Social entities only exist in virtue of collective acceptance or recognition, or acknowledgement by two or more individuals in the context of joint activities. Joint activities are made possible by the coordination of plans for action, and the coordination of plans for action is made possible by the capacity for collective intentionality. This paper investigates how primitive is the capacity that nonhuman animals have to create social entities, by individuating how primitive is the capacity for collective intentionality. I present a novel argument for the evolutionary primitiveness of social entities, by showing that the collective intentions upon which these social entities are created and shared are metaphysically reducible to the relevant individual intentions.
The European Community, the Venice International Film Festival, the Vatican, the NBA, and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra are all social entities. And so, this paper argues, are the coalitions that get established during the hunting practices among the chimpanzee populations of the Taï Forest, in the Ivory Coast (Boesch & Boesch-Achermann, 2000;Kaufmann, 2020). These chimpanzees, like other primates, behave in a distinctively sophisticated way: they act jointly. But do these coalitions possess the characteristics necessary for being a social entity? The question at issue in this paper is: can nonhuman animals create social entities? Scholars in social ontology have debated over the primitiveness of collective intentionality. Searle (1995Searle ( , 2010) ) argued that certain features of the capacity to establish social entities are primitive in two ways: first, collective intentionality is evolutionarily primitive, that is, animal species other than humans create and share-at least rudimentary-social entities; secondly, collective intentionality is metaphysically primitive, that is, these social entities are created and shared upon collective intentions which are irreducible to individual distal intentions (Searle, 1990).
Researchers in developmental and comparative psychology found Searle’s notion of collective intention captivating (Rakoczy & Tomasello, 2007;Tomasello, 2014). And by embracing this notion, they advocate that the capacity to share intention, and then to create social entities, is uniquely human.
In this paper I argue that Searle’s two senses of primitive should be analysed separately. I defend his argument for the primitiveness of the capacity for collective intentionality in the first sense but not in the second sense: I argue that (1) collective intentionality exists among nonhuman animals but (2) it is constructed and shared upon collective intentions which are reducible to individual intentions (Bratman, 2014). I also argue that the reduction of collective intentions to individual intentions is necessary for nonhuman animals to be able to create social entities. This novel proposal is articulated both on conceptual and on empirical grounds drawing on Michael Bratman’s “augmented individualist” account of shared agency,1 and on Christophe Boesch’s cognitive ethology research on chimpanzee group behaviour respectively. Throughout the paper I describe the advantages of framing Boesch’s findings within Bratman’s account. In addition, recent studies support the view offered in this paper that chimpanzees have a significant understanding of each other actions and plans (Buttelman et al., 2017;Duguid and Melis, 2020;Heesen et al., 2021a;Melis and Tomasello, 2019). This paper is structured as follows. First, I present Searle’s account of collective intentionality, and, secondly, I discuss how, Rakoczy and Tomasello (2007) critically consider Searle’s view as an over-ascription of certain cognitive faculties to nonhuman creatures. Even if this is not overtly stated in their paper, I infer that the over-ascription of cognitive faculties that they are criticising concerns the capacity for conceptual thinking that is needed to create and share collective intentions.2 However, Searle (2010) argues again for the primitiveness of the capacity for collective intentionality. I shall explain why their criticism that Searle is over-ascribing certain cognitive capacities to nonhuman animals is a legitimate objection, but it is unconvincingly discussed, and a similar stance reiterated in more recent works by Tomasello (2016Tomasello ( , 2020)). For this reason, thirdly, I am going to explain how Searle’s argument for the primitiveness of collective intentionality can be articulated differently: arguably, (1) language and conceptual thought are interdependent, and since non-linguistic animals are capable of thought, it follows that non-linguistic animals can entertain mental states with a non-conceptual content; (2) since the sort of mental states that are involved in those joint activities that instantiate collective intentionality can be non-conceptual in content, then non-linguistic animals are capable of entertaining mental states that can establish social entities. I shall call this the Capacity-based Dependency View (CBDV).
Thus, collective intentionality is evolutionarily primitive: social entities exist among nonhuman animals, but they are constructed and shared upon collective intentions, which are reducible to individual intentions. The latter can be created and shared by creatures that lack the mastery of linguistic capacities. I shall introduce a new-primitive-social entity: call this a hunting team. I’m going to analyse Taï Chimpanzees’ group hunting (Boesch & Boesch-Achermann, 2000) in the light of this concept. By relying on the Planning Theory (Bratman, 2014), I shall explain that the phenomenon of group hunting, and presumably the joint activities of other primates (as recent evidence s
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