Rational Idiocy, Collective Intentionality, and the Core of the Social

It is characteristic of social facts that they enable agents to form expectations concerning other agents' behavior even if their decisions are interdependent. The denizens of the social world are creatures who, to some degree at least, can count on each other. The clarification of this basic structure of social reality is in the common focus of philosophy and the theory of social science. Based on a critical assessment of some important sociological theories, this paper develops the thesis that a strong conception of the sharing of cognitive and practical attitudes is needed in order to understand what it means to say that there are social facts in the world.