by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: December 25, 2009

A definition of a collective would be a good place to start an essay on 'the impact of collective intelligence'. Yet there is another question to ask-does the collective have intelligence for itself as a kind of being, or are we referring to a concatenation of the intelligence of individuals. There are other opportunities to provide meanings for our subject of inquiry 'collective intelligence', yet I will stay with those subjects generally in order not to have a world of ideas reduced to simply one opinion.

As philosophers we know that there is a particular subjectivist school such as became popular with the Dewey school of pragmatists and Jean Paul Sartre. Bertrand Russell was a known opponent of the subjectivist, intensionalists or psychological form of philosophizing that he traced much far back in history than Dewey. Romantics and other non-realists that seem to run counter to scientism and objectivity were his horse to whip into renormalization in the traces of progress. Though Russell decried that subjectivist branch of philosophy trapped on a leeward shore behind a reef of solipsism (as Sartre wrote in 'Being and Nothingness' I shall acknowledge the premise. From this point I may ask if collective or pluralist intelligence is possible, or if only my own knowledge can be considered real.

Stipulating the nature of intelligence as known in the first person only for oneself, it is yet possible to enquire into the realm of social intelligence, for with the analytic philosophical tradition that I take seriously enough, and in consideration of the ontological relativity work of W.V.O. Quine that pointed out that lexicons are phenomenal, I readily acknowledge that I did not create my own lexical word units generally. Instead of creating my own language I have learned the English language in the United States with all of the quality content in that ontology that I could add. Perhaps language and the various ontologies containing it with reference meanings is a repository of collective intelligence.With Sartre's 'Critique of Dialectical Reason' in mind I can stipulate that the ossified praxis of others comprises an ongoing collective of meanings and functions that I might avail myself of it sundry ways as is most of use-value for navigation through the collective of social praxis. Such a place in this essay may bring one to feel that in some way the main points of collective intelligence have been avoided. 
So it must be that I will address the issue of the

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