Foundations of a we-perspective

Abstract

What enables everyday collective attitudes such as the intention of two persons to go for a walk together? Most current approaches are concerned with full-fledged collective attitudes and focus on the content, the mode or the subject of such attitudes. It will be argued that these approaches miss out an important explanatory enabling feature of collective attitudes: an experiential state, called a “sense of us”, in which a we-perspective is grounded. As will be shown, the sense of us pre-structures collective intentional states and is thus relevant to an adequate understanding of collective attitudes. The argument receives indirect support by insights into distortions of interaction due to implicit stereotypes.