Joint or Collective Intention

Joint Intentions with Regard to the Future versus Joint Intentions in Acting

Theorists of personal intentions commonly divide these into the following two kinds: intentions with respect to the future and intentions in acting. Personal intentions in acting are an important aspect of much human behavior. Indeed, a large class of words that are applied to such behavior in everyday life depend for their applicability on the presence of a certain intention. Thus, suppose someone's arm rises; this rising of the person's arm will only properly be described as his or her raising it, if he or she intends to raise it.

Although not all personal intentions with respect to the future would naturally be referred to as plans, one with a plan thereby has a personal intention with respect to the future. Such intentions bring an important element of organization into the personal lives of individual human beings.

Joint intentions can also be divided into intentions with regard to the future and intentions in acting. This discussion focuses on the former kind of joint intention.

Questions about Joint Intention

On what is probably the most natural reading of sentences of the form “We intend …” in English, they are not elliptical for sentences of the form “We both intend …” or “We all intend …” Rather, they ascribe an intention to us—a joint intention.

The question arises: What is a joint intention? Is there, indeed, such a thing as a joint intention? Is it really the case that two or more people, as opposed to each of a number of people, can have an intention? Some may think that this cannot be, as it suggests that, in addition to the minds of individual human beings, there are minds of another kind—group minds, if you like. And that may seem impossible. Since the late 1980s, there has been a fair amount of discussion of these questions by philosophers working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition.

Generally, these philosophers do not doubt that an intention can truly be ascribed to us as opposed to me on the one hand and you on the other. There is disagreement, however, on what our having an intention amounts to.

Some of the main issues that have emerged include the following: What is the relationship, if any, of a joint intention to the personal intentions of the participants? More broadly, what is the relationship of a joint intention to specific psychological states of the participants? Can joint intention be understood in terms of the attitudes of the participants at a given time without reference to their past history? Does there need to have been some form of communication between the parties? These and related questions concern the nature or constitution of shared intention.

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