Comments and criticism: Collective intentions and game theory

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 106, Issue 5, 2009, Pages 292-300

  Tuomela, Raimo ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI   (Finland)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 68549087112     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil200910658     Document Type: Note

References (11)

1. See Raimo Tuomela and Kaarlo Miller, "We-Intentions," Philosophical Studies, LIII (1988): 367-89
2. This paper is based on A Theory of Social Action (Boston: Reidel, 1984), but it improves on it concerning some details. It was written for presentation at the American Philosophical Association fall meeting in 1985
3. John Searle's flawed discussion of the Tuomela-Miller paper has been a central source of misunderstandings in the literature - see below and Searle, "Collective Intentions and Actions," in Philip Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha Pollack, eds., Intentions in Communication (Cambridge: MIT, 1990), pp. 401-15
4. See Gold and Sugden, "Collective Intentions and Team Agency," this JOURNAL CIV, 3 (March 2007): 109-37
5. As I have emphasized especially in my later works, this joint intention provides a group reason for them to intend to perform their parts in the joint action X that is purported to satisfy the joint intention and to the performance of which the participants are collectively committed (because of their jointly intending X); see especially Tuomela, The Philosophy of Sociality: The Shared Point of View (New York: Oxford, 2007). A joint intention in the sense meant here is a we-mode joint intention that satisfies also the strong collectivity condition according to which, on the basis of the participants collectively having accepted the joint intention for their group, it is necessarily the case that when the intention is satisfied for any of the group members it is satisfied for all of them. (This is a kind of strong "being in the same boat" type of condition that is not to be confused with the participants just happening to share the same goal.) When GS speak about "collective intention" they seem to mean what I mean by the term "joint intention." Sometimes they say "collective intentionality" in a similar context (for example, on GS 111). This, however, is not an acceptable term here because not only joint intentions but also, for example, joint wants, beliefs, emotions, and actions express collective intentionality (or "aboutness")
6. From a logical point of view we may treat intentions as predicates. Letting 'JI' stand for joint intention and 'WI' for we-intention, we have roughly this equivalence in the case of two agents A and B and an action X: JI(A,B,X) <-> WI(A,X) & WI(B,X) & MB(WI(A,X) & WI(B,X)), where 'MB' stands for mutual belief. However, this logical formulation is somewhat misleading (although truth-functionally correct), as it ignores the fact that a we-intention intentionally (in the content of a we-intention) presupposes the existence of the joint intention (see Tuomela, The Philosophy of Sociality, chapter 4, for discussion of this circularity problem). An intention attributed to a group G, namely, I(G, X) is to be distinguished from the joint intention of its members in general, although in the case of simple unstructured, egalitarian groups, the group intends if and only if its members do
7. See Tuomela, A Theory of Social Action, chapter 5, and for a newer account with an emphasis on functioning as a group
8. In my later work a somewhat enriched formulation has been used - for example, in Tuomela, The Importance of Us: A Philosophical Study of Basic Social Notions (Stanford: University Press, 1995)
9. See the discussion in Searle, "Collective Intentions and Actions,"
10. and my responses in, for example, Tuomela, The Importance of Us, chapter 3, on Searle's interpretation of the TM paper
11. and in The Philosophy of Sociality, chapter 4, on the circularity problem