Collective Attitudes and the Sense of Us: Feeling of Commitment and Limits of Plural Self‐Awareness

Abstract

This article explores the particular structure of a collective perspective-the perspective of two or more persons referring to an object, which is sometimes called a "we-perspective." The phenomenon in question seems to be present in various forms of social activities: for instance, in joint action such as when two persons are going to the cinema together to watch a film; or in collective attitudes, when two persons are both intending to go to the cinema together. While the question of what structure underlies an individual perspective of one person has for a long time dominated many discussions in the philosophy of mind (especially debates on self-consciousness and of intentionality) the collective perspective of several persons has become a target of philosophical interest especially in the past few years.Current debates are mainly concerned with the question of what feature may be responsible for the "collectivity" in collective perspectives. 1 In search of an explanation a number of approaches have concentrated on features of the content, the mode, or the subject of collective attitudes. These approaches all have yet in common that they focus on the structure of (more or less) explicitly expressed attitudes of groups. Hans Bernhard Schmid has recently introduced an argument into the discussion that turns to implicit and pre-reflective underpinnings of a collective perspective. According to his claim, central features of a collective perspective are to be explained by an underlying pre-reflective awareness of plural subjectivity. 2 He argues that an explicit representation of "we" that is manifest in collective attitudes and cooperative behavior presupposes a "pre-reflective plural self-awareness," an implicit "sense of us." Schmid construes his argument in analogy to approaches to individual self-consciousness, according to which the capacity of explicit self-representation requires a prereflective or primitive self-awareness. 3 Overall, I am sympathetic to the general idea of analyzing the structure of a given phenomenon in terms of a relevant implicit mode of awareness. However, I think that Schmid's account is problematic in various respects. I will mainly argue that his description of the phenomenon raises difficulties and has some implausible consequences in view of the target features of groups and collective attitudes. (i) In the first part of the article I will sketch the general motivation for explaining the collective perspective of two or more persons. (ii) After presenting Schmid's argument for plural self-awareness, (iii) I will construe two