This post is a little more about Michael Tomasello's book A Natural History of Human Thinking. The author explains his meaning of collective intentionality.
Conventional cultural practices can evolve into institutions, their
key feature not just regulating activities, but constituting them. A
human group might make decisions about what to do next by arguing
among themselves. For more difficult decisions, the group might form
some kind of governing council, which would give otherwise normal
individuals abnormal status and powers. Some individuals might become
like chiefs. Thus councils and chiefs are cultural creations. (p.
90).
These institutions and their practices with their acceptance and
enforcement become “objectified” into the way things are, or
ought to be, in the world at large. “Human group-mindedness thus
reflects a profound shift in ways of both knowing and doing.
Everything is genericized to fit anyone in the group in an
agent-neutral manner, experienced as a sense of the “objectivity”
of things, even those we have created. Thus is human joint
intentionality “collectivized”” (p. 92-3).
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