ABSTRACT
Concepts from the study of collective action have been used in explanations of a wide range of phenomena related to language and communication. For example, common knowledge has been used in accounts of common ground (e.g., Stalnaker 2002), speaker meaning (Schiffer 1972), speaker reference (Clark and Marshall 1981), linguistic conventions (Lewis 1969), and insinuation (Pinker 2009); joint attention has been used to explain the evolution of language (Tomasello 2008) and infant word learning (Sabbagh and Baldwin 2005); and joint commitment has been used in accounts of conversational context (Gilbert and Priest 2013) and joint meaning (Carassa and Colombetti 2009). As this list shows, it would be difficult to do justice in the space allotted to all the ways in which research into collective intentionality promises to advance our understanding of language. In this chapter, I focus on a core element of the theory of collective intentionality, the theory of collective intentional action, and its relation to the study of language.
