A Moderate Collectivist Reading of Sellarsian We-Intentions

A lively debate has arisen as to whether we should interpret Sellars as an individualist or a collectivist about we-intentions. Individualism holds that an agent’s we-intending does not depend on the we-intending of the larger group. The collectivist holds, by contrast, that an individual’s we-attitude presupposes the corresponding group attitude. Sellars’s view of we-intentions, and his view on reasoning among intentions, underwent significant shifts during his career. Most recent interpretation of Sellars reads him as an individualist. However, I will argue for a moderate collectivism, one that offers a reconciliation between stronger versions of collectivism and individualism while at the same time insisting on the priority of collectivism. On this account, the paradigm or “reference” case—the case most revealing of the nature of we-intentionality—requires actually shared intentions. Individual unshared intentions are possible, but necessarily exceptional, and parasitic on the paradigm case. Thus, the shared intentions of a group have explanatory priority over an individual’s we-intention, and the latter is dependent on the former. I will conclude that moderate collectivism is not only textually supported by Sellars’s late articles, but that it is the most philosophically sound position as well.