Abstract
What is it for a set of individuals to make up a social group? How does a social group come into existence? What features do social groups have? These are among the questions that especially Margaret Gilbert and Raimo Tuomela have been trying to answer during the past decade or two. An important feature that their accounts share is the following: they take the intentional states that are often ascribed to groups and group members in everyday life as essential to an adequate account of social groups. Individuals can share intentional states with one another and, if certain conditions are satisfied, they constitute a social group in virtue of doing so. The terms that have been coined to capture this aspect of their projects are ‘weintentionality’ and ‘collective intentionality’.
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Hindriks, F. (2003). Social Groups, Collective Intentionality, and Anti-Hegelian Skepticism. In: Sintonen, M., Ylikoski, P., Miller, K. (eds) Realism in Action. Synthese Library, vol 321. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1046-7_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1046-7_14
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