Abstract
What is required for several agents to intentionally \(\varphi\) together? I argue that each of them must believe or assume that their \(\varphi\)-ing is a single end that each intends to contribute to. Various analogies between intentional singular action and intentional joint action show that this doxastic single end condition captures a feature at the very heart of the phenomenon of intentional joint action. For instance, just as several simple actions are only unified into a complex intentional singular activity if the agent believes or assumes that there is a single end that each action is directed to, so several agents’ actions are only unified into an intentional joint activity if each agent believes or assumes that there is a single end that each intends to contribute to. Influential accounts of intentional joint action, including Christopher Kutz’s and Michael Bratman’s, implicitly include this condition only if participants must intend to contribute to the end under the same conception. While such a requirement successfully rules out some counterexamples, it also makes the accounts unable to appropriately accommodate and explain clear cases of intentional joint action that they ought to be able to accommodate and explain.
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Notes
I take it to be intuitively plausible that this principle holds in the singular case. As far as I know, it is not explicitly part of any existing theory of complex intentional singular activity (see e.g. Dalton 1995). While the arguments I present here are concerned with intentional joint action, they arguably also lend support to the claim that the principle or condition should be part of a theory of intentional singular activity. As Chant (2006, p. 439) suggests, theories of joint action may shed light on the undertheorised phenomenon of complex intentional singular activity.
Versions of the condition are implicit in Ludwig (2007), Gilbert (2009) and Butterfill (2015). As far as I am aware, the condition is explicitly included in only two accounts, namely Searle’s (2010) and Blomberg’s (2015a). According to Searle, “[i]n order to engage in collective behavior I have to believe (or assume or presuppose) that others are cooperating with me. And their cooperation will consist in their having intentions-in-action that specify the same goal [end] as I have but need not specify the same means to the goal.” (2010, p. 53).
I have avoided formulating the condition in terms of agents believing that each intends to contribute to “the same” goal or end since this may suggest that participants must first think of several ends and then judge that the ends are identical. But each participant may simply think of the end she intends to contribute to as an end that others also intend to contribute to, without making any judgement of identity. Furthermore, it may suggest that the notion of “the same end” must figure in the content of the participants’ intentions. But the requirement is not that each believes that each intends to contribute to the same end as that which the others intend to contribute to, irrespectively of which end this is.
As Smith (2006, pp. 279, 282) puts it, shared intention seems to presuppose “conceptual agreement” as well as “epistemic agreement”.
The Yankees and the Mets are rival baseball teams, both from New York City.
The dilemma remains if one insists on individuating ends with respect to the conceptions under which they are represented. It merely has to be reformulated: The accounts fail to provide sufficient conditions for intentional joint action unless they require that agents intend to contribute to the same end, but if the accounts require this, then they fail to appropriately accommodate and explain many cases of intentional joint action that ought to be accommodated and explained. The solution to the dilemma must then be put in terms of a condition that each participant must believe or assume that there is a single outcome or activity that realises the intended end of each.
If I represent your intended end under the same conception that I represent my own intended end, then I must believe that there is a single end that is intended by each of us. In other words, I am assuming that same conception implies same extension, in the way that same mode of presentation or “aspectual shape” (Searle 1992, p. 155) implies same extension.
For what it is worth, I believe that at least Tuomela and Miller (1988), Miller (2001), Alonso (2009) and Pacherie (2011) need to incorporate the doxastic single end condition. Blomberg (2015b) argues that Butterfill’s (2012) account of goal-directed joint action needs to incorporate a condition similar to the doxastic single end condition.
I add “at least in paradigmatic cases” because I want to leave it open whether there can be cases of intentional joint action where the doxastic single end condition is satisfied but where there in fact is no single end that each intends to contribute to. See Sect. 5.
That Kutz rejects the Simple View is suggested by the claim that an “action is intentional under a description appropriately related (or identical) to a statement of the agent’s goal” (2000b, p. 73). He also argues that an agent can intentionally contribute to a collective end without intending the realisation of that end, which also suggests a rejection of the Simple View (see 2000a, p. 25).
On Kutz’s account, participants need not have common knowledge of each other’s intentions (2000a, p. 6). In fact, they need not even have first-order expectations about each other’s intentions or contributions (2000a, pp. 18–19). But the presence of such common knowledge is of course compatible with intentional joint action.
I am assuming here that us catching both Rustle and Shadow is one state of affairs, namely a conjunctive state of affairs, which consists of the state of affairs of us catching Rustle and the state of affairs of us catching Shadow.
I am grateful to Michael Bratman for presenting me with this objection.
Thanks to Gunnar Björnsson for suggesting this possibility.
A paper by Stephen Butterfill drew my attention to this fact (unpublished manuscript, December 12, 2013). Ludwig’s notion of joint action as “a single event of which there are multiple agents” (2007, p. 364), as well as Smith’s (2011) notion of some agents J-ing “severally”, does not imply that there is such a state of affairs either. In contrast, Butterfill’s notion of a ‘plural activity’ is a notion of several agents’ actions bringing about a state of affairs that each action is individually directed at (2012, pp. 34–46). Gilbert’s notion of a plurality of individuals that “emulate a single body” that Js implies that there is single state of affairs that the group is directed at (2009, p. 180), but it is not obvious to me whether this implies that each individual is directed to it.
Rather, we each believe that the conditions for what Stephen Butterfill calls an "unshared intention" that we <J1, J2> (where J1 ≠ J2) are satisfied (unpublished manuscript, December 12, 2013). An unshared intention is exactly like a Bratmanian shared intention, except that there are distinct states of affairs that the participants intend that they bring about. (I doubt that I would have cooked up the Bratmanian Hunters (Frege-Style) case if I hadn't been exposed to Butterfill's discussion of unshared intentions, so I am deeply indebted to Butterfill here.)
It is true that the formation and persistence of our intentions relies on a belief that at most is a justified true belief, not knowledge. However, condition D does not—on either interpretation—rule out that the intentions and beliefs specified by A–D have been formed in light of beliefs that don’t constitute knowledge.
Why would I intend this? Perhaps I want you to be agentially and not just causally co-responsible for Rustle being caught.
I reject Smith’s (2006, p. 281) claim that “absent clear and public conceptual agreement, the systematic unity of our activities [that is characteristic of shared intentional activities] is blocked.” Smith’s claim is, I believe, based on the idea that an agent forms beliefs about another’s intended end by first grasping under what conception the other represents the end and then working out its extension on the basis of this grasped conception. This idea is mistaken. It is typically only after we have ascribed an intention to another agent that we try to work out—if it is necessary—under what conception the agent represents the intended end (for discussion, see Blomberg 2015b, pp. 99, 100). This is not to deny that inter-personal conceptual divergence can have the potential to block shared intentional activity. For example, if each of us falsely believes that there are two animals in Collective Hunters and we become aware of the fact that I intend that we catch the animal that rustles the leaves and you intend that we catch the animal that casts the shadow, then the belief of each that there is single end that is intended by each might be undermined.
Bratman’s account already contains a condition E. This “mutual responsiveness condition” now becomes condition F. If this condition is also satisfied, then the shared intention results in the participants’ J-ing in such a way that it is their shared intentional activity.
If an argument in Butterfill (2015) is sound, then adding the doxastic single end condition wouldn’t suffice for ruling out such mutual exploitation. I will not address this here, but see Bratman’s (2014, pp. 100–101) response to Christine Korsgaard’s objection that shared intention involves a sort of mutual exploitation.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is in many ways indebted to Stephen Butterfill. I sketched the dilemma that this paper revolves around in my PhD thesis—then without a solution at hand—but Steve made me see the potentially larger scope of it. I have also benefited greatly from his encouraging, generous and lucid comments in response to two earlier draft versions of this paper. For comments, questions and suggestions, I am also grateful to Aurelién Darbellay, Mattia Galotti, Alisa Mandrigin, Alessandro Salice, Thomas Szanto and Michael Wilby, as well as my audiences at XVI Taller d'Investigació en Filosofia (Barcelona, January 2014), Collective Intentionality IX (Bloomington, September 2014), Thinking (About) Groups (Copenhagen, October 2014) and Metaphysics and Collectivity Mini-Workshop (Lund, November 2014). In particular, Michael Bratman's question and comments in Bloomington helped me improve and sharpen the paper. Last but not least, I thank an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions. My work on this paper was supported by a postdoctoral research grant (DFF—4089-00091) from the Danish Council for Independent Research and FP7 Marie Curie Actions COFUND under the 7th EU Framework Programme.
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Blomberg, O. Shared intention and the doxastic single end condition. Philos Stud 173, 351–372 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0496-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0496-z