We-Intention

Tuomela & Miller’s (1988) concept: an intention to do something as part of a group — operationally I intend that we φ rather than I intend that I do my part of φ. Tuomela argued that we-intentions are irreducible to the individual intentions of the group’s members; the alternative reductive position is held by Bratman (1992, Shared Cooperative Activity) and Cohen & Levesque (1991), who show that a sufficiently rich structure of recursively-nested individual intentions can capture joint action without invoking a primitive group subject. The dispute is partly empirical, partly definitional, and partly programmatic — the reductive position better fits computational MAS implementations; the irreducibility position better fits descriptive social ontology.

In this vault

• We-intentions
• Shared Cooperative Activity
• Joint Intentions