Introduction: Beyond the Big Four and the Big Five

In the past two or three decades it has become increasingly popular to analyze collective actions in terms of collective intentions. This volume brings together chapters which address issues such as how individuals succeed in maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action, whether groups can actually believe propositions or whether they merely accept them, and what kind of evidence, if any, disciplines such as cognitive science and semantics provide in support of irreducibly collective states. A number of chapters explore the interplay between individual and collective rationality in order to shed new light on the alleged discontinuities between these levels. They make abundantly clear that it is no longer an option simply to juxtapose analyses of individual and collective level phenomena and maintain that there is some discrepancy.