Collective Goals vs Shared Intentions

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

The notion of a collective goal is key to understanding a notion of joint action that does not involve on shared intention. (An outcome is a collective goal of two or more actions involving multiple agents just if the actions are directed to this goal and this is not, or not just, a matter of each action being individually directed to that goal.)

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Notes

The Problem

Brownell neatly describes the problem we face in characterising joint actions as performed by one- and two-year-olds:

‘all sorts of joint activity is possible without conscious goal representations, complex reasoning, and advanced self-other understanding … both in other species and in our own joint behavior as adults, some of which occurs outside of reflective awareness … In studying its development in children the problem is how to characterize and differentiate primitive, lower levels of joint action operationally from more complex and cognitively sophisticated forms’ (Brownell, 2011, p. 195).

Collective Goals

An outcome is a collective goal of two or more actions involving multiple agents if it is an outcome to which those actions are collectively directed (Butterfill, 2016).

For us to have a shared goal G is for G to be a collective goal of our present or future actions in virtue of the facts that:

We each expect the other(s) to perform an action directed to G.

We each expect that if G occurs, it will occur as a common effect of all of our actions (compare Butterfill, 2012; Vesper, Butterfill, Knoblich, & Sebanz, 2010).

Joint Action

Consider a minimally demanding sufficient condition for joint action:

Where an event comprises two or more agents’ actions and the actions have a collective goal in virtue of the agents’ acting on expectations that these actions will have this collective goal, the event is a joint action.

Does the proposed sufficient condition characterise joint actions as performed by children in the first years of life?

References

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. (2012). Joint action and development. Philosophical Quarterly, 62(246), 23–47.

Butterfill, S. A. (2016). Joint action: A minimalist approach. In J. Kiverstein (Ed.), Routledge handbook on the social mind (pp. 357–369). London: Routledge.

Tomasello, M., & Carpenter, M. (2007). Shared intentionality. Developmental Science, 10(1), 121–125.

Vesper, C., Butterfill, S., Knoblich, G., & Sebanz, N. (2010). A minimal architecture for joint action. Neural Networks, 23(8–9), 998–1003. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2010.06.002