In Choice: The Essential Element in Human Action Alan Donagan argued for the importance of “will” to our shared understanding of intelligent action. By “will” Donagan meant a complex of capacities for forming, changing, retaining, and sometimes abandoning our choices and intentions. (Choice is, for Donagan, a “determinate variety of intending.”) Our capacity to intend is to be distinguished both from our capacity to believe and from our capacity to be moved by desires. And Donagan thought that intentions involve what, following Austin, he called “ ‘as it were’ plans.”

I am broadly in agreement with these main themes in Donagan's book, and I will pretty much take them for granted in what follows. I will suppose that intention is a distinctive attitude, not to be reduced to ordinary desires and beliefs; that intentions are central to our shared understanding of ourselves as intelligent agents; and that “the study of intention” is in part the “study of planning.” My hope is that these common elements in our views about intention can serve as a basis for reflection on the phenomenon of shared intention.

That we do sometimes have intentions that are in an important sense shared seems clear. We commonly report or express such shared intentions by speaking of what we intend or of what we are going to do or are doing. Speaking for you and myself I might say that we intend to paint the house together, to sing a duet together; and I might say that we are going to New York together.