1 Communication and Shared Information Marija Jankovic In this paper, I argue for (what I will call) the collectivist model of communication. 1 This model holds that standard Gricean communication is an essentially intentional collective action type (an EIC). 2 Like line dancing or playing catch, it is a type of action that can only be performed by the utterer and the audience acting together intentionally. By Gricean communication, I mean that type of communicative action on which (1) entails (2). (1) U communicated that p. (2) U meant something. On this notion of communication, e.g., Herod’s showing the severed head of John the Baptist to Salome does not count as communicating to her that he is dead. 3 The collectivist model does not hold that all Gricean communication is cooperative—lying is an obvious counterexample. But it does hold that cooperation is the standard for Gricean communication in the sense that all departures from cooperative communication are to be understood as causally or conceptually dependent on it. 4 1 Note the following about the terminology. [1] The collectivist model of communication acknowledges the existence of the audience’s contribution to a communicative action and, therefore, does not identify the action of communicating with the utterance act and does not identify communicative intention tout court with the speaker’s intention. To align with the prevalent usage, however, talk of an unqualified communicative intention is to be understood as concerning the utterer’s communicative intention. On the collectivist model, this intention is a we-intention, while on the individualist model, it is an I-intention. (For an explanation of how I am using the terms we-intention and I-intention see n. 21.) I am explicit when I want to talk of the audience’s communicative intention or a shared communicative intention. [2] Shared, collective, joint, cooperative are used interchangeably in the context of discussions of shared agency. 2 For the concept of an essentially intentional collective action type see (Ludwig, 2013), especially pp. 4- 8. 3 (Grice, 1957). There are other types of information transfer that are called communicative. For instance, on an ordinary sense of the word communicate the honeybee’s dance communicates information about the locations of patches of flowers. But this is not the sense of communication which requires the communicator to mean something by her utterance. Here, our interest is only in the form of communication that entails non-natural meaning. 4 Jonathan Bennett advocated such a model when he suggested that instead of looking for necessary and sufficient conditions for speaker meaning we secure an explanatory base from which we can “easily range out and capture the rest of the territory” (1976, p. 23). On the cooperative model, the base is cooperative communication. Noncooperative forms of communication are understood as the sabotaging or extending of an established practice.