author: Frol Revin
Urgency of the research. Collective activity as a specific research area has long been a subject of intensive socio-philosophical reflection. The shift in the role of social integration, a dynamic metamorphosis of the societal relations paradigm, an emergence of novel forms of cooperative endeavors coupled with new modes of globalized social partnership motivates to approach this quickly growing field relying on a variety of innovative research techniques and methodological tools.
Target setting. Collective intentional attitudes are cross-cutting in our lives. Such cooperative teleological undertakings form the core of specialized studies’ interest in exploring their critical relevance for the foundation and functioning of social reality. The author, thus, tasks himself with providing a scrupulous overview of the variegated modes of joint activity which allow us to view our personality through the prism of social group impact, shape and evaluate the scope of our praxeological interconnectedness, fulfill our civic duties and responsibilities while performing numerous sustainability-driven social roles and functions.
Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. Critical reflection pertaining to the general foundations of the issues at hand is presented in the works of the following Ukrainian researchers: V. Andrushenko, Y. Boyko, M. Boychenko, L. Gubernskiy, A. Yermolenko, A. Yermolaev, V. Lisoviy, M. Mikhalchenko, V. Navrotskiy, M. Nadolniy, V. Nikolaev, N. Petruk, O. Polishuk and others.
The research objective. The aim of this work is to shed light on the previously understudied within Ukrainian social philosophy phenomenon of “collective intentionality” by analyzing major stances in the current socio-philosophical debate pertaining to the ontological status of collective activity, individual and shared praxeological dimension of intentional manifestations, various of cooperative acts, states and modalities.
The statement of basic materials. The article examines the dominant paradigm and current research state of the theoretical and practical dimension of cooperative behavior based on the notion of “collective intentionality” scrutinized within the framework of analytic social philosophy. Accordingly, the goal was to elaborate foundational normative, socio-ontological and psychological aspects of the debate around the underlying nature of the mechanisms of content, modality, and subjects of shared praxeological undertakings, outline major points of agreement, controversy and contention in positions and arguments of the principal sides and their proponents.
Conclusions. The paper's findings can be interpreted to support a non-distributive we-mode conjecture which requires a thorough mereological account of cooperation to complement an overly individualistic I-mode account of shared collaborative undertakings prevalent in Anglo-Saxon social science. Thus, if assessed through the lens of the individual self-interest mode almost half of the standard experiment participants choose to cooperate by employing we-reasoning approaches, thereby proving that a team of people can intend to act in rational ways achieving Pareto-optimal outcomes. A further critical deficiency of such models is their atomistically hermetic methodology which in spite of producing immediate logical gains nonetheless completely disregards a host of crucial real-life cumulative factors of cooperation, viz. cultural embeddedness, communal trust and reciprocity that build up and are shaped over time.
Keywords: intentionality, collectivism, individualism, internalism, externalism, instrumentalism, holism, reductionism, naturalism, praxeology, rational choice theory, cooperation, synergy, shared intentions
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