From Team Reasoning to Shared Intention
Does reflection on team reasoning enable us to understand shared intention and therefore joint action. In this section introduces Pacherie (2013)’s proposal. And highlights four questions for proponents of team-reasoning based accounts of shared intention.
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Notes
Prerequisites
This section depends on you having studied some sections from a previous lecture:
Sources for Further Research
Gold & Sugden (2007) give an account of shared intention involving team reasoning. (Roughly, shared intentions are ordinary individual intentions; the difference is just that the shared intentions are formed as a consequence of team reasoning.)
Pacherie (2013) gives an alternative account of shared intention involving team reasoning.
Gold & Sugden (2007) and Pacherie (2013) both offer objections to Bratman on Shared Intentional Action.
Bratman (1985, p. 96) replies to Gold & Sugden (2007)’s objection (do read the footnotes, that’s where much of the substance is).
On what might prompt agents to engage in team reasoning, Hindriks (2012) critically discusses both Bacharach’s and Sugden’s different views.
Bermúdez (2020, p. 188ff) offers ‘two very significant difficulties for Bacharach’s theory’ of team reasoning. This discussion is not directly relevant to Gold & Sugden (2007) and Pacherie (2013).
Other Approaches to Joint Action
There are a wide range of other approaches to characterising joint action which are not covered in these lectures but are relevant to the syllabus.
Gilbert (1990); Gilbert (2013) develops an alternative to Bratman based on her notion of joint commitment.
It may be that Tuomela & Miller (1988) and Searle (1990)’s response initiated contemporary debate. (Brooks (1981) does not appear to have been considered.)
Many philosophers agree that distinguishing acting jointly from acting in parallel but merely individually involves invoking states of the agents who are acting jointly, often dubbed ‘we-’, ‘shared’ or ‘collective intentions’ Some hold that the states in question involve a novel attitude (Searle, 1990; Gallotti & Frith, 2013). Others have explored the notion that the primary distinguishing feature of these states is not the kind of attitude involved but rather the kind of subject, which is plural (Helm, 2008). Or they may differ from ordinary intentions in involving distinctive obligations or commitments to others (Gilbert, 1992; Roth, 2004).
No all philosophers invoke shared intention to explicate joint action. Petersson (2007, p. 138), for instance, attempts to explicate the distinction between acting jointly and acting in parallel but merely individually ‘in terms of dispositions and causal agency’. See also Chant (2007) for another alternative line.
Miller (2001) is unusual in focussing first on ends (which I label goals) rather than starting with some kind of intention or other mental state.
Ludwig (2007); Ludwig (2016) offers a distinctive approach based on semantic analysis. Although this is sometimes viewed as a variant of Bratman’s theory, Ludwig and Bratman probably disagree on fundamental issues about what a theory of joint action is supposed to achieve. Helpfully, Ludwig (2015) has discussed Bratman.
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