course these limits will vary depending on how intentions are delineated. This interest in turn is at heart an interest in the limits of rationality in controlling behavior, since intentions are or at least can be the products of processes of practical rationality, of practical reasoning. In what follows, we trace part of the ancient as well as the more recent history of that debate, not for its own sake, but as a means of introducing various aspects of intentions and their control over behavior and of locating the contributions of this volume in the geography of this territory.

This entry concerns the consciousness or experience subjects have of their own actions. The now burgeoning interest in the phenomenology of agency is a fairly recent development, even more recent than the rediscovery of consciousness in general. This is reflected in the fact that much of the literature, especially the philosophical literature, is concerned with defending or battling viewpoints still skeptical of the significance of a distinctive phenomenology of agency or even of its very existence. One source for such skepticism is the assumption that such a phenomenology would have to take the form of a specific and unitary feeling or sensation of acting. A better conception is that of a family of actional experiences. Consider the following everyday scenario: you plan to write a paper and, after much deliberation, you choose a topic and create a rough outline. Sitting down in front of your computer to write, perceiving its screen as something to be filled and the keyboard as a means to this end, you focus your thoughts on creating a sentence, finally executing typing movements, experiencing yourself as moving your hands and moving the keys through them and perceiving the events of letters appearing on the screen as the result of your movements. These are some of the family of experiences connected to action and its authorship: experiences of deliberating, intending, of active and purposive bodily movement, of perceiving entities as objects for and results of action. They raise a host of questions. This entry will focus on the structure of actional experience in the sense of the experience of active, purposive movement, and its relation to perceptual experience.

Program for our workshop "Layers of Collective Intentionality" in Vienna, August 16-18, with Katja Crone, Elisabeth Pacherie, Björn Petersson, Glenda Satne, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Kirk Ludwig, Christian List, Pierre Saint-Germier, Alejandro Rosas, Judith Martens / Luke Roelofs, Ludger Jansen, Valeria Bizzari, Jacob Mackey, Giulia Lasagni, Michael Schmitz and Hans Bernhard Schmid

Abstract of a talk to be held at a workshop in Brussels on transparency and externalism with Paul Boghossian, Francois Recanati and Robert Stalnaker. I argue that standard forms of externalism inherit the worst faults of traditional Cartesianism because they try to bring in the world by appealing to features of it that the subject is unaware of. Therefore the mind is just as intransparent and out of touch as before. Instead I propose a kind of externalism from a 1st person point of view, according to which we can only understand the contents of our minds in relation to objects in the world that we know.

This is a short commentary on a talk by Patrick Haggard that distinguishes some broad classes of action experience and discusses the Libet experiments and some of Patrick's experiments in the light of these distinctions. (Slides available in the Talk section)

Can we give a machine consciousness and free will by giving it the capacity to reflect on its routines and to change its behavior on the basis of these reflections as suggested by Prof. Dörner? I argue that we cannot by way of clarifying the key concepts of consciousness, free will and machines. A machine is essentially a tool that serves human purposes and does not have a will of its own, free or not. By contrast, consciousness and will are essentially biological phenomena. Having a will presupposes basic biological urges and consciousness the cycle of sleeping, dreaming, and waking.

How can a joint commitment be initiated? Suppose we try to understand the initiation of a joint commitment in terms of individual conditional intentions. I intend to commit if you intend to commit and you intend to commit if I intend to commit. But it’s hard to see then how either of us could ever detach the antecedent of their conditional and reach a non-conditional commitment (cf. Gilbert 2013: 43f).
A more natural and more promising suggestion is that joint commitments can be initiated through questions, for example through questions posed by means of presenting imperative sentences with rising intonation as in “Go for walk?” or “Have a drink?”. But existing accounts of questions in the philosophy of language neglect such practical yes-no questions, affirmative answers to which are tantamount to directions rather than assertions. They can neither explain how an answer to a question can be a practical commitment, nor how it can establish a joint commitment.
In my contribution, I will present a new account of questions, the higher-level act account, and show how it can explain both these things. I will argue that questions are not on all fours with assertions and directions, as it is commonly supposed. Nor should we accept the force-content distinction and with it the idea that all these acts have forceless propositions as their contents. Rather questions are higher-level acts (Schmitz 2021) which put forward assertions or directions themselves in order to elicit yes-no responses, or various kind of completions in the case of word questions. And basic assertoric, directive and interrogative force indicators such as intonation contour, word order and grammatical mood themselves nonconceptually present the subject’s theoretical or practical position towards a state of affairs: theoretical or practical knowledge for assertoric, respectively directive force indicators, and a position of wondering, for interrogative force indicators. Questions then have structures like “? AS (it rains)” or “? DIR (go for a walk)”, where in the context created by the higher- level illocutionary act of questioning, the assertoric or directive force indicators now present knowledge positions the subjects seek rather than ones they lay claim to.
I will show how this account can explain practical commitment and how it can be naturally extended to also explain joint commitment. Key is the thought that the experience of joint attention, deliberation and communication, as manifest in eye contact, alignment, posture, attunement, again intonation contour, and so on, can also nonconceptually determine that what is being proposed or under consideration is a joint action and a joint commitment.
I conclude with some general reflections on how overcoming the force-content distinction – and thus a picture of intentionality centered around the idea that all content is propositional and conceptual – is crucial for a proper understanding of collective intentionality.

Slides of talk given at the SSHAP 2021 meeting.

The opposition between the force (mode) and the propositional content of speech acts (and propositional attitudes) has long reigned supreme in the history of analytic philosophy since Frege made what Geach later called the ‘Frege point’. Lately though it has been attacked by philosophers such as Peter Hanks and Francois Recanati, who argue that propositions can’t be forceless and non-committal because anything that bears a truth value must take a position with regard to whether things hang together in the way they are represented. It cannot leave this open.
Against this background of the history and the current debate, my paper will discuss Wittgenstein’s critique of the force-content distinction in the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein’s critique of Frege’s (and Russell’s) use of an assertion sign in the Tractatus (4.442) is well-known and has often been discussed, though (perhaps unsurprisingly) this discussion has not led to a generally accepted intepretation. Comparatively less attention has been given to Wittgenstein’s remarks on the assertion sign and the force-content distinction in §22-23 of the Philosophical Investigation.
I will develop an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s comments according to which the rejection of the force-content distinction represents a continuity between the thought of early and late Wittgenstein, and some of the remarks in the Investigations can also be used to elucidate what he means in the Tractatus. The assertion sign is “logically meaningless” and thus redundant because what one wants to express by means of the assertion sign is on reflection already indicated by other signs. As Wittgenstein puts it in §22, “Frege’s assertion sign marks the beginning of the sentence” and “distinguishes the whole period from a clause within the period”. I will argue that in the Tractatus the truth-table (of the conditional) that Wittgenstein refers to in 4.442 has a function similar to the period. It is “a propositional sign”, that is, it represents the proposition as a whole, in contradistinction to the elementary propositions which are part of it. Moreover, the truth-table already indicates that the conditional does not entail its clauses, and this is, I shall argue, sufficient to account for the intuition that motivates the ‘Frege point’.
Wittgenstein further points out in §22 that we have to be careful what contrast we want to indicate by means of an assertion sign. We can use it, for example, to distinguish an assertion from a question, but it is a mistake to conclude from this that asserting consists of two separate acts, of considering or entertaining a proposition, and of asserting it. Here I will argue that Wittgenstein correctly identifies a mistake Frege makes. Frege confounds the question whether something is an assertion with such questions as whether it is e.g. an antecedent or consequent rather than a free-standing occurrence. Properly understood, the assertion sign does not mark this latter contrast – which is already indicated by conditional markers – but a contrast with different forces such as those of directive speech acts. At this point though, I will argue that Wittgenstein also does not take his insight to its logical conclusion. The assertion sign does not mark a contrast with questions either, because questions are higher-level non-logical operations which operate on either assertions or directives, yielding theoretical or practical questions (“Is the door closed?” or “Close the door?”).
In §23 Wittgenstein argues that that-clauses are not propositions because to say something like “that such and such is a case” is not yet a sentence or proposition, it is not yet, as he puts it, “a move in the language game”. I argue that this is because as a mere representation of a state of affairs it is essentially incomplete as it does not yet specify the position a subject takes up towards the reality of a state of affairs. Wittgenstein’s remark here supports Hanks’s point that only something that takes a position with regard to the reality of a state of affairs can be a truth value bearer and thus a move in the language game.

Slides for a talk that can be accessed here:
https://so2020.isosonline.org/conference/legal-positivism-and-collective-acceptance/
In my contribution I will discuss legal positivism from the point of view of a collective acceptance account of the nature of institutional reality and thus of the legal order. For purposes of my talk, I take the core claim of legal positivism to be that whether something is law does not depend on its moral merits, but on its sources, on the social structures and processes from which it originates and which maintain its existence, its being in force. Legal positivism rejects the ideas of the natural law tradition that something could be law ‘naturally’, without a proper social, institutional context, and that something properly situated in such a context could fail to be law. So when people express their opposition to certain prescriptions by saying they are not, or not really, the law, the positivist will think that they are mixing up the question whether a certain social fact obtains with the question whether it should obtain. But while this part of the positivist position strikes me as correct, it is not sufficient to establish the core claim of positivism with its sharp separation of law and morality. I will argue that this core claim only seems compelling if we take up an observational stance towards the law, but not towards morality. The legal positivist notes as an observer that something is the law which is morally unacceptable – in light of the theorist’s own morality. But, (1) the decisive question is not whether an observer can find the laws of a society morally unacceptable, but whether something can be the law of that society indepedently of its acceptance through the members or co-subjects of that society, and whether (2) this acceptance is plausibly independent of their moral attitudes. I further argue that (3) acceptance is holistic in the sense that the legal order as a whole can remain in force even if specific laws lack acceptance, and that (4) while acceptance is a somewhat vague and elastic notion, the law being in force is plausibly construed as being a special case of it. The law being in force in the relevant sense here is (5) not an inner-legal notion. It is not sufficient for it that a law has been passed in accordance with the procedures specified in the law itself, but requires that the legal order is accepted in the society at large. Against John Searle’s version of the collective acceptance account I argue that (6) the relevant acceptance constituting attitudes are not mere beliefs, but have an irreducibly practical aspect. They don’t represent the legal order as a mere fact, but as prescriptions which are binding at least in the normal case. They are (7) pushmi-pullyu representations in the sense of Ruth Millikan. On the basis of these points I argue that it remains plausible that acceptance of a legal order will crucially depend on moral attitudes. I conclude by proposing to think of the law itself as an institutionalized form of morality.

Recently some philosophers have started to naturalize propositions by reconceptualizing them in act-theoretic terms. The works of Scott Soames and Peter Hanks represent two fundamentally opposed ways of going about this.
Soames’s proposal preserves the traditional dichotomy of force and propositional content, as he suggests we can predicate a property of an object by merely entertaining a proposition, for example, in imagination or hypothesis, without committing to its truth. This would be a further step we would take in asserting its truth or otherwise acknowledging or endorsing it. Hanks has criticized this proposal and argued that only something that is forceful and committal and takes a position with regard to whether an object actually has the property predicated of it can be a truth value bearer. The traditional separation of propositions as truth value bearers from force is therefore untenable. A proposition can only be a unified truth value bearer through the forceful act of a subject. He further claims that if an act of predication has represented inaccurately, its subject must have made a mistake.
I believe that Hanks is right that a truth value bearer must take a position with regard to whether things hang together as it represents them. Otherwise it does not make sense to say that it is true, that is, that it has represented things succesfully, as they are. At the same time it seems that Soames is right that there are contexts such as those of imagining or doubting, those created by conditionals or disjunctions, or fictional contexts created by acts of pretense, in which the subject is not committed to things being as they are represented, and in which it would also be wrong to say that the subject has made a mistake. For example, in a conditional the subject is not committed to the truth of the antecedent and therefore has not made a mistake if it turns out to be false.
In my contribution I will argue that there is a way to reconcile these seemingly conflicting claims. We should think of imagining, doubting or questioning, but also of conditionalizing or pretending as higher-level acts, which operate on forceful acts such as assertions or directives themselves rather than on something supposedly distinct from them such as propositions. Propositions just are assertions as put forward for consideration by higher-level acts. The first crucial step here is a distinction between commitment in and commitment to an act. An assertion is a commitment to the reality of a state of affairs (SOA) from a theoretical position, a directive from a practical position. Through e.g. questioning, conditionalizing or other higher-level acts we present an assertion (or directive) while suspending commitment to it. Put differently, we entertain a commitment, but suspend commitment to it. But how is it possible for an act to contain a commitment if its subject is not committed? The second crucial step is a representational account of force indicators as presenting the subject’s position vis-à-vis the relevant SOA. The act can contain a commitment in the sense that it represents a committal position, even thought the subject is not commited to this position because it has performed a higher level act such as questioning or conditionalizing which suspends commitment to the act of which this representation is a part.

Two distinct approaches to the philosophy of language trace back to Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein tried to analyze all language into elementary statements about what is the case and their truth functions. In the Investigations he criticized the notion of logical analysis and developed an alternative vision of language as consisting of an indefinite multitude of language games essentially embedded in forms of life. Now, the force of speech acts is more commonly associated with the latter approach to language, but their propositional content with the former. In light of this it is interesting that in both the Tractatus and the Investigations Wittgenstein rejects the force-content distinction as propounded by Frege, based on what has come to be known as the ‘Frege point’. In my contribution I will explicate and defend Wittgenstein’s arguments against the distinction. Based on these arguments, I will sketch my own proposal for responding to the ‘Frege point’ and for overcoming the force-content dualism and integrating the two approaches to logic and language.

In this talk I argue that consciousness and content can be found on all layers of collective intentionality and propose some criteria to distinguish these layers such as the richness /concreteness of content, the degree of
degree of context dependence, the density of representation vs. the differentiation of representational role and the degree of durability / stability and the degree of externalization / standardization of representations.

Abstract of a talk to be held at a workshop in Brussels on transparency and externalism with Paul Boghossian, Francois Recanati and Robert Stalnaker. I argue that standard forms of externalism inherit the worst faults of traditional Cartesianism because they try to bring in the world by appealing to features of it that the subject is unaware of. Therefore the mind is just as intransparent and out of touch as before. Instead I propose a kind of externalism from a 1st person point of view, according to which we can only understand the contents of our minds in relation to objects in the world that we know.

Many theories routinely appeal to social or collective rules such as rules of language even when people are not aware of these rules, assuming it is unproblematic that such rules can be followed unconsciously. I criticize this view as well as Searle's account that appeals to the notion of a pre-intentional background into which rules 'recede' and offer an alternative account based on the the notion of nonconceptual content.
[This talk revisits ideas of my paper "Social Rules and the Social Background".]

[Slides, paper can be found under "drafts"] In this paper I want to introduce and defend what I call the "subject mode account" of collective intentionality. I propose to understand collectives from joint attention dyads over small informal groups of various types to organizations, institutions and political entities such as nation states, in terms of their self-awareness. On the subject mode account, the self-consciousness of such collectives is constitutive for their being. More precisely, their self-representation as subjects of joint theoretical and practical positions towards the world – rather than as objects of such positions – makes them what they are. Members of such collectives represent each other as co-subjects of such positions and thus represent the world from the point of view of the collective.

The philosophy of collectivity is still often driven by fear of group minds. Defenders of content accounts like Michael Bratman attempt to analyze away all occurrences of “we” as a subject of intentions, proposing that at least small-scale collectivity can be entirely explained in terms of attitudes of the form “I intend that we J”. Proponents of mode accounts like John Searle reject this and embrace group mindedness as irreducible, but are also dismissive of collective subjects out of fear of group minds. In his recent  book, Kirk Ludwig makes valid criticisms of the mode account and of Margaret Gilbert’s version of a plural subject account and develops a very rich and improved version of the content account. However, I will argue that  this analysis is still inadequate and subject to counterexamples, and that it  throws out the baby of the group mindedness essential to understanding joint intention with the bathwater of group minds. I conclude by sketching an account of groups as subjects of intentions that responds to Ludwig’s criticisms of Searle and Gilbert. It explains how group mindedness ties the group members together so that they can jointly be the subjects of intentions and other attitudes. A group has minds, not a mind. A subject of we-intentions is essentially plural, while both the notion of a group mind and the content account try to reduce it to something singular. Joint commitment is one form of group mindedness that ties subjects together into collectives, but  there are also others such as e.g. joint attention, joint skills, or joint habits.

A naïve realism that is naïve in a good way must also be naively realistic about the mind. It must recognize that perceptual experiential relations to the world can only obtain in virtue of contentful experiential states of the perceiver, and that such states are also involved in the bad cases of misperception. Some naïve realists seem reluctant to acknowledge such states, presumably because they worry that these might insert themselves between subject and world and become epistemologically foundational. I outline a version of naïve realism designed to put such worries to rest. Experiential states do not block direct access to the world, but enable it. The good case is primary because the bad case can only be conceptualized as a deviation from it, and our very understanding of experience and its content is also tied to this. So naïve realism about mind and world and the good and the bad cases are closely tied to one another.

Slides for my talk, for the paper see "drafts"!
A strict dichotomy between the force / mode of speech acts and intentional states and their propositional content has been a central feature of analytical philosophy of language and mind since the time of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Recently this dichotomy has  been questioned by philosophers such as Peter Hanks (2015, 2016) and Francois Recanati (2016), who argue that we can’t account for propositional unity independently of the forceful acts of speakers and propose new ways of responding to the notorious ‘Frege point’ by appealing to a notion of force cancellation. In my paper I will offer some supplementary criticisms of the traditional view, but also a way of reconceptualizing the force-content distinction which allows us to preserve certain of its features, and an alternative response to the Frege point that rejects the notion of force cancellation in favor of an appeal to intentional acts that create
additional forms of unity at higher levels of intentional organization: acts such as questioning a statement or order, or merely putting it forward
or entertaining it; pretending to state or order; or conjoining or disjoining
statements or orders. This allows us to understand how we can present a forceful act without being committed to it. In contrast, the Frege point confuses a lack of commitment to with a lack of commitment or force in
what is put forward.

In this talk I sketch a mode account of joint attention based on the idea that in joint attention we experience others as co-subjects rather than objects of attention, using findings from developmental psychology to illustrate the significance of this distinction. I argue that in joint attention we experience others at a level that is prior the differentiation of mental and physical properties and show how this insight can open up a new perspective on the traditional problem of skepticism about other minds.

This is a short commentary on a talk by Patrick Haggard that distinguishes some broad classes of action experience and discusses the Libet experiments and some of Patrick's experiments in the light of these distinctions. (Text available in the Miscellaneous section)

Many clauses that are part of complex clauses like e.g. antecedents of conditionals are not asserted. Does it follow that they are also not assertions (or other speech acts) but rather something fundamentally different from speech acts, namely propositions? Since Frege and Russell propositions so conceived have been taken to be the core of so-called propositional attitudes and what logical operations operate on. In this talk I challenge the seemingly obvious claim known in the literature as the Frege Point. I argue that it can be debunked once we see that a truth-evaluable representation cannot be completely forceless because it must be connected to a theoretical point of view, position or force, and that we need to distinguish commitment to a clause or position from commitment in this position. I conclude by comparing my proposed response to the Frege Point with two other recent criticisms of the orthodoxy, namely those of Peter Hanks (2015) and Francois Recanati (2016).

In this talk I propose to move beyond the force-content dualism in the theory of speech acts by thinking of force as presenting a subject's position towards a state of affairs. I then give an account of group speech acts as presenting the positions of plural subjects and show how we can make sense of a plural version of Moore's paradox and of first-person plural authority.

I outline a view that overcomes the opposition between intentionalist and disjunctivist, also so-called ‘naïve realist’ or ‘relational’ views of perception, by way of commenting on John Searle’s version of intentionalism and his debate with his disjunctivist opponents. Searle, I believe, is absolutely right that we need a notion of the intentional content of perceptual experience and of such experience as being an internal state of its subject. That such states have content is just another way of saying that the world seems to be a certain way to their subjects. And to think that content would be somehow between subject and world is indeed the ´Bad Argument` skewered by Searle. Content is just a determinant of the way the subject’s state is. And the existence of an experiential relation cannot only depend on conditions external to the subject, but must also depend on its state. So we need two – intimately related – notions of experience, of experiential relations to the external world, and of internal subjective states in virtue of which such relations obtain. Only then can we be naïve realists both about the world that we have access to and the minds that provide this access. Against both Searle and the disjunctivist I argue that the perceptual relation is intentional and experiential at the same time. Charitably construed, a crucial motivation for disjunctivism is what I will refer to as the primacy of the good over the bad cases. I will show how this can be accomodated within an intentionalist framework. That there is experience in the bad as well as the good cases does not mean that our epistemological starting point has to be neutral between them. The primacy of the good case means that we do need a reason to deny or even to doubt that we are in the good case, while we do not need a reason to move from experience to the corresponding belief, taking for granted that we are in the good case.

Friends and foes of consciousness alike often tend to mystify it. Either they want to celebrate it as something all-important that resists all attempts at explanation; or the use this kind of characterization to raise doubt that something of this nature exists or even deny its existence outright. In my talk I will try to demystify consciousness through conceptual clarification and preserve a sense of its importance at the same time. Consciousness is the common denominator of the sleeping and waking states and essentially has degrees. It’s neither solely sensory, nor solely reflective, but essentially both. It’s ontologically subjective in the sense that it belongs to a subject and essentially participates in subject/object-relations: it is essentially directed at objects. It resists a certain kind of objectification: I can’t picture it as an object in a creature’s head – though it is, contra externalism, located in heads – but have to take or imagine that creature’s point of view. This characteristic sets it apart from other phenomena, including unconscious mental states (if such there be), but an epistemically objective science of consciousness is still possible. Consciousness can’t be explained through self-representation – for example, a state of consciousness is not a state a subject is aware of being in – but it still essentially involves the awareness a subject has of itself and of its position in the world. Consciousness is not all that matters, but if it did not exist, nothing would matter at all.

Can we give a machine consciousness and free will by giving it the capacity to reflect on its routines and to change its behavior on the basis of these reflections as suggested by Prof. Dörner? I argue that we cannot by way of clarifying the key concepts of consciousness, free will and machines. A machine is essentially a tool that serves human purposes and does not have a will of its own, free or not. By contrast, consciousness and will are essentially biological phenomena. Having a will presupposes basic biological urges and consciousness the cycle of sleeping, dreaming, and waking.

Approaches to collective intentionality are commonly distinguished in terms of whether they locate
collectivity in the content, mode or subject of intentional states, that is, in terms of what subjects believe or intend (e.g. Bratman), in a special we-mode (e.g. Searle, Tuomela), or in collective, plural
subjects (e.g. Gilbert, Schmid). Despite their differences, all these approaches take for granted the standard model of intentional states as propositional attitudes. In my contribution I argue that we should rethink our understanding of propositional attitudes: their subject is not only aware of the state of affairs it believes to obtain or intends to bring about, but also has at least a sense of her own practical or theoretical position towards that state of affairs. I go on to show that this revised understanding of
intentional states can be the basis for an improved understanding of collective intentionality.
I distinguish three levels of collective intentionality in terms of the format or structure of the relevant intentionality – the pre-conceptual level of joint attention and action, the conceptual level of collective intention and belief and common knowledge, and the documental level of institutional reality, where we
take up postures in institutional roles such as being a clerk, judge, or professor. For each level, I show the benefits of understanding collective intentionality in terms of subject mode representation.
Joint attention is a matter of attending with rather than to somebody else and thus distinct from mere mutual attention. This distinction can be explained in terms of how the co-attenders figures in the intentional content of their joint attention experiences: as co-subjects rather than as objects. This
content is affectively charged and disposes to joint action. Moreover, the subject mode account can easily avoid the infinite iteration of states that mar traditional approaches such as those of Lewis and Schiffer. The subjects of common knowledge don’t have beliefs of the form “I know that you know that
p” and “You know that I know that you know that p”, and so on, but their relevant thoughts and beliefs are simply of the form “We know that p”, that is, they represent each other as joint subjects of
knowledge. With regard to institutional reality I argue that it is best understood in terms of what I call “role mode”, which is a form of subject mode. That is, in the fundamental case, institutional reality does not – counter to what notably Searle has argued – exist because of what we believe, desire or intend. For example, a professor is not a professor because others believe that she is one, but because she takes theoretical and practical positions from the vantage point of this role, and because others also represent and accept her in that role from the vantage points of their roles as her students, colleagues, administrators and so on, and by accepting the rights and obligations that come with the roles that are defined in relation to her role.

Some philosophers argue that only the good cases of successful perceptual experience can provide reasons for
belief. In my talk I argue that they are right that the good cases have a certain primacy over the bad ones, but
propose a fundamentally different way of understanding this primacy: it consists in the fact that if experience
presents a situation, I do not need a reason to believe it actually obtains, but would rather need a reason even to
doubt this, much more to conclude that this is really a bad case. Since to take myself to be in possession of such a
reason is to take myself to be in possession of a fact, bad cases are only conceivable as deviations from the good
case of successful representation. I further argue against disjunctivism that experiences can only be properly
understood as mental states when it is also acknowledged that the bad cases involve intentionally contenful
misrepresentations. The key here is to understand the relation between our notions of mind and world. Then we
can be naïve realists about both.

In my talk I will take culture to consist of socially established and maintained mental dispositions and practices, as well as of the artifacts that play an essential role in those dispositions and practices. I will especially focus on representational dispositions, practices and artifacts. My main goal is to introduce a taxonomy that distinguishes between three layers of the representational mind and its culture: the preconceptual level, where we find culturally shaped forms of action and perception, corresponding dispositions, such as skills, habits, and tendencies, and corresponding artifacts such as basic tools, forms of shelter, dress etc.; the conceptual level, where we find propositional thought, dispositions such as propositional knowledge (both practical and theoretical), belief, and intention, practices such as language games and artifacts such as speech sounds; and the documental level, which requires the practice of writing and corresponding dispositions and artifacts, and which enables church, state, and other forms of institutional reality and the roles that people occupy within that reality. These layers can be distinguished in terms of such parameters as the degree of the differentiation of representational roles; of context independence or autonomy; of the externalization, explicitness, and standardization of the relevant representations; of the independence of institutional from biological roles; and of the size of the social groups which establish, maintain and continually update and refine these practices, dispositions and artifacts.

In this talk I present an account of joint attention as affective, intentional, and relational. This account is supported by a variety of results from developmental psychology. I argue that our account of joint attention should be both intentionalist and relational, thus trying to overcome a common opposition in the literature on joint attention and perception.

In my contribution I criticize the traditional notion of a propositional attitude and introduce a conception according to which the subject of each intentional state represents its position vis-à-vis an object. For example, when we intend an action, we are aware of our intending position with regard to that action. Accordingly, I distinguish between subject mode representational content, position or attitude mode content, and object or what-content. I argue that this conception is well-placed to explain collective intentionality and social action. In particular, I try to show that at various levels of collective intentionality subject mode content is fundamental to explaining social action. We attend, act, believe and intend with others insofar as we represent them as co-subjects of positions with regard to actions and other objects of our intentionality. With regard to the non-conceptual level of joint attention, I describe the difference between experiencing others as co-subjects and as objects on the basis of empirical evidence from developmental psychology and argue that the former rather than the latter explains joint action. Analogous arguments are given for the conceptual and propositional we-mode level of collective intention and belief and for what I call “role mode”, which is meant to help explain our actions in institutional contexts. For example, when we vote as members of ISOS, we perform a social action in a role mode.

In my contribution I want to defend the idea that we can account for the intentionality of what Dan Hutto and Erik Myin (henceforth H&M) call ‘basic minds’ in terms of nonconceptual content against some of their objections. I will also try to define a sense of content (and of intentionality) in which, it seems to me, it cannot be meaningfully denied that any intentional state has content.
Consider any of the kind of perceptual or actional intentional states that make up basic minds, for example, your perceptual experience of your surroundings or the actional experience of walking. You perceive, say, a tree as being in front of you, and you are therefore perceptually related to certain elements of your environment. Now why do we need to speak of content here? Well, this perceptual relation might fail to obtain if either of its relata were significantly changed: if the tree did not exist or were in a different place, but also if the perceiver’s mental state were different – say, because her perceptual system had shut down or because she was totally distracted. Now call those features of the perceptual state in virtue of which the subject perceives certain phenomena, but not others, in virtue of which her intentionality is directed at these phenomena, but not others, its intentional content. Intentional content is not the object of the perceptual state – it only becomes an object of intentionality through the kind of reflections we are engaged in right now – it rather is that which determines which phenomena are its objects. It is how the mind is with regard to its intentional significance. Corresponding remarks can be made if intentionality is glossed in terms of aboutness or of seeming – the latter being especially appropriate for perception: intentional content is that in virtue of which perceptual experience is about certain phenomena, or that in virtue of which it seems to the subject that these phenomena exist.
It is because I don’t know what is meant by “intentionality” if not aboutness or directedness, and because I don’t know how perceptual and other intentional relations should obtain if the constitution of the mind does not enable these relations and determines which phenomena are its objects, and because I stipulate that this constitution be called intentional or representational content, that I don’t know how there could be intentionality without content in this sense.
Part of the reason that H&M object to the notion of content (for basic minds) is that they (rightly) argue against various reductive interpretations of that notion. Suffice it to note here that I assume with Searle (and Burge) that intentionalistic notions are irreducible, and let me also mention that I further assume with Searle (but not Burge) that intentionality is essentially tied to consciousness, though I don’t have the space to argue either point here. But H&M also have more specific objections against the notion of nonconceptual content, particularly against how it is deployed in arguments for content from illusion. I have not explicitly appealed to illusion so far because I think it is important to see that we do not only need the notion of content to make sense of illusion, but also of successful representation. But we do need it for illusion and also, we might add, for sensory and motor imaginings, because in all these cases there has to be an answer to the question: what did seem to be the case, though it wasn’t, or what did the subject imagine? The “what”-question asks for the content, and so it’s hard to see how it could be answered on a view that rejects the notion of content.
In objecting to this kind of reasoning, H&M contend with reference to the Müller-Lyer illusion that “the only evidence that there is an illusion here is the conflict between the content of our perception and the content of our better-informed belief”, and even that “…perceptual illusions depend for their very existence on high-level interpretative capacities being in play” (2013: 124f; their italics). They conclude that illusions could only be ascribed to beings with higher level, that is, conceptual and propositional, attitudes and thus not to basic minds. But it seems to me that this argument confuses conditions for the self-ascription of illusions with conditions for their existence. It is true that one can only arrive at conceptions of illusion if one has a ‘better-informed belief.’ But it does not follow and it is not true that such beliefs are preconditions for the existence of illusions, nor that they are the only conceivable evidence for illusions. Actional responses and emotional reactions like surprise can also be evidence for illusions. For example, if an animal did not adjust its grasp to an object and would then show surprise at its failure to grasp it properly, this could be evidence that it had misperceived its size.
A related objection is that the defender of nonconceptual content can’t both hold that it’s different in kind from conceptual, propositional content and that the two can conflict. There can only be a conflict between contents that share the same representational format (2012: 124). But this objection also fails. It is true that there cannot be a contradiction between nonconceptual and conceptual contents, because that requires the presence of negation, and negation cannot be found at the level of nonconceptual content. But I don’t see how it can be denied, for example, that there is a conflict between my urge to smoke and my conceptual intention not to.
In conclusion, I will turn the charge of intellectualism that H&M level against some attempts to account for the contents of basic minds back against them. It is because they assume an intellectualist notion of content by requiring, for example, that it be attributive, accessible, and that it figure in inference, that they cannot make sense of the contents of basic minds. Or so I shall argue, simultaneously sketching some properties of nonconceptual content.

In the contribution the traditional view of intentional attitudes, which equates their representational content with their so-called propositional content, is rejected in favor of an account that treats both subject-mode (e.g. I-mode vs. we-mode) and attitude-mode (e.g. intention vs. belief) as representational. On this account, subjects do not represent states of affairs from nowhere, as it where, but always also represent, though usually in a backgrounded fashion, their individual or collective position with regard to these states of affairs. It is shown that this view can best account for the peculiar representational failure that occurs when an individual has an illusory we-intention and for several other puzzles about we-mode intentionality. For example, we can reconcile the fact that there exists a relation between individual members of a collective in cases of successful we-mode representation with the fact that the existence of this relation is entirely dependent on the representational contents in the heads of these individuals. The account also takes the sting out of the notion that there is a group as a logical subject. Once we have got conceptually irreducible we-mode representation, it is argued, there is a sense in which the group is ontologically free, because just like an ‘I’ is no more than a being that is capable of representing itself in a certain way, so a ‘we’ is also no more than an entity – a group – that is capable of representing itself in a certain way. Moreover, the representationalist account of mode also helps us understand collective deductive reasoning. The account of we-mode intentionality and reasoning is then extended to understand role-mode as another form of subject-mode – the mode(s) representing certain positions of groups or individuals within institutions such as being a committee or a policeman. It is shown that role-mode can be understood as representational in essentially the same fashion as we-mode. The contribution concludes with some reflections on the relation between we-mode and role-mode and different layers of collective intentionality and different representational formats on these layers.

How are we aware of ourselves and the contents of our minds and how do we express this awareness in speech? What is the relation between consciousness and self-consciousness? Are they independent or interdependent and if the latter, how? What do subjects do when they e.g. assert, hypothesize, order and promise something? How are theoretical forms of intentionality – perception, and thought and speech that aims to represent facts, what is the case – related to practical forms of intentionality – action and practical thought and speech that represents goals and directs our actions? Is the structure of theoretical inference and theoretical rationality parallel to the structure of practical inference and rationality, or are there fundamental asymmetries? For example, are there practical forms of deduction, abduction and induction? Do the subjects of perception, action, thought and speech have to be individuals, or can they also include collective subjects ranging from joint attention dyads to corporations and nation states?
Aims, contents and method of the course (language of instruction) These lectures will be quite demanding. We will cover a lot of ground. We will discuss and connect the philosophy of self-consciousness, of consciousness and intentionality, perception and action, of speech acts, practical and theoretical inference, and of collective intentionality. I will develop an account of consciousness and self-consciousness as essentially connected and of mode – what distinguishes e.g. belief and intention – and force – what distinguishes e.g. assertion and promise – as representational. A subject is never just aware of the world, but also always of its position relative to it and thus of itself. This position has temporal, spatial and causal, but also theoretical, epistemic or practical dimensions. For example, in asserting I arguably present myself as knowing what is the case, in ordering as knowing what to do. I go on to outline an account of theoretical and practical knowledge, rationality and inference as essentially parallel, criticizing standard accounts as theory-biased, as privileging the theoretical domain. In a final step I extend this picture of intentionality as essentially involving subjects’ awareness of themselves and of their position in the world to collective intentionality. The key here is the thought that when we perceive, act, believe and intend jointly with other creatures, we experience and represent them as co-subjects of such positions rather than as their objects.
This opening first lecture discusses the relation between consciousness, self-consciousness, and intentionality.