The everyday concept of a social group is approached by examining the concept of going for a walk together, an example of doing something together, or "shared action". Two analyses requiring shared personal goals are rejected, since they fail to explain how people walking together have obligations and rights to appropriate behavior, and corresponding rights of rebuke. An alternative account is proposed: those who walk together must constitute the "plural subject" of a goal. The nature of plural subjecthood, the thesis (...) that social groups are plural subjects, and the relation of these ideas to Rousseau's and Hobbes 's, are briefly explored. (shrink)

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and (...) evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention. Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition. Key Words: collaboration; cooperation; cultural learning; culture; evolutionary psychology; intentions; shared intentionality; social cognition; social learning; theory of mind; joint attention. (shrink)

Two partners plan to rob a bank. The first recruits a driver while the second purchases a shotgun from a gun dealer. The driver knows he’s taking part in a robbery, although not a bank robbery. The gun dealer should have checked his customer’s police record before the sale, but failed to do so. The bank is robbed, a guard is killed, and the robbers escape, only to be caught later. “They committed bank robbery,” a prosecutor will say. But does (...) “they” include the gun dealer, whose lax standards made the robbery possible? “They conspired to rob the bank”—but does “they” here include the driver, who didn’t know it was a bank they were robbing? “They killed a bank guard”—but does it matter which robber inside the bank pulled the trigger? (shrink)

Collective action is a widespread social phenomenon, ranging from intricate duets to routinized, hierarchical cooperation within bureaucratic structures. Standard accounts of collective action (such as those offered by Bratman, Gilbert, Searle, and Tuomela and Miller) have attempted to explain cooperation in the context of small-scale, interdependent, egalitarian activities. Because the resulting analyses focus on the intricate networks of reciprocal expectation present in these contexts, they are less useful in explaining the nature of collective action in larger or more diffuse social (...) contexts. I argue here instead for a minimalist account of collective action, which explains collective action across a broad range of contexts by reference to individuals’ overlapping “participatory intentions,” i.e., intentions to do one’s part in a collective act. Participatory intentions are, formally, simply species of individual instrumental intentions, although their objects make irreducible reference to collective acts. (shrink)

Cases of modest sociality are cases of small scale shared intentional agency in the absence of asymmetric authority relations. I seek a conceptual framework that adequately supports our theorizing about such modest sociality. I want to understand what in the world constitutes such modest sociality. I seek an understanding of the kinds of normativity that are central to modest sociality. And throughout we need to keep track of the relations—conceptual, metaphysical, normative—between individual agency and modest sociality. In pursuit of these (...) theoretical aims, I propose that a central phenomenon is shared intention. I argue that an adequate understanding of the distinctiveness of the intentions of individuals allows us to provide a construction of attitudes of the participants, and of relevant inter-relations and contexts that constitutes shared intention. I explain how shared intention, so understood, differs from a simple equilibrium within common knowledge. And I briefly contrast my views with aspects of views of John Searle and Margaret Gilbert. (shrink)

Shared agency is of central importance in our lives in many ways. We enjoy engaging in certain joint activities with others. We also engage in joint activities to achieve complex goals. Current approaches propose that we understand shared agency in terms of the more basic phenomenon of shared intention. However, they have presented two antagonistic views about the nature of this phenomenon. Some have argued that shared intention should be understood as being primarily a structure of attitudes of individual participants (...) and their interrelations (Bratman, Searle, Tuomela and Miller). Others have claimed that shared intention should be regarded as being primarily a normative transaction which gives rise to interpersonal obligations (Gilbert). In contrast to these approaches, I propose a compromise view. I argue that shared intention involves a complex socio-psychological structure which ensures, in the absence of special circumstances, the existence of relevant moral obligations. My argument involves two main steps. First, I show that shared intention includes important relations of mutual reliance between the participants. Then, I argue that the existence of these relations of mutual reliance in shared intention helps us explain why, failing special circumstances, shared intention generates those obligations. This provides, in my view, a solution to the vexed question of the relation between shared intention and interpersonal obligations. (shrink)

This collection of essays by one of the most prominent and internationally respected philosophers of action theory is concerned with deepening our understanding of the notion of intention. In Bratman's view, when we settle on a plan for action we are committing ourselves to future conduct in ways that help support important forms of coordination and organization both within the life of the agent and interpersonally. These essays enrich that account of commitment involved in intending, and explore its implications for (...) our understanding of temptation and self-control, shared intention and shared cooperative activity, and moral responsibility. The essays offer extensive discussions of related views by, among others, Donald Davidson, Hector-Neri Castañeda, Christine Korsgaard, Harry Frankfurt, and P. F. Strawson. This collection will be a valuable resource for a wide range of philosophers and their students. (shrink)

The discovery of mirror neurons has given rise to a number of interpretations of their functions together with speculations on their potential role in the evolution of specifically human capacities. Thus, mirror neurons have been thought to ground many aspects of human social cognition, including the capacity to engage in cooperative collective actions and to understand them. We propose an evaluation of this latter claim. On the one hand, we will argue that mirror neurons do not by themselves provide a (...) sufficient basis for the forms of agentive understanding and shared intentionality involved in cooperative collective actions. On the other hand, we will also argue that mirror neurons can nevertheless play an important role in an account of the production and understanding of joint action, insofar as they provide the basic constituents of implicit agent-neutral representations and are useful elements in a process of online mutual adjustment of participants' actions. (shrink)