Dr Mattia Gallotti, University of London "Shared Intentionality and Social Understanding"

Abstract: Human life flourishes in a world of common habits and perspectives. In an influential paper, Jane Heal (2013) argued that considerations about the relevance of acts of shared intentionality, or ‘co-cognition’, suggest that the notion of mental content recommended by (social) anti-individualism enjoys pride of place in accounts of psychological knowledge. This claim draws upon a body of literature in social ontology and social cognition, which has improved understanding of the mechanisms and processes whereby people achieve knowledge of things by sharing mental resources. According to Heal, in discussions of the nature and mechanism of folk-psychological attributions, in particular, talk of shared mental states slips into natural descriptions of the externality of thought. I shall challenge this view by providing a different interpretation of the scope and philosophical significance of acts of shared intentionality for psychological knowledge. There are two meanings to claims about shared intentionality: although both are consistent with the anti-individualistic notion of content, neither recommends anti-individualism as the privileged view of the content of thoughts about others’ thoughts.