If the intention's validity depended solely on one agent's predictive confidence about the other, it would reduce collective intention to a conjunction of individual intentions, which Searle explicitly identifies as a reductive fallacy.

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Reasons For

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Reason for

1.Collective intentions exhibit irreducible we-intentionality that cannot be decomposed into isolated I-intentions without losing essential features.
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2.If validity rested only on predictive confidence, agents could maintain 'collective' intentions while harboring fundamental disagreements about shared goals.
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3.Searle's distinction between collective and conjunctive intentions tracks a real metaphysical difference that predicts behavior better than reductionist models.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against

1.Predictive confidence about mutual commitment is exactly what distinguishes genuine collective intention from mere coordination; dismissing it begs the question.
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2.All intentions, collective or individual, ultimately depend on brain states of particular agents; invoking irreducible we-intentionality merely obscures this fact.
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3.Searle's reductio may conflate 'reducible to' with 'exhausted by'; collective intention could supervene on individual intentionality without being eliminable.
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Key Terms

Conjunction of individual intentions(as used in philosophy of action): Just adding up separate personal goals into one pile, rather than truly shared goals where people are committed to each other's success.
John Searle(as the philosopher being referenced): An influential American philosopher who studies how minds work, language functions, and how people cooperate; he argues that collective intentions are fundamentally different from just combining individual ones.
Predictive confidence(as used in epistemology and philosophy of mind): How sure or confident one person is about what another person will do based on past behavior or knowledge of them.
Reductive fallacy(as used in logic and philosophy of science): The mistake of explaining something complex by breaking it down into simpler parts, when the complex thing actually has extra properties that the simple parts alone can't capture.
agent(Economics terminology applied to medical ethics): The party in a principal-agent relationship who is instructed to produce the good or service on the principal's behalf — in the medical context, the doctor
collective intention(Philosophy of mind and legal interpretation debate): The intention attributed to a group as a whole, which on the account under discussion depends in a complex way on how the group would behave in various counterfactual circumstances
intention(as used in philosophy of language): A deliberate plan or purpose that someone has in mind when they do something.
validity(Formal logic; distinguished from syntactic deducibility): The model-theoretic counterpart to deducibility; an argument is valid if its conclusion is true under every interpretation in which its premises are true

Connections

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Philosophy of Language1 linked Moral Responsibility1 linked

All intentions, collective or individual, ultimately depend on brain states of p...An agent can form an intention of the form 'I intend that we X' without requirin...

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 2 (1 for, 1 against)
Edits: 1 edit