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Intentional joint agency: shared intention lite

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Abstract

Philosophers have proposed accounts of shared intentions that aim at capturing what makes a joint action intentionally joint. On these accounts, having a shared intention typically presupposes cognitively and conceptually demanding theory of mind skills. Yet, young children engage in what appears to be intentional, cooperative joint action long before they master these skills. In this paper, I attempt to characterize a modest or ‘lite’ notion of shared intention, inspired by Michael Bacharach’s approach to team–agency theory in terms of framing, group identification and team reasoning. I argue that the account of shared intentions this approach yields is less cognitively and conceptually demanding than other accounts and is thus applicable to the intentional joint actions performed by young children. I also argue that it has limitations of its own and that considering what these limitations are may help us understand why we sometimes need to take other routes to shared intentions.

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Notes

  1. For a discussion of various forms of emergent coordination, see Knoblich and Sebanz (2008) and Knoblich et al. (2010).

  2. It is important to note that in using Butterfill’s notion of a shared goal in order to characterize a weaker form of intentional joint action, I go beyond what Butterfill (2012) commits himself to. His objective in this paper is to provide an account of a kind of joint action that does not involve shared intentions. He takes no stand on whether or not the kind of joint action he is interested in qualifies as intentional.

  3. Note that for there to be intentional joint actions in the strong sense implied by requirement (6), it isn’t always necessary that requirements (4) or (5) be satisfied. For instance, Searle (1990) considers as an instance of intentional joint action the case where business school graduates all get together on graduation day and form a pact to the effect that they will all go out together and help humanity by way of each pursuing his own selfish interests and not cooperating with the others. This case satisfies requirement (6), but neither requirement (4) nor requirement (5). It is also possible that a joint action meet requirements (4) and (6) but not (5), as when all the action coordination needed to achieve the joint goal is taken care of by emergent coordination processes.

  4. 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.

  5. See, for instance, Jeannerod (1997).

  6. See, for instance, Apperly and Butterfill (2009), Baillargeon et al. (2010), Perner and Ruffman (2005).

  7. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, players have a choice between either defecting or cooperating. The payoff matrix is constructed in such a way that defect is the dominant strategy each player (i.e., regardless of what the opponent does, defect earns a higher pay-off than cooperate). On orthodox game theory, it will therefore be rational for each player to choose defect. Yet, the players would both be better off, if they had both chosen cooperate. A substantial number of people see that, since in experiments in which people play the Prisoner’s Dilemma for money, anonymously and without repetition, between 40 and 50 % of the participants choose cooperate (Sally 1995). In the game of Hi-Lo, players must choose between two actions, \(a\) and \(b\). They receive something only if they both choose the same, but they get more if they both choose \(a\) then if they both choose \(b\). This puzzle is, if anything, even more puzzling than the first one. It is intuitively obvious that the rational choice for both players is \(a\). Yet, orthodox game theory has no explanation of what makes the choice of \(a\) rational. All the theory says is that if either expects the other to play \(a\), then \(a\) is the rational thing to do, but also that if either expect the other to play \(b\), then \(b\) is the rational thing to do.

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

  9. See Bacharach (2006, Chap. 2) for a review of social psychology work on group identification and Hindriks (2012) for an assessment of the empirical adequacy of the team–agency theorists’ appeal to group identification in explaining cooperation.

  10. This aspect of team–agency theories remains under-developed. Bacharach (2006) proposes that action profiles should be ranked according to a Paretian criterion, while Sugden (2003) suggests that they should be ranked by summing up the payoffs of the team members. See Hakli et al. (2010) for a discussion of group utility functions and group preferences.

  11. In contrast, according to Sugden’s assurance theory (Sugden 1993), the purpose of the theory of team reasoning is to really explain how people cooperate for mutual advantage. It follows that Sugden’s agents will endorse team reasoning only if they have assurance that other team members also endorse team reasoning. Assurance therefore functions as a rational precondition for team reasoning on Sugden’s account.

  12. This, of course, is not to say that adopting one frame over another in given situations cannot be externally or evolutionary rational (be to the agent’s benefit and enhance fitness). Indeed, in his book Bacharach surveys a body of evolutionary theory that provides evidence that humans have evolved to be cooperators and that the psychological mechanisms that support group identification are the proximate mechanisms that make cooperation possible.

  13. Note that Bacharach was in a sense well aware of these problems since he developed a theory of circumspect team reasoning in order to deal with such cases. Bacharach (1999) introduces the idea that, in coming to frame a situation as a problem for us, an individual also gains some sense of how likely it is that another individual would frame it in the same way. In circumspect team reasoning, an individual who group-identifies will then maximize the expected value of the group pay-off function given the probabilities that other group members identify or fail to identify to the group. There seems to be some tension, however, between Bacharach’s theory of circumspect team reasoning and his claim that group-identification and team reasoning are a matter of framing and hence cannot be a matter of choice. It seems that if one can be aware that a situation can be framed in different ways, which is why circumspection is possible and needed, then it should also be possible to decide which frame to adopt.

  14. For a discussion of group preferences, see Tuomela (2007, Chap. 7).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper from Stephen Butterfill, from participants at the First PML Conference in Stockholm in September 2011, and from two anonymous referees.

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  1. Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29 rue d’Ulm, 75005 , Paris, France

    Elisabeth Pacherie

  2. IEC-ENS, EHESS, CNRS, Paris, France

    Elisabeth Pacherie

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Pacherie, E. Intentional joint agency: shared intention lite. Synthese 190, 1817–1839 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0263-7

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