Conférence de M. Alessandro Duranti, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UCLA.
Intersubjective Blues
Linguistic Anthropologist’s Perspective of Analytic Philosophers’ View of Cooperation
Over the last three decades, through the notion of 'collective intention' and its variants (e.g., 'we-intention,' 'shared intention,' 'plural subject') analytic philosophers have expanded their model of individual action to a model of joint action understood as the basis of human cooperation. In so doing, they have simultaneously reinvented intersubjectivity (without engaging with phenomenologists) and proposed a theory of group behavior (without engaging with anthropologists or sociologists). In this presentation, I extend the critique of John Searle’s notion of collective intentionality I presented in my book The Anthropology of Intentions (2015) to include an evaluation of specific definitions and claims made by other analytic philosophers. By integrating a phenomenological approach to embodied intersubjectivity with a detailed analysis of video recorded examples of allegedly cooperative activities (e.g., making a toast, moving a piano together, and playing a tune with a band), I uncover some recurring key properties of cooperative activities that challenge analytic philosophers’ conceptualization of 'doing things together.'
