Framing Joint Action

Many philosophers have offered accounts of shared actions aimed at capturing what makes joint actions intentionally joint.
I first discuss two leading accounts of shared intentions, proposed by Michael Bratman and Margaret Gilbert. I argue that
Gilbert’s account imposes more normativity on shared intentions than is strictly needed and that Bratman’s account requires
too much cognitive sophistication on the part of agents. I then turn to the team-agency theory developed by economists that
I see as offering an alternative route to shared intention. I concentrate on Michael Bacharach’s version of team-agency theory,
according to which shared agency is a matter of team-reasoning, team-reasoning depends on group identification and group identification
is the result of processes of self-framing. I argue that it can yield an account of shared intention that is less normatively
loaded and less cognitively demanding.