Abstract
Cooperation can be discussed also from the point of view of the kinds of practical inferences and reasoning that the participants are entitled to perform in situations of cooperation. In Section II will discuss some such patterns of inference for g-cooperation (cooperation based on a shared collective goal), and to i-cooperation (viz., coaction-cooperation). Furthermore, I will apply these considerations to discuss communicative action in the context of cooperation (in Sections II-IV, drawing on Tuomela, 1997b).
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Notes
This note gives a simple formalization of the inference Schemas I and II.
Meaningful, rational use of language may still be argued to involve the collective goal of truth telling and cooperation with respect to it. An argument for this is the largely Davidsonian one that otherwise communication cannot be successful in general as people would not any more know what others mean by their sentences nor what they take to be true or correctly assertable. Note that lying might still be instrumentally rational against the background of general truth telling.
An example of a conversational principle is Grice’s much-discussed Cooperative Principle and the conversational maxims related to it (Grice, 1989, Chapter 2). We may note in the this connection that Grice seems to require common goals (resembling collective goals in my sense) in any normal communication: “Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction.” “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. One might label this the Cooperative Principle.” (Grice, 1989, p. 26)
In several places in this book I deal with the reason-relation, usually with the relation of an action performed for a certain reason, say p (expressing a state of affairs taken to obtain or being made to obtain). I have also used the alternative locution of an action performed in accordance with and an in part because of p. I will now elucidate some central aspects of the reason-relation for instrumental action using the symbolism — although not in the conceptual framework — of Cohen and Levesque (1990): (RA) Reasonfor(x,a,p) ↔ IA(x,Does(x,a),Bel(x, Done(x,a) → p)) & I(x,p). I assume that intention is a primitive notions or at least a notion understood for the present purposes and that ‘I(x,p)’ reads as ‘x intends that p’ and ‘Bel(x,p)’ as ‘x believes that p’. An obvious assumption for actions related to change is: I(x,p) → Bel(x,-p) & I(x, Eventually p). I interpret ‘Reasonfor(x,a,p)’ as ‘Agent x intentionally performs action a for the reason that p’. This interpretation of course requires that ‘Does(x,a)’ is understood as ‘x intentionally performs action a’. TA(x,Does(x,a),Bel(x, Done(x,a) → p)))’ reads ‘x does a with the intention-in-action to perform it while believing that his performance of it leads to the satisfaction of p’. (Note that I(x,p) entails Bel(x,I(x,p)).) I have discussed intentions-in-action in Chapter 2 of Tuomela (1995) and will not here discuss them at length. Briefly, intentions-in-actions are willings, a species of present-directed (or “here and now”) intentions. I argue in the mentioned work that they indeed can refer to the agent’s further goal, and here IA does it via the agent’s means-belief. Given all this, my above formal account can be interpreted as follows: (RA *) Agent x intentionally performs action a for the reason that p if and only if x intentionally performs action a on the basis of his intention-in-action to perform action a intentionally while believing that his performance of action a will lead to the satisfaction of p intended by him. Note that in the analysans the scope of the locution ‘on the basis’ is the rest of the sentence-regarded as a conceptually unbreakable item. What it is to perform an action a on the basis of the intention to perform a is here taken as an understood notion, which is weaker than the reason-relation being analyzed. Note that my account is not reductionistic — no attempt to reduce the notion of reason to normative notions correct deductive or inductive inference or to any non-normative naturalistic notions is made. (I take reasons to entail cognitive norms, however. For instance, it is cognitively permissible, and in some cases even obligatory, to carry one’s umbrella along when a rain is to be expected (the rain is the objective reason for the action.)
Let us consider briefly the early Grice’s views. I will be interested only in communication below and assume that questions of linguistic meaning (broadly understood) have been settled. Let me cite the analysis from Grice (1989, p. 92): “‘S meant something by uttering x’ is true iff, for some audience A, S uttered x intending a) A to produce a particular response r, b) A to think (recognize) that S intends a), c) A to fulfill a) on the basis of his fulfillment of b).” My above requirements for a perlocutionary communicative intention entail Grice’s conditions, applied to future-directed intentions, although I have arrived at my conditions on the basis of different considerations. Note that A cannot act for the right reason unless he has the belief b). However, the important requirement that in b) A must acquire his belief via S’s communicating his intention to him is missing in Grice’s treatment.
The views on communication I present in this chapter have been influenced by the work of Bach and Harnish (1979). Some differences are that a) these authors do not make the distinction between g-communication and i-communication that I make, b) they assume the presence of illocutionary communicative intention in all communication (or this is the impression I got), and c) they rely on a special principle of expression that I do not accept. As to b) and c), Bach and Harnish think that communication expresses an attitude and accordingly require that communication must express an attitude in the following sense (p. 15): (EXP) For S to express an attitude to A is for S reflexively to intend A to take S’s utterance as a reason to think S has that attitude. Crudely put, when I tell you that the weather is fine, according to (EXP) I must express my belief that the weather is fine so that you find it out. When I ask you to open the window, I must be expressing the attitude that I desire that you open the window. However, that seems too much to require. In my approach, it is enough that you open the window because of my perlocutionary communicative intention, independently of any underlying attitude. As we have seen, this suffices for communication. (EXP) also entails that any communication involves an illocutionary communicative intention. Moreover, a communicative intention is one such that recognition of the communicative intention is necessary and sufficient for its satisfaction. However, this is what I mean by an illocutionary communicative intention, and thus it does not cover perlocutionary communicative intentions in my sense. In my system the ubiquitous place of these authors illocutionary intention is largely taken by a corresponding belief, as indicated. (As to how to define communicative intentions, see also Recanati, 1986, and Bach, 1987; both of these are accounts with which the present chapter disagrees.)
In Tuomela (1997b) I discuss Habermas’s (1984, 1985, 1991) well-known theory of communicative action from the point of view of cooperation. For lack of space I cannot discuss Habermas’s approach in this book. Nevertheless, let me present some theses from that paper relating Habermas’s approach and his communicative actions, termed HCA, to mine: (H1) a) Communicative action in the sense of this chapter (viz., communicative action is either g-communicative or i-communicative action requiring a communicator and a communicatee) is similar to Habermas’s except that there is no need to require the acceptance of the speech act offer generally, b) There can accordingly be both i-consensus (viz., consensus consisting of merely personal attitudes and achievable by separate symbolic or communicative action) and g-consensus (viz., consensus consisting only of properly collective attitudes and achievable only by means of collective action). (H2) a) Some HCA is joint action (in the sense of acting together, AT, of Chapter 3) while some is not. b) Some communicative action in my sense is not CA. (H3) All HCA is collective social action, viz., collective action performed for the same social reason (here: achieving consensus); in this context collective social action is understood as collective action performed for the same social reason (in the sense of Tuomela and Bonnevier-Tuomela (1997); cf. also Chapter 6). (H4) a) HCA is cooperative action at least in the sense of i-cooperation with shared private goals (either types or tokens of goals; see Tuomela and Bonnevier-Tuomela for this), b) Not all HCA need to be cooperation in my full sense of cooperative action, viz., acting together towards a shared collective goal. (H5) There is communicative activity (“communication of thought contents”) which is not communicative action, HCA, in Habermas’s or my sense, but which is central for the reproduction of symbolic structures in a society.
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Tuomela, R. (2000). Cooperation, Practical Reasoning, and Communication. In: Cooperation. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 82. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9594-0_5
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