Quasi-Psychologism about Collective Intention

This paper argues that a class of popular views of collective intention, which I call “quasi-psychologism”, faces a problem explaining common intuitions about collective action. Views in this class hold that collective intentions are realized in or constituted by individual, mental, participatory intentions. I argue that this metaphysical commitment entails persistence conditions that are in tension with a purported obligation to notify co-actors before leaving a collective action attested to by participants in experimental research about the interpersonal normativity of collective action. I then explore the possibilities open to quasi-psychologists for responding to this research.

The Poetics of the Barricade

This chapter examines the most widely disseminated iconography and symbolism of the popular will during the age of democratic revolution: the poetics of the barricade. While the insurgent barricade dates back to the sixteenth century as a defensive tactic against the forces of state repression, it was only during the nineteenth century that it acquired its distinctly modern and democratic association with popular constituent power. After the July Revolution of 1830, the barricade spread rapidly throughout Europe as a symbolic condensation of revolutionary upheaval. This chapter examines the insurgent barricade as a space that enabled a distinctive form of political subjectivization in emergent democratic contexts, one that not only materialized the boundary of the political—the defining opposition between the people and the state—but that simultaneously enacted a self-organizing manifestation of popular will. The insurgent barricade is the site of the tangible formation of a collective intention.

Jazz

This chapter examines the practices that define jazz as an art form, including its rhythmic character, its harmonic language, and its distinctive approach to melody. Issues of swing, of the creativity of jazz that is found within its harmonic realization and chord voicings, and of the character of melodic invention in jazz are all considered. The nature of improvisation as a form of pathfinding is also discussed, with particular foci including ethical issues in performance and the artistic obligations under which jazz players perform, group attention and the way attention is distributed across players, jazz as a representational art and the ways we can see representational content within it, the special way that collective intention and distributed creativity work within an improvising ensemble, and relations between jazz and another great American contribution, philosophical Pragmatism.

Deep structure in the Acheulean adaptation: technology, sociality and aesthetic emergence

This article considers the adaptive setting and probable origins of human aesthetic capabilities, using evidence of the Acheulean tradition in the last million years, and highlighting the importance of the preceding and enveloping social and technological contexts. Acheulean bifaces, made from about 1.75 to 0.1 Ma, often with an appearance of symmetry, give windows on crucial interlocking aspects of human intellectual evolution. These have been seen as the domains of technology, sociality and aesthetics, following Leroi-Gourhan, or in near-equivalence the ‘technological’, ‘sociological’ and ‘ideological/philosophical’ of L.A. White. These domains can be analysed to have a reality, in the sense that social worlds of the apes far antedate technology, which in turn is generally taken to be far older than a sense of aesthetic appreciation. The bifaces are helpful in illustrating early developments because they can be made only through bringing together a set of concepts linking form, function and technology of manufacture, in a recurring ‘deep structure’. As there are at least 6 to 12 necessary concepts, perhaps significantly more, the artefacts are essentially multivariable or multivariate. They thus impose high cognitive requirements in manufacture, pressing towards effective sequencing of steps so that not too many variables will be involved simultaneously. Support of such a knowledge base has social requirements of shared or collective intention. Biomechanical and functional necessities also exert pressures on concepts: rules maintained by all these requirements entail a notion of ‘appropriateness’ or ‘rightness’ that may have been a prime factor in driving evolution of a sense of aesthetics and even the shaping of moral feelings. As the rules are variably expressed through time and space in the Acheulean, some of the best information comes from seeing how far particular variables are ‘locked’ in relationships which recur to give the impression of deep structure.

Composing for Improvisers: Negotiating the Issue of Individual Voice

This paper addresses one aspect of my Practice as Research project exploring composing for large groups of improvising musicians. It looks at how my practice evolved as a result of contemplating the nature of solo improvisation, together with Garry L. Hagberg’s writings around “Collective Intention.” I discuss a new work for octet that started with small-group improvisations, initially totally freely and then later using thematic material inspired and informed by the initial sessions. By basing the finished compositions on improvisations this way, I aim to bring the creative voice of the individuals into final performance. Not just by employing the compositional techniques of the likes of Graham Collier, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton and many others who allow room for realtime improvised contributions in performance, but by weaving the unique voices of the musicians into the written material as well. In this way, I am challenging the stereotype of a lone composer working away from the ensemble, which the contemporary big band composer often fits.

The ensemble as plural subject

Group jazz improvisation at the highest levels can achieve a kind of cooperative creativity that rises above the sum total of the contributions of the individuals. This phenomenon is widely recognized, but has resisted description beyond metaphors that refer to ‘special chemistry’ and the like. Some recent work in the philosophy of social action, on collective intention and group cognition, and on what has been helpfully called a ‘plural subject’, is brought together in this chapter with a close listening to the Stan Getz Quartet’s performance of the classic standard ‘On Green Dolphin Street’. As with discussions of group action in recent philosophical writings, here it emerges that qualities of the improvised performance are not reducible to individuated intentional content, and the notion of the plural subject provides both an analysis of it and the language for it.

Mistake, Failure of Consideration and the Planning Theory of Intention

Recovery of mistaken payments in the law of restitution is often justified by reference to a vitiated intention and that of payments where there is a failure of consideration by reference to a qualified intention. This paper aims to investigate whether this is a misleading characterisation and suggests that both causes of action should be understood in terms of conditions affecting our intentions. Specifically we should look at the failure of our planning agency, and Michael Bratman’s theory of agency in particular. In cases of mistaken payments we should look at the failure of a background condition to the payment. In such cases to fail to allow recovery is to fail to respect me as an autonomous actor, acting under norms having agential authority for me. In failure of consideration cases the autonomy of the other party is at stake, but we can take this into account by positing not a failure of a condition affecting personal intention, but affecting collective intention. There are different views on what collective intention is and how it should be understood, which may themselves have different implications in terms of the concurrency of mistake and failure of consideration as unjust factors. The paper examines different ways in which collective intentions might fail and how they fit the failure of consideration paradigm.

Ensemble Improvisation, Collective Intention, and Group Attention

Jazz improvisation offers raw material of considerable value for issues in the philosophy of mind, but this material remains insufficiently investigated. Collective intention and distributed group attention have emerged within philosophy in recent years as fruitful areas of study: the long-entrenched dualistic picture of an inner mental event standing behind its physical manifestation has been supplanted by a model of embodied action that is unburdened by a misleading inner/outer dichotomy (so we can now see how an intentional musical work emergeswithin, and not prior to, its physical sound). This makes possible a new focus on a special form of collective intentional action that is not contained within one single mind at one given moment, but rather distributed across a group of individuals engaged in a cooperative, interactively creative performance; cases examined here include John Coltrane, among others.