We Will Do It: An Analysis of Group-Intentions

You and I may intend that we jointly carry this heavy table upstairs. In this case we both can be said to have the group-intention to carry the table upstairs, for the content of the intention here involves that we perform something together and 'we' refers to our group. Group-intentions are expressible by means of locutions like We will do X, where the word 'will' is used conatively (rather than predictively, in the future tense) and X is a joint action type (in the sense of Tuomela, 1984, Chapter 5).1 In another paper I have investigated (jointly with Kaarlo Miller) a subclass of group-intentions called we-intentions (see Tuomela and Miller, 1988a). That paper presents the basic conceptual features of both absolute (or nonconditional) and conditional we-intentions. Some basic arguments for the introduction of the notion of we-intention were also presented in that pa-