Michael E. Bratman (1992), The Philosophical Review 101(2): 327–341 — DOI-10.2307/2185537. Reprinted as chapter 5 of Bratman, Faces of Intention, Cambridge University Press (1999), pp. 93–108.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, under the topic
social-ontology that ADR-017 added, as the first statement of Bratman’s
planning-theory account of acting together.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read
and no NOTE is filed. The summary’s three features of shared cooperative
activity are as search indexes and secondary summaries report them; they
are unverified against the paper.
What the record can say with a source is about the later form of the account. Bratman’s open-access précis of Shared Agency (2015, described in LIT-488) gives the construction in five conditions: each intends that we J; each intends that we J by way of each other’s intentions, mutual responsiveness and meshing subplans; each believes the intentions are persistence-interdependent; they are; and all of this is common knowledge. The précis calls the approach “reductive in spirit”, and sets it against Gilbert (LIT-477) and Searle (LIT-490), who appeal to “basic new elements”. How much of that construction is already in this 1992 paper is for a reading to establish.
Neighbours already in the record:
- Tomasello (LIT-125, NOTE-185). Bratman’s commentary there argues that obligation may come from the “web of assurances” rather than from collaboration itself, and Pettit’s commentary frames Bratman’s model as the “normatively austere” side of a dilemma whose other side is Gilbert.
- Bratman on autonomy (LIT-296, LIT-297, read in NOTE-267 and NOTE-266). Those encyclopedia entries report Bratman’s planning theory of individual agency only in passing: harmony with long-term plans, and plans that partly constitute personal identity. This paper applies the same planning theory to acting together.
No instruction for machine-learning practice is known, so nothing here points to the Anthology of the SOTA.
What a reading should check.
- Whether the 1992 paper already has the “intend that we J” condition and the meshing-subplans condition, or only the three features.
- How it handles coercion. Search summaries report that shared cooperative activity, unlike shared intentional activity, excludes some kinds of coercion; the précis does not say so, and it is unverified.
- Whether the account is claimed to give necessary conditions or only sufficient ones. The précis claims only sufficient ones.