Inferentialism and Collective Intentionality

Inferentialism and the analysis of collective intentionality are two important new approaches or research programs in international philosophical research. Inferentialism analyses the social foundations of meaning and intentionality, arguing that such attitudes as beliefs, desires, and intentions, are basically social statuses within a social practice of mutual assignment of commitments and entitlements. Collective intentionality analysis investigates into the ways in which intentional attitudes can be shared, arguing that for a practice to be social, it has to be, in some way, jointly intended. While these research programmes have been tremendously influential in their own respective domains and research communities, they have rarely been brought into contact with each other. This is surprising, because they both place social action and social practices at the core of their accounts, approaching this topic from different and sometimes contrary perspectives. Moreover, it seems plausible to assume that each research program has important contributions to make to problems that arise within the domain of the other program. The ambition of the project is to fill this obvious lacuna in the current research by establishing an international research network comprisingleadingresearchers with complementary competences in both domains, thereby providing a platform for a constructive critical dialogue between them.

The aim of this joint Czech-Austrian research project was to bring inferentialist approaches to meaning and conceptual content to bear on research on collective action and attitudes, and vice versa. Both inferentialism and collective intentionality research are concerned with the nature, functioning, and significance of normative social practices, and the project sought to explore how these two theoretical frameworks could complement each other, and how they may be in tension. Among the more specific questions addressed were: - To what extent do collective intentions and other attitudes underlie communicative practices? - Can the 'normative attitudes' invoked by inferentialists to account for proprieties of language use be understood as collective attitudes? If not, what sort of sociality do they exhibit? - Does the 'I-thou' form of sociality involved in inferentially articulated scorekeeping practices stand in tension with the 'I-we' form of sociality often invoked within research on collective intentionality? - To what extent can social groups themselves participate and be recognised as participants within discursive practice, as this is typically conceived by inferentialists? The project was successful in bringing researchers from within these two research programmes into fruitful dialogue. This took the form of three workshops featuring high profile scholars, and the publication of two volumes of essays. A number of scholars from outside the project are now working on the issues first raised within the project, and we expect research at the intersection of collective intentionality and inferentialism will continue to receive scholarly attention. Did your project result in new important scientific/scholarly advances? If so, to what extent and in what respect? One of the advances made within the project was to give sustained attention to the phenomenon of group speech. This relates to the final research question mentioned above, 'To what extent social groups themselves participate and be recognised as participants within discursive practice?' In connection with this, the project team members co-edited a journal special issue on the theme of 'Group Speech Acts', and one team member further developed and extended this work in his successful proposal for a FWF stand-alone project on group speech and group silencing.