Colloque

Which of the two kinds of cooperation is the most basic?

Adriano Naves De Brito

Membre a labase

Adriano Naves De Brito

Résumé de la communication

Tuomela in his paper “Two basic kinds of cooperation” analyses the broad topic of human cooperation from the perspective of teleology in order to distinguish between the we-mode and the I-mode cooperation. While we-mode cooperation implies that people involved in action shared a collective goal, I-mode cooperation is more like a coordinated action in which the participants are not engaged in achieving a goal collectively assumed, but rather trying to fulfil individual goals, as it is typically the case in the context of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. His paper is a stringent conceptual analysis, but Tuomela wants to defend as well that we-mode cooperation is more efficient than I-mode cooperation, since some dilemmas of human action are better resolved when acting for collective reasons. That conclusion is scarcely argued for in the article. Moreover, it raises the question of whether one of these two basic modes of cooperation is the most basic form of cooperation among humans. In the first part of this paper I will reconstruct the main lines of Tuomela conceptual distinction trying to emphasise the moral implications of each cooperation mode. In the second part I will try to answer positively the question above and I will also try to defend that while from the point of view of biology alone I-mode cooperation is the most primitive among beings capable of showing moral sentiments. That result shall than shed to Tuomela's theses on the efficiency of we-mode cooperation among humans.

Résumé du colloque

Cette activité de discussion théorique interdisciplinaire sur langage, pensée et action servira aussi de lancement au Québec du livre collectif de Daniel Vanderveken LOGIC, THOUGHT & ACTION paru dans la collection Logic, Epistemology and the Unity of Science de Springer en 2005. Les directeurs de la collection, John Symons (de l’université du Texas) et Shahid Rahman (de l’université de Lille) seront présents. Des conférenciers de marque étrangers et canadiens y participeront.