Why Not Take ‘Shared Intention’ Literally?

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Why Not Take ‘Shared Intention’ Literally?

‘shared’ 1 : Ayesha and her best friend have the same haircut

-> the Simple View

‘shared’ 2 : Ayesha and her brother share a mother

-> plural subject account (Schmid, Helm)

Let’s try to understand, in really minimal terms, what the plural subject account is saying ...

For comparison, properties like mass and volume can have plural subjects.

e.g. our volume, yours and mine, is approx 130 litres.

cf. our intention, yours and mine, is that we paint the house.

To understand the plural subject account, consider the formal features of mental states. Here is a desire ...

The desire has three parts, subject, attitude and content.

The subject is you or me or whoever. (The subject might not be the agent but some part of it. That is, we can imagine that some component of an agent, like her perceptual system or motor system, represents things that she herself does not.)

The attitude is labelled ‘belief’ or whatever. These are usually distinguishes by their causal, explanatory and normative roles. Roughly, what makes a *belief* that Ayesha will cycle up Hármashatár hill different from a *desire* that Ayesha will cycle up Hármashatár hill is that these two things will have different effects on the subject’s actions.

The content is what distinguishes one belief from all others, or one desire from all others. The content is also what determines whether a belief is true or false, and whether a desire is satisfied or unsatisfied.

There are two main tasks in constructing a theory of mental states. The first task is to characterise the different attitudes. This typically involves specifying their distinctive functional and normative roles. The second task is to find a scheme for specifying the contents of mental states.

The second task is to find a scheme for specifying the contents of mental states. Usually this is done with propositions (and we don’t need to worry about that here).

Most philosophers think that shared intention is special with respect to at least one of subject, attitude and content. However they disagree on which, and how.

Corresponding to each of the three things--subject, attitude and content--there are different strategies for trying to explain shared intention.

Strategies for explaining shared intention: \begin{enumerate} \item mess with the subject \citep[e.g.][]{helm_plural_2008,Schmid:2008,schmid:2009_plural_bk,pettit:2006_joint} \item mess with the attitude \citep[e.g.][]{Searle:1990em,gallotti:2013_social} \item mess with the content \citep[e.g.][]{Bratman:1993je,bratman:2014_book} \item mess with all three \citep[e.g][]{gilbert:2014_book} \end{enumerate}

So one strategy for explaining shared intention is to try messing with the subject. I think this is potentially interesting, whether or not it gives us shared intention.

‘shared’ 1 : Ayesha and her best friend share a name

-> the Simple View

‘shared’ 2 : Ayesha and her brother share a mother

-> plural subject account

So I’ve tried to explain, in really minimal terms, what the plural subject account is saying ...

We’ll come back to it later. But for now I want to assume that we cannot take the term ‘shared intention’ literally. On most accounts, shared intentions are neither shared nor intentions.

Can intentions have
plural subjects?

My thought: to answer this question we have to step back and ask, What anchors our thinking about intention? It’s not hard to imagine answers which allow the subjects of intention to be plural.

shared intention

Our current status is this: the failure of the Simple View and other simple, initially attractive ideas about what joint action is indicates that we need to consider full-blown theories about the nature of joint action. These are mostly accounts of shared intention, so I wanted to start by trying to anchor our understanding of what shared intention is by offering a point on which nearly everyone agrees. (The point of agreement is this: shared intention is to joint action at least approximately what ordinary individual intention is to ordinary, individual action)

So still need an account of what shared intention is. The first account we will look at in detail is Michael Bratman’s (well you cover Searle in the seminar so I don’t need to say much about that here). But first I want to step back and cover some basics about the nature of intention very quickly. This will give us a sense of the options for constructing accounts of shared intention.

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Why Not Take ‘Shared Intention’ Literally?

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