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Pacherie’s Objection to Bratman on Shared Intention

Pacherie (2013, p. 2) objects to Bratman (2014)’s theory of shared intention on the grounds that not ‘intentional joint actions require the sophistication in ascribing propositional attitudes that Bratman’s account appears to demand.’ What is this objection and what is the evidence for it?

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Notes

This an optional section that may move to a later lecture. It’s here now because I might use it in response to a question.

Pacherie (2013)’s objection slightly modified:

  1. Bratman (2014)’s account[1] requires sophistication in coordinating planning.

  2. There is an age at which children engage in joint action

  3. while lacking this sophistication.

∴ Not all joint action involves the shared intentions Bratman characterises.

If the objection succeeds, it provides reason to prefer Pacherie (2013, p. 18)’s team-reasoning-based account of shared intention over Bratman (2014)’s. This is because the former does not require sophistication in coordinating planning.

Premise 2: One- and Two-Year-Olds Are Capable of Performing Joint Actions

A variety of evidence indicates that although they have quite limited capacities to coordinate their actions with others, even fourteen-month-olds will spontaneously initiate joint action with an adult. Children of around this age also demonstrate awareness in the context of joint action that success requires another person’s contribution.

Carpenter makes a strong case for the claim that one- and two-year-olds are capable of performing joint actions:

‘By 12–18 months, infants are beginning to participate in a variety of joint actions which show many of the characteristics of adult joint action.’ (Carpenter, 2009, p. 388)

As does Brownell:

‘infants learn about cooperation by participating in joint action structured by skilled and knowledgeable interactive partners before they can represent, understand, or generate it themselves. Cooperative joint action develops in the context of dyadic interaction with adults in which the adult initially takes responsibility for and actively structures the joint activity and the infant progressively comes to master the structure, timing, and communications involved in the joint action with the support and guidance of the adult. ... Eager participants from the beginning, it takes approximately 2 years for infants to become autonomous contributors to sustained, goal-directed joint activity as active, collaborative partners’ (Brownell, 2011, p. 200).

Premise 3: One- and Two-Year-Olds Do Not Coordinate Their Plans with Yours

The hypothesis that one- and two-year-olds have shared intentions as characterised by Bratman generates a prediction: since a function of shared intention is to coordinate planning, children of this age should be capable, at least in some minimally demanding situations, of coordinating their plans with another’s.

Is the prediction correct?

There is good evidence that even 3-year-olds’ abilities to coordinate plans are quite limited. For instance:

‘3- and 5-year-old children do not consider another person’s actions in their own action planning (while showing action planning when acting alone on the apparatus). Seven-year-old children and adults however, demonstrated evidence for joint action planning. ... While adult participants demonstrated the presence of joint action planning from the very first trials onward, this was not the case for the 7-year-old children who improved their performance across trials.’ (Paulus, 2016, p. 1059)

And:

‘proactive planning for two individuals, even when they share a common goal, is more difficult than planning ahead solely for oneself’ (Gerson, Bekkering, & Hunnius, 2016, p. 128).

There is a review of evidence that the prediction is falsified in Butterfill (2020, p. Chapter 15).

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Glossary

joint action : Many of the things we do are, or could be, done with others. Mundane examples favoured by philosophers include painting a house together (Bratman, 1992), lifting a heavy sofa together (Velleman, 1997), preparing a hollandaise sauce together (Searle, 1990), going to Chicago together (Kutz, 2000), and walking together (Gilbert, 1990). These examples are supposed to be paradigm cases of a class of phenomena we shall call ‘joint actions’.
Researchers have used a variety of labels including ‘joint action’ (Brooks, 1981; Sebanz, Bekkering, & Knoblich, 2006; Knoblich, Butterfill, & Sebanz, 2011; Tollefsen, 2005; Pettit & Schweikard, 2006; Carpenter, 2009b; Pacherie, 2010; Brownell, 2011; Sacheli, Arcangeli, & Paulesu, 2018; Meyer, Wel, & Hunnius, 2013), ‘social action’ (Tuomela & Miller, 1985), ‘collective action’ (Searle, 1990; Gilbert, 2010), ‘joint activity’ (Baier, 1997), ‘acting together’ (Tuomela, 2000), ‘shared intentional activity’ (Bratman, 1997), ‘plural action’ (Schmid, 2008), ‘joint agency’ (Pacherie, 2013), ‘small scale shared agency’ (Bratman, 2014), ‘intentional joint action’ (Blomberg, 2016), ‘collective intentional behavior’ (Ludwig, 2016), and ‘collective activity’ (Longworth, 2019).
We leave open whether these are all labels for a single phenomenon or whether different researchers are targeting different things. As we use ‘joint action’, the term applies to everything any of these labels applies to.
shared intention : An attitude that stands to joint action as ordinary, individual intention stands to ordinary, individual action. It is hard to find consensus on what shared intention is, but most agree that it is neither shared nor intention. (Variously called ‘collective’, ‘we-’ and ‘joint’ intention.)

References

Baier, A. C. (1997). Doing Things With Others: The Mental Commons. In L. Alanen, S. Heinamaa, & T. Wallgren (Eds.), Commonality and particularity in ethics (pp. 15–44). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25602-0_2
Blomberg, O. (2016). Common Knowledge and Reductionism about Shared Agency. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 94(2), 315–326. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2015.1055581
Bratman, M. E. (1992). Shared cooperative activity. The Philosophical Review, 101(2), 327–341.
Bratman, M. E. (1997). I intend that we J. In R. Tuomela & G. Holmstrom-Hintikka (Eds.), Contemporary action theory, volume 2: Social action. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Bratman, M. E. (2014). Shared agency: A planning theory of acting together. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://0-dx.doi.org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199897933.001.0001
Brooks, D. H. M. (1981). Joint action. Mind, 90(357), 113–119. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2253670
Brownell, C. A. (2011). Early Developments in Joint Action. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2, 193–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0056-1
Butterfill, S. A. (2020). The Developing Mind: A Philosophical Introduction. London: Routledge.
Carpenter, M. (2009a). Just how joint is joint action in infancy? Topics in Cognitive Science, 1(2), 380–392. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2009.01026.x
Carpenter, M. (2009b). Just how joint is joint action in infancy? Topics in Cognitive Science, 1(2), 380–392.
Gerson, S. A., Bekkering, H., & Hunnius, S. (2016). Social context influences planning ahead in three-year-olds. Cognitive Development, 40, 120–131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2016.08.010
Gilbert, M. P. (1990). Walking together: A paradigmatic social phenomenon. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 15, 1–14.
Gilbert, M. P. (2010). Collective action. In T. O’Connor & C. Sandis (Eds.), A companion to the philosophy of action (pp. 67–73). Oxford: Blackwell.
Knoblich, G., Butterfill, S. A., & Sebanz, N. (2011). Psychological research on joint action: Theory and data. In B. Ross (Ed.), Psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 51, pp. 59–101). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Kutz, C. (2000). Acting together. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61(1), 1–31.
Longworth, G. (2019). Sharing non-observational knowledge. Inquiry, 0(0), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2019.1680430
Ludwig, K. (2016). From Individual to Plural Agency: Collective Action. Oxford University Press.
Meyer, M., Wel, R. P. R. D. van der, & Hunnius, S. (2013). Higher-order action planning for individual and joint object manipulations. Experimental Brain Research, 225(4), 579–588. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-012-3398-8
Meyer, M., Wel, R. P. R. D. van der, & Hunnius, S. (2016). Planning my actions to accommodate yours: Joint action development during early childhood. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 371(1693), 20150371. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0371
Pacherie, E. (2010). The phenomenology of joint action: Self-agency vs. Joint-agency. In A. Seemann (Ed.), Joint action. MIT Press.
Pacherie, E. (2013). Intentional joint agency: Shared intention lite. Synthese, 190(10), 1817–1839. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0263-7
Paulus, M. (2016). The development of action planning in a joint action context. Developmental Psychology, 52(7), 1052–1063. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000139
Pettit, P., & Schweikard, D. (2006). Joint Actions and Group Agents. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 36(1), 18–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0048393105284169
Sacheli, L. M., Arcangeli, E., & Paulesu, E. (2018). Evidence for a dyadic motor plan in joint action. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 5027. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-23275-9
Schmid, H. B. (2008). Plural action. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 38(1), 25–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0048393107310877
Searle, J. R. (1990). Collective intentions and actions. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, & M. E. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in communication (pp. 90–105). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sebanz, N., Bekkering, H., & Knoblich, G. (2006). Joint action: Bodies and mind moving together. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(2), 70–76.
Tollefsen, D. (2005). Let’s pretend: Children and joint action. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35(75), 74–97.
Tuomela, R. (2000). Cooperation: A Philosophical Study. Dordrecht: Springer.
Tuomela, R., & Miller, K. (1985). We-Intentions and Social Action. Analyse & Kritik, 7(1), 26–43. https://doi.org/10.1515/auk-1985-0102
Velleman, D. (1997). How to share an intention. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57(1), 29–50.
Warneken, F., Steinwender, J., Hamann, K., & Tomasello, M. (2014). Young children’s planning in a collaborative problem-solving task. Cognitive Development, 31, 48–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2014.02.003
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Endnotes

  1. See Bratman on Shared Intentional Action. ↩︎