Introduction
Notes
This lecture depends on you having studied some sections from a previous lecture:
For the minimum course of study, none of this lecture is needed.
This lecture has two parts that you can study independently of each other.
It is quite likely that you will want to consider at most one of the two parts.
The first part
concerns applications of team reasoning to theories of
aggregate subjects and shared intentions.
In this first part we are concerned with how discoveries about
game theory and its limits might be important for philosophical
theories of joint action.
The second part introduces some discoveries in psychology and neuroscience
about the role of motor representation in joint action
and examines their implications for philosophical theories.
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Glossary
aggregate subject :
A subject whose proper parts are themselves subjects. A paradigm example would be a Portuguese man o' war (Physalia physalis), which is an animal that can swim and eat and whose swimming and eating is not simply a matter of the swimming or eating of its constituent animals. Distinct from, but sometimes confused with, a plural subject.
game theory :
This term is used for any version of the theory based on the ideas of Neumann et al. (1953) and presented in any of the standard textbooks including. Hargreaves-Heap & Varoufakis (2004); Osborne & Rubinstein (1994); Tadelis (2013); Rasmusen (2007).
motor representation :
The kind of representation characteristically involved in preparing, performing and monitoring sequences of small-scale actions such as grasping, transporting and placing an object.
They represent actual, possible, imagined or observed actions and their effects.
shared intention :
An attitude that stands to joint action as ordinary, individual intention stands to
ordinary, individual action.
It is hard to find consensus on what shared intention is, but most agree
that it is neither shared nor intention.
(Variously called ‘collective’, ‘we-’ and ‘joint’ intention.)
team reasoning :
‘somebody team reasons if she works out the best possible feasible combination of actions for all the members of her team, then does her part in it’ (Bacharach, 2006, p. 121).
References
Bacharach, M. (2006).
Beyond individual choice. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Retrieved from
http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3272720~S1Hargreaves-Heap, S., & Varoufakis, Y. (2004).
Game theory: A critical introduction. London: Routledge. Retrieved from
http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b2587142~S1Neumann, J. von, Morgenstern, O., Rubinstein, A., & Kuhn, H. W. (1953).
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton, N.J. ; Woodstock: Princeton University Press.
Osborne, M. J., & Rubinstein, A. (1994).
A course in game theory. MIT press.
Rasmusen, E. (2007).
Games and information: An introduction to game theory (4th ed). Malden, MA ; Oxford: Blackwell Pub.
Tadelis, S. (2013).
Game theory: An introduction. Princeton: Princeton University Press.