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20. Action / B. Preliminaries of Action / 1. Intention to Act / d. Group intentions

[possibility of joint or group intentions]

6 ideas
20073 Bratman has to treat shared intentions as interrelated individual intentions [Stout,R]
     Full Idea: Bratman has to construe what we think of as shared intentions as not literally involving shared intentions, but as involving interrelating of individual intentions.
     From: Rowland Stout (Action [2005], 7 'Conclusion')
     A reaction: Stout rejects this, for an account based on adaptability of behaviour. To me, naturalism and sparse ontology favour Bratman (1984) . I like my idea that shared intentions are conditional individual intentions. If the group refuses, I drop the intention.
20069 A request to pass the salt shares an intention that the request be passed on [Stout,R]
     Full Idea: When one person says to another 'please pass the salt', and the other engages with this utterance and understands it, they share the intention that this request is passed from the first person to the second.
     From: Rowland Stout (Action [2005], 7 'Shared')
     A reaction: Simple and intriguing. We form an intention, and then ask someone else to take over our intention. When the second person takes over the intention, I give up the intention to acquire the salt, because it is on its way. It's political.
20070 An individual cannot express the intention that a group do something like moving a piano [Stout,R]
     Full Idea: It is unnatural to describe an individual as intending that the group do something together. ...What could possibly express my intention that we move the piano upstairs?
     From: Rowland Stout (Action [2005], 7 'Shared')
     A reaction: Two possible answers: it makes sense if I have great authority within the group. 'I'm going to move the piano - you take that end'. Or, such expressions are implicitly conditional - 'I intend to move the piano (if you will also intend it)'.
20071 An intention is a goal to which behaviour is adapted, for an individual or for a group [Stout,R]
     Full Idea: An individual intention is a goal to which an individual's behaviour adapts. A shared intention is a goal to which a group of people's behaviour collectively adapts.
     From: Rowland Stout (Action [2005], 7 'Shared')
     A reaction: This is part of Stout's externalist approach to actions. One would have thought that an intention was a state of mind, not a goal in the world. The individual's goal can be psychological, but a group's goal has to be an abstraction.
20028 Groups may act for reasons held by none of the members, so maybe groups are agents [Wilson/Schpall]
     Full Idea: Rational group action may involve a 'collectivising of reasons', with participants acting in ways that are not rationally recommended from the individual viewpoint. This suggests that groups can be rational, intentional agents.
     From: Wilson,G/Schpall,S (Action [2012], 2)
     A reaction: [Pettit 2003] is the source for this. Gilbert says individuals can have joint commitment; Pettit says the group can be an independent agent. The matter of shared intentions is interesting, but there is no need for the ontology to go berserk.
20027 If there are shared obligations and intentions, we may need a primitive notion of 'joint commitment' [Wilson/Schpall]
     Full Idea: An account of mutual obligation to do something may require that we give up reductive individualist accounts of shared activity and posit a primitive notion of 'joint commitment'.
     From: Wilson,G/Schpall,S (Action [2012], 2)
     A reaction: [attributed to Margaret Gilbert 2000] If 'we' are trying to do something, that seems to give an externalist picture of intentions, rather like all the other externalisms floating around these days. I don't buy any of it, me.