In his Collective Intentions and Actions John Searle argued that having a preintentional sense of others as at least potentially cooperative agents “like me” is a necessary condition of collective intentionality. He also argued, in Rationality in Action, that understanding others qua intentional agents necessarily presupposes rationality because rational constraints are built into the logical structure of intentional phenomena. In this paper we will try to specify further these claims in the light of current debate on mindreading, where other-understanding is spelled out either in terms of automatic, subpersonal simulative mechanisms, or in terms of normative, rational principles. We will argue for a mixed approach to understand the prereflective sense of the other as already involving normative, rational constraints on cooperative behavior.