Social intentions and irreducibly social goods: Comments on Charles Taylor

Peter Gärdenfors

Pp. 91-96 in Rationality, Individualism and Public Policy, ed. by G. Brennan and C. Walsh, Centre for Research on Federal Financial Relations, Canberra. Revised version with the title "The social stance" published in Protosoziologie, Heft 6, 1994, pp. 91-94.

Abstract

I argue that it is necessary to go beyond Dennett's notion of the "intentional stance" and adopt a social stance to certain phenomena. I introduce the notion of a social intention, which is an intention that cannot be replaced by individual intentions. The assumption of such intentions are helpful for understanding language and other social conventions. At the end of the article, I also discuss the relation between social intentions and social values.

The paper is available in PostScript format (get).

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