The Team Reasoning Account

This chapter explains the Team Reasoning account of shared intention according to which what is special about participatory intentions is that the members of the group arrive at the intention to do their parts by taking as their initial goal the promotion of the group good rather than their own good. The Team Reasoning account aims to explain individual agents who are team reasoning can solve problems for standard decision theory such as the Prisoner's Dilemma and the HiLo Game in which there are two equilibria one of which is better than the other. The Team Reasoning account is motivated by a criticism of psychology accounts like Bratman's on the grounds that they yield the wrong conclusion in the Hawk-Dove game in certain scenarios, namely, that the participants share an intention, when intuitively they do. The chapter argues that the criticism misses the mark because it does not distinguish between an agent believing that another will do something in coordination with her and intending to do so. It also argues that the Team Reasoning account is subject to counterexamples that show that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for shared intention.