The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality

The concurrence criterion might be too strict. Some joint action is fluid, forming spontaneously and dissipating just as easily.

The idea is that one cannot “without fault” withdraw from (or substantially modify) shared activity unless every other participant concurs (Gilbert 1990, 2009: 174, 2006: 106–15).

Participants should, of course, display some sensitivity in their behavior to playing a role in shared activity. But to require that they understand it as such would rule out joint action for many who do, in fact, engage in it.

Tuomela, R. (2007) The Philosophy of Sociality: The Shared Point of View, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tuomela, R. (1995) The Importance of Us, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bratman, M. (2014) Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together, New York: Oxford University Press

Bratman, M. (1987) Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

It is a vexed question what modifications those views will have to undergo, if any, to accommodate more complex cases of shared intention involving a large number of participants, authority relations, and so forth.

for me to have

an intention whose content is that that very intention bring it about in accordance with a plan [I] associate[e] with [my] intention at the time of action (that is, with [my] intention-in-action) that [I am] the agent of an event which is our coming to [prepare hollandaise sauce] by way of a shared plan.

(Ludwig 2016: 201)

Like Bratman, but unlike Searle, Ludwig thinks that “what is special about [we-intention] is to be sought in its content rather than mode” (Ludwig 2016: 182).