Jonas Faria Costa

Classic game theory assumed that agents could only reason at the individual level. This is an assumption not only of ontological individualism but also of methodological individualism. But this assumption was unnecessary, a heritage from the previous generations of economists and the strong fear of the communist menace at the time. I will explain the roots of this assumption and its limitations, most specifically, how it faces problems when explaining cooperation. Next, I will show how this assumption slipped into evolutionary theory, through the works of John M. Smith (1982) and Richard Dawkins (2017). Yet, as Peter Kropotkin’s (2009 [1902]) work on mutual aid illustrates, evolutionary theory need not assume individualism. To develop this, I will present a contemporary version of game theory that allows the possibility of collective reasoning. This will allow me to explain why altruism is a form of individual reasoning and why solidarity is a form of collective reasoning. On this reading, solidarity is not reducible to the radical individualism present in neoclassical economics and Dawkins’s evolutionary theory, that is, it is not reducible to reciprocal altruism. As long as we do not maintain the assumption of individualism, game theory and evolutionary theory can provide an account of solidarity.

Team reasoning is the idea that we can think as a ‘we’ and this can solve some coordination dilemmas, such as Hi-Lo. However, team reasoning can only solve the dilemmas it is intended to solve if the conditions for team reasoning warrant the belief that others will also perform team reasoning and these conditions cannot render team reasoning otiose. In this paper, I will supplement the theory of team reasoning by explaining how agency transformation also involves a change in the normative attitude. To do this, I will use the theory of affordances, which is the idea that the environment provides ways to interact with it. I will argue that when a person perceives as a group member, she associates herself and the other members with the group’s mosaic of affordances. This triggers a feeling of joint ownership of the agency. It is the feeling that it is up to us to deal with the situation, so we feel entitled to demand each other to cooperate. It warrants the belief that others are team-reasoners without rendering team reasoning otiose. This means that the agency transformation (from I to we) involves a change in the normative attitude.

There seems to be a difference between drinking coffee alone at home and drinking coffee in a café. Yet, drinking coffee in a café is not a joint action. It is an individual action done in a social environment. The café, with each person minding their own business next to others, is what I call a gregarious state of affairs. Gregariousness refers to the warmth of the social world. It is the difference between studying alone at home and studying in the library. This light form of sociality is precisely what we were deprived of during the coronavirus lockdowns. Gregariousness cannot be explained as interaction or coordination, and neither can it be grasped solely as a normative aspect of the environment. This is why gregariousness cannot be explained using the concepts of strategic equilibrium, shared planning agency, joint commitment, we-intention, or second-person standpoint. In this paper, I will also provide a prospective theory of gregariousness. The aim of this paper is not to provide a definitive theory of gregariousness, nor to demonstrate that other theories of joint action are incorrect, but rather to draw attention to this aspect of the social world that has been largely neglected.