Collective Intentionality: a Human - Not a Monkey - Business

In Making the Social World, Searle makes the same claim he made in 1995: that “Human beings along with a lot of other social animals, have the capacity for collective intentionality” (Searle, 2010, p. 43). In this paper, I aim to show that Searle's overattribution' of collective intentionality to non-human animals is unjustified. Firstly, I briefly reconstruct and augment Tomasello & Rakoczy's (2007) criticism that Searle overemphasises the primitiveness of the notion of collective intentionality. Secondly, I will outline a cross-species analysis for the emergence of cooperative behaviour. Such an approach suggests that we resist Searle'soverattribution. Thirdly, I argue that Searle's six conditions of adequacy for any account of collective intentionality are incompatible with his attribution of collective intentionality to non-human animals. Finally, I conclude by noting that Searle's overattribution has important consequences for his system, as it implicates that human uniqueness begins with institutional reality rather than with collective intentionality and social ontology.