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This year special focus is aimed at exploring relationships between individual mental representations and states and collective intentional states.
Different perspectives and methodologies are encouraged; ranging from neural to psychological, computational (both AI and Alife-oriented), philosophical and logical ones (included formal ontology).


Collective Intentionality and Collective joint mental states or activities exhibit collective intentionality or "aboutness". The contents of those mental states and activities are supposed to be shared by a group of people. Typical examples of collective intentionality are presented by joint intentions and mutual beliefs. People may share collective intentional states or they may take others' thoughts and actions into account when acting.

CollIntIV topics and possible questions are (but are not restricted to) the following:

Individual cognition and collective intentionality
What are the mental individual ingredients of acceptance, agreement, joint commitment?
Which are the relationships with individual beliefs, motives, intentions, commitments, powers, obligations? What are the motivational or epistemic prerequisites for joining collective intentional states?

Social cognition and collective intentionality
Are there necessary specific epistemic rules based for example on empathy, conformity, imitation, authority, etc.? Should the members of a joint act have a specific motivational structure, for example: group identity and the feeling of membership? Or the representation of a collective interest distinct from the personal egocentric utility? Can a group of animals exhibit collective intentionality? Is a theory of mind necessary to attribute intentional attitudes to collective entity? If so, how should it be implemented?

Distributed cognition and collective intentionality
What is the relation between the "extended mind" and the collective intentionality of groups? How can other minds scaffold the individual one? Is the extended mind only in external object and technologies and symbols or can be extended to social interactions and relations? Are collectivities themselves intentional agents?

Normativity and collective intentionality
What is the relationship between collective intentionality and normativity? Are entitled expectations, prescriptions, commitments and duties building blocks of joint intending? Should we necessarily characterise a 'role' within a joint plan or in a group in deontic terms? Are conventions based upon collective acceptance and/or collective acceptance build on conventions? And are conventions just a structure of expectations or do they contain deontic constituents? Which are the cognitive and social prerequisites for prescriptions, permissions, prohibitions?

Part of the conference will be devoted to the crucial issue of the special conventional nature of institutional acts and functions: the so called "Counts As" relation.

Important Dates

Conference registration:
September 10, 2004

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