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A committee's passing a resolution may be rational or irrational. Groups of people perform acts that are evaluable for rationality. This observation raises two philosophical questions: What makes a collective act evaluable for rationality? What principles of rationality govern collective acts? Collective rationality extends principles of evaluation from individuals to groups. However, because groups of people lack minds, their acts' evaluability does not require collective preferences, beliefs, or intentions. The evaluability of a group's act originates in the freedom of the group's members and their control over acts constituting the group's act. Common principles of collective rationality, such as efficiency, require grounding in general principles of rationality. Game theory demonstrates the origin of principles of collective rationality from principles governing all agents.

In this concluding chapter, the author makes a sort of experiment in imagining his argument about the history of poetry as a prescription for reading rather than writing. The author addresses the two concerns he has raised in this book: to think about the nature or structure of collective intentions, and to offer a defense of a kind of intense and deliberated inattention to poems. The discussion is partly autobiographical, taking the author's own use and abuse of poetry as a case study. The author reflects on how he sought to read a poem, A. R. Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year with another person, but at a distance—“together apart.” He explains how reading poems together may promote an attitude of indifference toward the specificity of any poem in the greater interest of solidarity with other persons. He also proposes an alternative to models of poetic community built around conversation, interpretation, or translation.

The central aim of this chapter is to establish that collectives may have intentions and are capable of collective action. This claim is crucial to the broader claim that moral responsibility operates at both the individual and the collective level, which in turn rests on the claim that intentional action also operates on two levels, the individual and the collective. This chapter distinguishes between two types of collective agents—organizations and goal-oriented collectives—and gives an account of their respective intentional structures. It defends the view that collective intentions, from which the agency of collectives derives, are not simply collections of individual intentions, and collective actions are not simply collections of individual actions. Collective actions are the products of the intentions of collectives.

This chapter introduces new arguments for the thesis that judges have all-things-considered reasons to obey nonpermissive rules. These arguments appeal to the systemic effects of deviating from the law: effects on individuals other than parties to the case. The point of departure is Alan H. Goldman’s defense of restrictive rule. As Goldman shows, judges are in a special kind of collective action problem: a multiplayer moral-moral prisoner’s dilemma. This chapter suggests that judges who possess good moral judgment constitute a group—Group O—the members of which share two collective intentions: to minimize suboptimal results throughout their legal system and to avoid reaching suboptimal results themselves. They can fulfill the second intention by deviating from the law in suboptimal-result cases, but a pattern of deviating from the law, even in such cases, causes mimetic failure—other judges will imitate Group O and deviate in optimal-result cases, thereby reaching suboptimal results. At some point the rate of deviation by Group O could encourage so much deviation by other judges that the suboptimal results reached by those judges would outweigh the suboptimal results avoided by Group O. That point is defined as the “deviation density threshold.”

Philosophical approaches to collective moral responsibility fall into two main categories, individualist and collectivist. Individualists think of it as a reductive concept; collectivists think of it more holistically. Having argued in Chapter 1 that collectives’ intentional actions flow from their intentions, this chapter claims that we may therefore understand collective moral responsibility as operating at a different level from individual responsibility and as being justified by appeal to collective intentions and the actions to which they give rise. Collective moral responsibility is not a function of the moral responsibility of individuals. Instead, it is a function of the agency of collectives. This chapter explains, motivates, and defends a collectivist account of collective moral responsibility.

Collective intentions as joint intentions, we-intentions, and group agent’s intentions are studied in this chapter, and detailed characterizations of both we-mode and I-mode cases are given. Some other accounts in the literature are commented on as well. The chapter argues for the conceptual irreducibility of we-mode intentions and other we-mode states to their I-mode counterparts.

This chapter introduces a new theory of collective intentions that focuses on the dynamic process of maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action. The chapter draws on empirical findings from cognitive science concerning the way in which individuals maintain control over their bodily actions over time. The chapter's ambition is to explicate the dynamics of collective action in considerable detail in a way that is less cognitively demanding than rival theories. It argues that a dynamic theory of collective intention serves to improve our understanding of the phenomenology of collective action and the experience of joint control.

This chapter deals with the concept of collective intentionality as a continuation of examining the logical construction of intentionality, with emphasis on the collective aspect of human society and social ontology. It determines how collective intentionality transpires in the mind and is formed into either a collective prior intention or collective intention-in-action. Collective intentionality is not simplybased on the plurality of minds, as opposed to intentionality coming from a single individual; that being said, the chapter provides a set of prerequisites in order to fully grasp the nature of collective intentionality, along with a discourse on various examples and interpretations.

Group jazz improvisation at the highest levels can achieve a kind of cooperative creativity that rises above the sum total of the contributions of the individuals. This phenomenon is widely recognized, but has resisted description beyond metaphors that refer to ‘special chemistry’ and the like. Some recent work in the philosophy of social action, on collective intention and group cognition, and on what has been helpfully called a ‘plural subject’, is brought together in this chapter with a close listening to the Stan Getz Quartet’s performance of the classic standard ‘On Green Dolphin Street’. As with discussions of group action in recent philosophical writings, here it emerges that qualities of the improvised performance are not reducible to individuated intentional content, and the notion of the plural subject provides both an analysis of it and the language for it.

This chapter argues that group intention (also called “shared” or “collective” intention) is often determined by more than the attitudes of the members. Bratman, List, and Pettit share the assumption that the model for the practical activity of groups is the practical activity of individuals. The functional roles that group intention plays for groups are analogous to the roles that individual intention plays for people. Intention is part of a system of practical activity, involving intention, planning, deliberation, and action. The chapter ties intention to action, showing that when a system of practical activity is working properly, intentions will issue in corresponding actions. The chapter discusses three kinds of constraints on group action, and how these percolate into group intention. In each case, the intention of the group is determined by more than the intentions of the members. The chapter discusses similarities and differences between group intention and individual intention.

Chapter 10 presents an analysis of ‘intentions for mutual benefit’. This builds on theories of team reasoning, but uses opportunity-based rather than preference-based concepts and makes minimal assumptions about people’s rationality. In a population of people who act on intentions for mutual benefit, those actions tend to reproduce practices that provide opportunities for mutual benefit. Intentions for mutual benefit are neither self-interested nor altruistic. Such intentions do not lead to the Paradox of Trust, and can be expressed in ordinary market behaviour. If market participants act on intentions for mutual benefit, market relationships are fundamentally cooperative, contrary to the virtue-ethical critique considered in Chapter 9.

Building a working spoken natural language dialog system is a complex challenge. It requires the integration of solutions to many of the important subproblems of natural language processing. This chapter discusses the foundations for a theory of integrated dialog processing, highlighting previous research efforts. The traditional approach in AI for problem solving has been the planning of a complete solution. We claim that the interactive environment, especially one with variable initiative, renders such a strategy inadequate. A user with the initiative may not perform the task steps in the same order as those planned by the computer. They may even perform a different set of steps. Furthermore, there is always the possibility of miscommunication. Regardless of the source of complexity, the previously developed solution plan may be rendered unusable and must be redeveloped. This is noted by Korf [Kor87]: . . . Ideally, the term planning applies to problem solving in a real-world environment where the agent may not have complete information about the world or cannot completely predict the effects of its actions. In that case, the agent goes through several iterations of planning a solution, executing the plan, and then replanning based on the perceived result of the solution. Most of the literature on planning, however, deals with problem solving with perfect information and prediction. . . . Wilkins [Wil84] also acknowledges this problem: . . . In real-world domains, things do not always proceed as planned. Therefore, it is desirable to develop better execution-monitoring techniques and better capabilities to replan when things do not go as expected. This may involve planning for tests to verify that things are indeed going as expected.... The problem of replanning is also critical. In complex domains it becomes increasingly important to use as much as possible of the old plan, rather than to start all over when things go wrong. . . . Consequently, Wilkins adopts the strategy of producing a complete plan and revising it rather than reasoning in an incremental fashion.