CONCEPT
Collective Intentionality
The capacity to participate in roles, norms, and institutions constituted by collective agreement—we intend this rule, this role, this reality—enabling millions to coordinate behavior through shared intentionality scaled beyond dyads.
Collective intentionality is Tomasello's name for the cognitive capacity that enables institutional reality. When two people share a goal, the intentionality exists between them and dissolves when the interaction ends. When a community collectively recognizes that a person occupying a role has specific powers and obligations, the role exists independently of any particular interaction—it is constituted by the collective agreement and persists as long as the agreement holds. Money, property, marriage, law, scientific authority—all are collective intentional achievements. They exist because communities collectively intend them to exist. Remove the collective recognition, and the institutional reality vanishes. This capacity to participate in collectively constituted realities is uniquely human, emerging developmentally around age three as children begin to enforce norms and protest violations even when not personally affected.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The philosophical foundations of collective intentionality were laid by John Searle in The Construction of Social Reality (1995), which analyzed status functions—roles like 'president' or 'property owner' whose powers