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Framing Joint Action

  • Joint Action: What is Shared?
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Abstract

Many philosophers have offered accounts of shared actions aimed at capturing what makes joint actions intentionally joint. I first discuss two leading accounts of shared intentions, proposed by Michael Bratman and Margaret Gilbert. I argue that Gilbert’s account imposes more normativity on shared intentions than is strictly needed and that Bratman’s account requires too much cognitive sophistication on the part of agents. I then turn to the team-agency theory developed by economists that I see as offering an alternative route to shared intention. I concentrate on Michael Bacharach’s version of team-agency theory, according to which shared agency is a matter of team-reasoning, team-reasoning depends on group identification and group identification is the result of processes of self-framing. I argue that it can yield an account of shared intention that is less normatively loaded and less cognitively demanding.

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Notes

  1. Different authors use different terminologies, speaking of shared intentions, collective intentions, joint intentions or we-intentions. Here I use these labels interchangeably, unless otherwise stated. Similarly, ‘shared agency’, ‘collective agency’, ‘joint agency’ and ‘team-agency’ are used interchangeably, unless otherwise stated.

  2. But see Tuomela (2005) for a rebuttal of Searle’s charge of vicious circularity. Importantly, Tuomela also insists that his and Miller’s analysis was not meant as a reductive analysis of we-intentions. The I-mode/we-mode distinction made by Tuomela (2006, 2007) and his discussion of full-blown we-intentions as involving the we-mode make it clear that his aim is not reductive. Interestingly, there are important commonalities between Tuomela’s notion of we-mode reasoning and Bacharach’s team-reasoning (Hakli et al. 2010).

  3. See also the empirical results of Colman et al. (2008) showing that in social dilemma games most players prefer team-reasoning strategies to strategies supporting unique Nash equilibria, although individually rational players should choose equilibrium strategies.

  4. See, for instance, Gold and Sugden (2007, 2008) for a presentation and discussion of those reasoning schemas.

  5. A range of researchers have argued that infants are sensitive to some aspects of goal-directed activity and discriminate between intentional and accidental actions (Gergely et al. 1995; Csibra 2008; Tomasello and Rakoczy 2003; Woodward 1998; Woodward and Sommerville 2000). Developmental psychologists also widely agree that children’s understanding of desire and intention develops earlier than their understanding of belief (Baron-Cohen 1993; Bartsch and Wellman 1995). There is also evidence that initially children have difficulty clearly distinguishing intentions from desires (Astington 1991, 1994; Perner 1991).

  6. See Sebanz et al. (2006), Sebanz and Knoblich (2009) for discussions of these further mechanisms.

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Acknowledgement

I thank the editors of this special issue, Stephen Butterfill and Natalie Sebanz, and an anonymous referee for their comments. I also thank Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde for introducing me to the literature on team-reasoning, in particular to Bacharach’s work. This research was supported by ANR Grant 07-1-191653 from the French National Research Agency.

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  1. Institut Jean-Nicod, UMR CNRS 8129 (ENS, EHESS), Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29 rue d’Ulm, 75005, Paris, France

    Elisabeth Pacherie

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Pacherie, E. Framing Joint Action. Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 173–192 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0052-5

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