Inferentialism and Collective Intentionality (ICI)

Czech-Austrian Joint Research Project 2017 - 2020
funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Grantová agentura České republiky/Czech Science Foundation.

Principal investigators:                  Hans Bernhard Schmid (University of Vienna)                                                                                                                                                  Ladislav Koreň (University of Hradec Králové)

Vienna postdoctoral researcher:  Leo Townsend
Vienna affiliated researcher:         Michael Schmitz

Project proposal:                             PDF

Inferentialism and the analysis of collective intentionality

are two important new approaches or research programs in international philosophical research. Inferentialism analyses the social foundations of meaning and intentionality, arguing that such attitudes as beliefs, desires, and intentions are basically social statuses within a social practice of mutual assignment of commitments and entitlements. Collective intentionality analysis investigates into the ways in which intentional attitudes can be shared, arguing that for a practice to be social, it has to be, in some way, jointly intended.

While these research programs have been tremendously influential in their own respective domains and research communities, they have rarely been brought into contact with each other. This is surprising, because they both place social action and social practices at the core of their accounts, approaching this topic from different and sometimes contrary perspectives. Moreover, it seems plausible to assume that each research program has important contributions to make to problems that arise within the domain of the other program.

The ambition of the project is to fill this obvious lacuna in the current research by establishing an international research network comprising leading researchers with complementary competences in both domains, thereby providing a platform for a constructive critical dialogue between them.