Abstract

My aim is to underline a few limits of an intentionalist approach to cognitive interaction and social ontology, typical of classic cognitive science and social theory. In particular, I shall try to offer a good alternative to the concept of collective intentionality to account for the socio-cognitive interactions taking place in a group of agents, focusing with particular attention on the concepts of cooperation and competition. I claim that collective intelligence phenomena can be explained by means of structures of emergent rules, ‘byproduct’ of the behaviour of agents who pursue their individual and more limited objectives: it is not necessary to establish in advance all the rules of the game to get the development of cooperation or competition dynamics in a group. A stigmergy based approach permits to bypass the difficulty of a conscious planning of rules and the intentionality postulate it entails.