Two Approaches to Shared Intention: An Essay in the Philosophy of Social Phenomena (original) (raw)

Drawing on earlier work of the author that is both clarified and amplified here, this article explores the question: what is it for two or more people to intend to do something in the future? In short, what is it for people to share an intention? It argues for three criteria of adequacy for an account of shared intention (the disjunction, concurrence, and obligation criteria) and offers an account that satisfies them. According to this account, in technical terms explained in the paper, people share an intention when and only when they are jointly committed to intend as a body to do such-and-such in the future. This account is compared and contrasted with the common approach that treats shared intention as a matter of the correlative personal intentions, with particular reference to the work of Michael Bratman. 3 See Taylor 1985. On 'common knowledge' see Lewis 1969; for a proposal of my own see Gilbert 1989, ch. 4. A good general survey of the often quite technical literature is to be found in Vanderschraaf/Sillari 2007. 4 This part of Taylor's work was an important influence on my own thinking. See Gilbert 1989, preface. Though there I see common knowledge as playing a significant role in human sociality, I saw a more central role for it in the doctoral dissertation 1978 of the same title. The latter is, to my knowledge, the first attempt within analytic philosophy to attempt a general theory of social phenomena in the human world. Central references in the book were the sociologists Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel and Max Weber, and the philosophers Peter Winch and David Lewis. The work of all three sociologists, in particular that of Simmel, can reasonably be thought of as comprising an important part of the philosophy of social phenomena. 5 As it happens, the article was written after the book went to press. 6 Tuomela/Miller 1988 maintains the basic thesis of Tuomela 1984, a substantial treatise which cites Sellars' work as a major influence, along with material in Rosenberg 1980, also inspired by Sellars. More attention has been paid in the literature to the article, which, the authors say, maintains the basic thesis of the book, also represented in Tuomela/Miller 1985. See Tuomela/Miller 1988, 388n 2. 7 Bratman 1999, 9n14, notes the particular influence of Searle 1990. 8 For a recent volume devoted to this relationship see French (ed.) 2006. Other pertinent topics include the problem of political obligation. See e.g. Gilbert 2006. 9 Cf. Gilbert 2008 on the distinct accounts of social convention offered by David Lewis and myself.