Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together
... En effet, les enfants apprennent généralement à anticiper ce que leur pair va faire et à ajuster leurs actions dans une coordination temporelle précise (Vesper et al., 2010). D'après Bratman (2014), lors de ces activités coopératives partagées, les enfants doivent s'engager à la réalisation d'activités conjointes et se soutenir mutuellement. Cet enchevêtrement des planifications entre les personnes est un élément clé de l'intentionnalité conjointe et partagée. ...
... Dans la catégorie de coopération motrice (en accord avec Bratman, 2014 ;Chaminade et al., 2012 ;Vesper et al., 2010), les actions conjointes sont ajustées à la partenaire ou au partenaire dans une temporalité précise, c'est pourquoi nous avons créé deux sous-catégories : gestes synchrones et gestes isolés. Les gestes synchrones peuvent être réalisés de façon complémentaire ou identique (réelles imitations) et sont révélateurs d'une coopération motrice. ...
... En plus d'un défaut de représentation commune, les durées importantes de gestes isolés sans lien avec la construction montrent que les enfants de CRPS prennent moins en compte les actions de leur partenaire de jeu et ne s'ajustent pas toujours dans leur comportement. Ils sont moins engagés à aider leur partenaire ou à réaliser l'action conjointe, ce qui peut provoquer la perte de l'intentionnalité conjointe et partagée (Bratman, 2014). Étant donné que ces mécanismes sont très présents dans nos sociétés coopératives (Tomasello, 2014), un tel manque d'intention conjointe partagée dans l'activité commune chez les enfants de CRPS provoquerait des difficultés sociales dans un système collaboratif. ...
En Suisse, les classes régionales de pédagogie spécialisée (CRPS) visent une intégration des enfants en milieu ordinaire. Cette étude exploratoire comparative étudie les compétences en communication non verbale et en coopération motrice chez les enfants de CRPS par rapport aux enfants de classes ordinaires, lors d’un jeu de construction. Les résultats montrent que les enfants de CRPS auraient une communication non verbale plus désorganisée et une coopération motrice moins efficiente. Pour favoriser la future intégration sociale des enfants de CRPS, il serait intéressant de stimuler les compétences nécessaires lors de tâches collaboratives.
... In this paper I argue that Searle's two senses of primitive should be analysed separately. I defend his argument for the primitiveness of the capacity for collective intentionality in the first sense but not in the second sense: I argue that (1) collective intentionality exists among nonhuman animals but (2) it is constructed and shared upon collective intentions which are reducible to individual intentions (Bratman, 2014). I also argue that the reduction of collective intentions to individual intentions is necessary for nonhuman animals to be able to create social entities. ...
... I'm going to analyse Taï Chimpanzees' group hunting (Boesch & Boesch -Achermann, 2000) in the light of this concept. By relying on the Planning Theory (Bratman, 2014), I shall explain that the phenomenon of group hunting, and presumably the joint activities of other primates (as recent evidence shows and I will discuss) can be understood as a case of ascription of individual intentions with meshing sub-plans that instantiate a social entity. ...
... One way of approaching the debate is by asking: what is the nature 9 of the content of the mental states that are required in collective intentional behaviour, i.e., the future-directed intentions required in structuring and coordinating action, which Bratman calls "plan-states" (Bratman, 2012(Bratman, , 2014 and I define as "distal intentions" to emphasize their functional role as mental causal antecedents of action planning. To illustrate, consider an example of a distal intention involved in collective intentions: a chimpanzee, before engaging in a group hunt, might anticipate the role it will play in driving prey toward another member of the group. ...
Social entities only exist in virtue of collective acceptance or recognition, or acknowledgement by two or more individuals in the context of joint activities. Joint activities are made possible by the coordination of plans for action, and the coordination of plans for action is made possible by the capacity for collective intentionality. This paper investigates how primitive is the capacity that nonhuman animals have to create social entities, by individuating how primitive is the capacity for collective intentionality. I present a novel argument for the evolutionary primitiveness of social entities, by showing that the collective intentions upon which these social entities are created and shared are metaphysically reducible to the relevant individual intentions.
... For this reason, the possibility of collective deliberation needs to be addressed in terms of what it means for individuals to share an intention. In this perspective, I will draw on Bratman's account of shared intention and shared deliberation (Bratman 2000;2004;2014). ...
... According to Bratman (Bratman 2014), shared intentions are not attitudes in individual mindsurging each individual to do her part in the collective activity, nor attitudes belonging to a collective super-mind. A shared intention should rather be understood as a web of individual attitudes appropriately interconnected. ...
... For that to be possible, there must be some common ground, which, in the context of common knowledge, allows for mutual intelligibility and justifiability. In other words, individuals need to share some common ground, allowing them to collectively understand and appreciate reasons advanced during their deliberation (Bratman 2014). ...
Collective deliberation plays a central role in both decision-making and judgment formation. Despite increasing research interest in this topic in philosophy and political science, a unified approach and a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon are still lacking. This challenge stems, in part, from the conceptual ambiguity surrounding collective deliberation. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of collective deliberation by proposing a conceptual elaboration on its meaning. Employing Carnap’s method of explication, I take the ordinary uses of the term as the explicandum and develop the concept of collective deliberation as shared reasoning ( explicatum ). More precisely, collective deliberation is characterized as shared reasoning embedded within a broader joint activity on the part of the group and applied in response to questions that require argumentation. Shared reasoning is further clarified in terms of its necessary conditions and objectives. Finally, the concept of collective deliberation as shared reasoning is evaluated against key criteria of theoretical adequacy (i.e., simplicity, similarity, exactness, and fruitfulness). I argue that the proposed concept enhances theoretical development, fosters theoretical unification, and advances our understanding of collective deliberation.
... The entrepreneur's decision rule is as follows, assuming that expected marginal returns to experimentation are greater than costs: To achieve this aim, this paper returns to its roots in pragmatism to provide mechanisms for the social processes that teams use to communicate, refine, and commit to shared representations (Brandom, 1994(Brandom, , 2000(Brandom, , 2008, and imports additional insights from social ontology that focus on the precursors to commitment and action by teams-the concept of we-intentionality (Epstein, 2015;Bratman, 1999Bratman, , 2014Ludwig, 2016;Schmid, 2023;Tuomela, 2005Tuomela, , 2013. ...
... A second approach to we-intentionality has been developed by Ludwig (2016 )and Bratman (2014). In this approach, we-intentionality is, and must be, reducible to the individual member's mental states. ...
... In this alternative account of we-intentionality, individuals hold (a) beliefs about other group members' beliefs and commitment, and (b) they will adjust their actions so as to complement the others. Bratman calls this process a "planning theory of acting together" (Bratman, 2014). However, this model still treats the unit of observation at the individual level because beliefs, intentions, and actions are vested in the group members, not the collective. ...
... Second, joint abilities are distinct from group abilities, understood as the abilities of a group agent, such as Amazon's ability to improve its working conditions (Miller, 2020, p. 200). Even though some authors treat every group that is capable of joint action as a group agent (Killoren & Williams, 2013;Tännsjö, 1989;Copp 2016;Aas, 2015) most distinguish between joint agency and group agency (Pettit & Schweikard, 2006;Bratman, 2014). A group of individuals can act jointly without creating a separate group agent, and vice versa. ...
... In this context it is worth noting that proponents of a plural property approach to joint ability cannot simply avail themselves of analyses of joint control existing in the literature on joint action. Individualistic accounts of joint control over joint actions, such as those brought forward by David Velleman or Michael Bratman, do not fit well with the notion of joint ability as something which several agents possess in an irreducibly joint way (see Velleman, 1997;Bratman, 2014). Instead, they support individualistic accounts of joint ability such as the relational approach defended in Sect. 3 of this paper. ...
Moral and political philosophy as well as public discourse is rife with talk about joint abilities: we are able to mitigate climate change, alleviate world poverty, or end a pandemic through social distancing and high vaccination rates. However, despite its common usage, the concept of joint ability has received surprisingly little attention in the philosophical literature. What exactly does it mean to say that we can or cannot do something together? According to the dominant conception of joint ability, a joint ability is best understood as the ability of a plurality of agents. I argue that plural property accounts of joint ability violate one of the central tenets of the metaphysics of abilities, namely that abilities relate agents to actions. I offer an alternative analysis of joint abilities. I propose to understand joint abilities as relations in which two (or more) agents stand to each other. The relational model offers a way of understanding our talk about joint abilities in moral and political debates, and it does so while preserving a conceptual continuity between individual and joint abilities.
... Y tuvo su despliegue en los ochenta con los desarrollos y propuestas de investigadores como Shoham, Wooldridge, Rao, Bratman, Weiss, Etzioni, Huhns, Singh, Bordini, Hübner, entre muchos otros [23,24,25,26,27,28,16]. ...
... Desde la propia racionalidad tecnológica de la IA pueden explorarse las potencialidades de algunas de sus subáreas, como las que se mencionan a continuación [25,23,3,43]. ...
El material didáctico que se presenta en este trabajo ofrece los fundamentos
para programar sistemas inteligentes usando el paradigma de agentes artificiales.
Para ello, se presentan problemas con su solución a través de un diseño de
agentes y su respectiva implementación.
En un inicio, se presentan las ideas clave de la Inteligencia Artificial, sus
métodos y principales logros, así como sus limitaciones. A partir del segundo
capítulo, se introduce el enfoque de Agentes Atificiales en esta disciplina. Pos-
teriormente, se presenta la concepción de Sistemas Multi-Agente; para terminar
con la temática relacionada con la Simulación Basada en Agentes, que permite
redondear las ideas expuestas en los temas que la anteceden desde un punto de
vista integrador.
El libro culmina con una reflexión de la dimensión humana en la Inteligencia
Artificial y los Sistemas Multi-Agente.
... This is patently absurd. 10 Cases like this look to me like cases of group or shared decision-making and action á la Bratman (2014), who centers the role of plans in shared agency. While it is certainly true that one party can contribute more than others to the development of these plans, shared intention and shared action still involve individual agents forming intentions to act on the basis of their shared intention. ...
... It is obviously right that legislative authority is not accommodated in cases like (3). 11 But some form of official political authority is built into Langton's account of subordination (in 1993, anyway): to deprive someone of rights is not something that just anyone can do; if Janice falsely imprisons Hank, she infringes on his right to bodily autonomy, but does not deprive him of this right. To say that she deprives him of his right is to say that he no longer has it-that is, that she is doing nothing wrong (legally, anyway, though of course she is doing something morally wrong) by doing so. ...
The “Authority Problem” is the problem that arises when speakers who lack authority successfully perform speech acts that require speaker authority in order to be felicitous. One solution that has been offered to the Authority Problem holds that the non-authoritative speaker of a successful authoritative illocution comes to have authority through a process of presupposition accommodation. I call this solution the Authority Accommodation Analysis, or AAA. In this paper, I argue that there is no Authority Problem, and thus, no need for an AAA. The appearance of the problem relies on a conflation between the felicity of speech acts and their success. Yet a speech act can be successfully performed even in the absence of felicity. While authority is often a felicity condition for certain speech acts, I argue that it need not be a success condition. Ultimately, the consequence of my argument is that I must reject conventionalism about illocutionary success.
... Most of these questions seem best approached with empirical means or 1 Throughout this discussion I presuppose that groups have (or can have) attitudes such as wants or desires and have (or can have) goals (cf. Gilbert (1989), Tuomela (1992Tuomela ( , 2013, Bratman (1993Bratman ( , 2014, List & Pettit (2011), Schmid (2009). Such group attitudes are not uncontroversial (see for instance Quinton (1975) and Rupert (2005Rupert ( , 2019, but it is not the aim of my paper to defend groups having such states. ...
Members of large, complex groups – organizations – often need to know what the group wants. They usually need to know what the group’s goals are to figure out how to best aid the group. But how exactly do these group members gain that knowledge? In this paper I suggest that one main route to member knowledge of group goals and attitudes is inferential and analyze that route. Some of the inferential mechanisms are based on human’s mindreading abilities, but members also use evidence from within the group that has no analogue in reading other human minds. Overall, the inference basis for member knowledge of group goals and attitudes uses evidence from group behavior and from the inner workings of the group, in particular evidence related to the group’s decision-making and attitude-forming processes. I discuss these inferential processes in relation to empirical research on ‘line of sight’ and employee-organization alignment by Wendy Boswell and her colleagues and show how my proposal fits with the empirical findings.
... While the collective notions of "we-intentionality" (Tuomela, 2007) and "shared agency" (Bratman, 2013) are easier to apply to the joint activities of research groups, they can be applied to larger communities as well. Rowbottom doubts that different disciplines are too diverse to include a common commitment (p. ...
Darrell Rowbottom has been an active participant in debates about scientific progress. In his recent work, Scientific Progress (2023), he gives a critical summary of the rival proposals and arguments during the last 15 years. But, more interestingly, Rowbottom explains the lack of consensus among philosophers of science by questioning the mainstream view that science is progressive by objective standards. Inspired by J. L. Mackie’s error theory in meta-ethics, he challenges the thesis that science has overarching shared or corporate aims, concluding that the criteria of scientific progress are ultimately local and subjective. This paper evaluates Rowbottom’s argument by defending an institutional account of the aim of science and by separating the aims of science from the standards of its progress.
... Although there is broad agreement that joint actions and shared intentions involve more than mere summations of individual actions and intentions, there is ongoing debate about what additional factors are required. Some argue for specific interconnections between individual intentions (Bratman, 2014), others propose a special individual attitude of "we-intention" (Searle, 1990), and still others emphasize joint commitments among participating agents (Gilbert, 2014). ...
... On the minimal notion on offer, joint goals are not constitutive of joint activities (contra, e.g., Butterfill 2012). Shared or joint intentions are not constitutive either, on any understanding of the terms (contra, e.g., Tomasello 2019), and neither are capacities for reasoning about intentions and beliefs (contra, e.g., some readings of Bratman 2014). As lean as the resulting sense of 'doing something together' may be, it is desirable to settle on it, and for two reasons. ...
The fact that speech acts serve to share commitments makes it possible to identify important preconditions for becoming a competent user of speech acts. I employ this assumption to investigate the development of prelinguistic, communicative competence in early childhood. To become competent users of speech acts, children must count as participants in normatively regulated joint activities. This includes being disposed to behave normatively, as well as knowing how to signal acceptance and rejection of candidate commitments which regulate those activities. Contrary to widespread opinions, I argue that by around 18 months of age children have started meeting these preconditions. I outline how they may get there based on studies about teasing and headshaking. To acquire the target competences, I argue, infants need not be able to conceptualize commitments or their contents, let alone reason about intentions and beliefs.
... Shared agency examines how individuals coordinate to achieve common goals, as seen in everything from two people moving furniture to massive orchestra performances. See Bratman (2014), Shapiro (2014), Le Besnerais et al. (2024). 8 Group agency explores how collectives -from ant colonies to corporate boards -can act as coherent agents despite being composed of individual actors. ...
The creation of effective governance mechanisms for AI agents requires a deeper understanding of their core properties and how these properties relate to questions surrounding the deployment and operation of agents in the world. This paper provides a characterization of AI agents that focuses on four dimensions: autonomy, efficacy, goal complexity, and generality. We propose different gradations for each dimension, and argue that each dimension raises unique questions about the design, operation, and governance of these systems. Moreover, we draw upon this framework to construct "agentic profiles" for different kinds of AI agents. These profiles help to illuminate cross-cutting technical and non-technical governance challenges posed by different classes of AI agents, ranging from narrow task-specific assistants to highly autonomous general-purpose systems. By mapping out key axes of variation and continuity, this framework provides developers, policymakers, and members of the public with the opportunity to develop governance approaches that better align with collective societal goals.
... If the individual I-subject is something purely mental, it seems like the collective we-subject must be, too, and that therefore it has to be something like like the dreaded group mind. It is, I believe, fear of group minds that motivates both attempts to reduce the subject-we to Is such as Bratman's (2014) and Ludwig's (2016) and modeaccounts such as Tuomela's (e.g., Tuomela, 2013) and Searle's (1990) which accept the conceptual irreducibilty of the we, but treat it as a mode in the sense of the received view at least insofar as it is not given a representational role as identifying a genuine we-subject. Searle further appeals to the idea of a pre-intentional, nonrepresentational background "sense of us". ...
In this paper, I argue that basic forms of collective intention- ality such as those involved in atttending, acting and feeling with others essentially involve experiencing and understand- ing others as co-subjects, that their content is nonconcep- tual, and that they represent co-subjects and their positions at a level that is prior to the mind-body differentiation.
... For a more comprehensive discussion of collective intentionality, seeGilbert (1989),Searle (1990),Tuomela (2002Tuomela ( , 2013,Bratman (2014), Tollefson (2015), Collins (2019),Schweikard and Hans Schmid (2021), and chapters 11 and 17 of this volume. ...
In this chapter, I critically examine issues relevant to the construction and reality of social categories, focusing on issues concerning conceptual schemes and conventionalism. Conceptual schemes (‘paradigms,’ ‘linguistic frameworks,’ ‘forms of life’) are systems of concepts that organize and give (intersubjective) meaning to empirical experience. In discussions about the construction of social categories, a common assumption is that social categories and kinds (e.g., ‘money,’ ‘marriage,’ ‘liberal’) require the presupposition of a conceptual scheme that gives meaning to those terms. One prominent position in social ontology (Lewis, 1969, Gilbert 1989, 2014, Searle 1995) holds that the reality of social categories is grounded in a conventionalist conceptual scheme: social categories are conventionally accepted categories that reflect explicit or implicit agreements within a community. According to this view, the reality of social categories and kinds is established (and maintained) by contingent and arbitrary conventional decisions about social categories (e.g., laws about legal tender, marriage laws, the one-drop rule). Conventions can be understood as social customs (e.g., rules governing traffic, marriage laws, institutionalized rules about sex and gender) that serve some human purpose or interest. They are important for the establishment and maintenance of social norms (see Bicchieri 2006, 2017).
The chapter proceeds as follows. In section 2, I examine the general idea of conceptual schemes, focusing on Kuhn’s influential theory of paradigms. While Kuhn’s position implies a conceptual relativity and anti-realism (or instrumentalism) about scientific concepts, Davidson and Popper challenge the Kuhnian orthodoxy that the presence of conceptual schemes implies conceptual relativity or ‘incommensurability’ of competing conceptual schemes. I argue that a key difference between scientific and social conceptual schemes is that the former are oriented towards describing nature, whereas the latter are oriented towards social utility or usefulness. In section 3, I examine some foundational works in social ontology—focusing on the accounts of Lewis, Gilbert, and Searle—that hold that social categories are grounded by a conventionalist conceptual scheme. These accounts of social categories imply that the reality of social categories is constituted by (or grounded in) social conventions, which ultimately reflect (or are anchored by) explicit or implicit community-level agreements. In section 4, I survey some prominent accounts of social human categories, focusing on the views of Hacking, Khalidi, Mallon, Haslanger, and Ásta. A common tendency in these accounts is the portrayal of social categories as social to the extent that they are conventionally determined. This suggests that the proper contrast class for social categories is natural categories (as opposed to individual categories or innate categories).
... One of our visiting professions was Michael Bratman, who had worked extensively on agency and rationality. He saw human beings as planning animals and theorised about the ways our desires and intentions shape shared and individual agency (Bratman 1999(Bratman , 2013. While he was in Oslo, he noticed how preoccupied I was with administrative work for the professors at the philosophy department. ...
Research on organisational life widely uses the concept of psychological safety to describe the circumstances under which people sense they can take interpersonal risks and challenge assumptions and beliefs in the group to which they belong. Here, I introduce it to describe one of the five qualities found in well-functioning communication climates. High levels of psychological safety indicate that people can express their disagreement with other group members without fear of repercussions. Individuals may have different perceptions of the psychological safety in the group, and some group members may act and speak in ways that weaken other members’ safety.
... Furthermore, the human praxis process seems more looping than iterative, because it does not have an endpoint, but is ongoing. For example, the person initiating praxis by having a vision for change employs this foresight and practical reasoning to sustain an eye on the future as a continuous enabler for changes to be ongoing 72 . Another example is how the person who enacts praxis, accurately reflects on their own ability and skills, subsequently utilizes this knowledge (working with what you know) as an initiator of praxis. ...
Introduction: The term 'human praxis' has been referred to in an array of theoretical frameworks: philosophy, institutional change, education, and critical theory. Broadly, human praxis denotes human agency towards personal and collective transformation in the wake of various kinds of constrictions, regardless of external interventions. If occupational therapy can understand the mechanisms of human praxis, it could be used as a potential therapeutic tool leading to the improvement of health and well-being within communities at large.Method: Eight individuals actively living human praxis participated in semi-structured interviews. Purposive sampling, and eligibility criteria based on a description of human praxis synthesized from literature, were employed. Six researchers independently performed a manual qualitative thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews, which served as method triangulation.Findings: Data analysis revealed that human praxis exists as a dynamic, and recursive two-phase process, consisting of initiators (Theme I), and continuous enablers (Theme II). In addition, seven categories (constituents) emerged from each of the two themes.Conclusion: Human praxis can be applied in the conscious facilitation of the interdependence between the various constituents such as the individual and the collective, personal and ongoing shared responsibility, and between conditions of constraint and resilience toward self-determination and growth. Keywords: Human agency, recursive, individual collective interdependent Â
... He justifies his choice and eventually, Betty agrees that she was wrong to criticize him and apologizes. Or she makes an excuse saying that she did not see what Albert was painting [65,66]. ...
Can robots or chatbots be moral patients? The question of robot rights is often linked to moral reasons like precautionary principles or the ability to suffer. We argue that we have prudential reasons for building robots that can at least hold us accountable (criticize us etc.) and that we have prudential reasons to build robots that can demand that we treat them with respect. This proposal aims to add nuance to the robot rights debate by answering a key question: Why should we want to build robots that could have rights in the first place? We argue that some degree of accountability in our social relationships contributes to our well-being and flourishing. The normativity ascribed to robots will increase their social and non-social functionalities from action coordination to more meaningful relationships. Having a robot that has a certain “standing” to hold us accountable can improve our epistemic standing and satisfy our desire for recognition.
... This joint action condition is intended to be neutral between the dominant theories of collective action,including Bratman 2014;Gilbert 1989;Tuomela 2013; Kutz 2000. 41 On the importance of the fact that participants must intend to advance a shared goal (in our case, overcoming significant adversity) in part by way of the intentions of each in favor of the shared goal, seeBratman 2014, pp. 50-6, esp. ...
There has been a resurgence of interest recently in the nature of solidarity. A problem, however, bedevils any attempt to defend any one view against another. What makes disagreement about the nature of solidarity meaningful? Why should we think any one usage ought to be preferred to any other? The questions I raise are about an important social phenomenon, and so are of significance to, among others, social and political philosophers. But they also raise difficult issues in what is now often referred to as conceptual ethics—about the standards we should use in deciding which concepts to use and when to use them. This article argues that we should conceive of solidarity as a distinctive type of social kind. Seen in this light, the discussion should contribute to understanding the nature of solidarity in at least three ways. First, it will help to allay skepticism that accounts of solidarity are really just accounts of the meaning of a word in a given language. Second, it will aid us in responding to the objection that solidarity is too vague or amorphous as a concept, and so can mean anything to anyone. Third, it will help us to identify an agenda for empirical and philosophical research on solidarity. The paper tries to make progress in two areas—research on solidarity and research on social kinds—by showing how one can inform the other.
... A range of studies that explored the cultural roots of violence against women highlighted the role of traditional gender norms and patriarchal structures (Alesina et al., 2021;Arisi & Oromareghake, 2011;Lomazzi, 2023). In patriarchies, men hold power, and women are oppressed, often through a hierarchical ordering of roles and control-based structures (Ness & Cope, 2021) that can manifest in various forms, including male dominance in families and institutions (Bell, 2014). These systems are perpetuated by social norms and structures that prevent women from accessing power and resources (Ng'eno, 2017). ...
This article begins by recalling the tragic loss of Giulia Cecchettin, an Italian university student who was brutally murdered by her ex-boyfriend. The exploration delves into the cultural and societal factors that contribute to violence against women, with an emphasis on the role of personal responsibility in perpetuating these harmful dynamics. It proposes the concept of servant-leadership as a means to counteract male dominance and work towards achieving gender equality. The research underscores the importance of self-reflection and forgiveness in understanding and altering individual contributions to gender violence. The final section explores the intersection between servant-leadership and the ethics of care, advocating for these approaches as transformative methods to traditional power structures, with the aim of fostering a more equitable and compassionate society. The study seeks to raise awareness of gender violence and propose actionable strategies for both individual and societal change.
... However, even though an ecosystem's sustainability orientation offers clear advantages, it is crucial to recognize its potential impact on the growth prospects of a startup. The concept draws parallels to Bratman's (2013) ideas, highlighting that when individuals within a group aim to achieve shared goals, two crucial elements come into play. Firstly, each person has their own intention, or what they want to do. ...
... This account argues that humans have evolved a species-unique group-mindedness that leads them to readily cooperate with their groups. Abiding by norms is one aspect of this group-mindedness, such that norms serve as collective agreements within groups (Bratman 2014;Searle and Willis 1995;Tomasello 2019), which group members are obligated to follow. These norms represent what "we" as a group should (not) do contexts rather than what any individual group member desires to do. ...
Young children rapidly acquire and rigidly adhere to conventional norms. Prior accounts of this early‐emerging norm behavior propose that children perceive conventional norms as obligations to their cultural groups and, in conforming to the norms, sacrifice their individual desires for the welfare of the group. In the current research, we investigate the hypothesis that children may actually derive happiness from adhering to conventional norms, thus aligning rather than diverging from their individual desires. To test this hypothesis, we presented 4–5‐year‐old children (N = 120) with a novel apparatus in which they were either be taught a set of actions that constituted the norm for operating the apparatus (Norm condition) or a set of actions that they chose from to use the apparatus (Control condition). While performing these actions, we videorecorded and coded children's facial expressions to measure the happiness they derived from performing the actions in the norm versus control conditions and asked them to retrospectively report on their happiness while using the apparatus. Facial expressions and self‐reports of happiness did not differ across conditions; however, they were significantly higher than neutral.
... This is a very stark statement of what is involved in joint action, broadly in line with(Bratman 2014); see(Pettit 2017; 2023, Ch 4). For other approaches to the analysis of this notion, any one of which would work for our purposes here, see(Tuomela 2007;Searle 2010;Gilbert 2015).6 ...
... With the great diversity of political views in liberal societies, including some at the extremist end of the political spectrum, 11 In contrast, cooperative joint action is characterized by "highly interdependent collaboration between individuals" and "individual contributory actions cannot be performed in isolation" (Schwenkenbecher, 2021b, 25). The latter would cover the type of actions described, for instance, by Bratman (2014) and Pettit and Schweikard (2006). For example, two people carrying a heavy piano upstairs. ...
Many philosophers accept the idea that there are duties to promote or create just institutions. However, are the addressees of such duties supposed to be individuals—the members of the citizenry? What does it mean for an individual to promote or create just institutions? According to the “Simple View,” the citizenry has a collective duty to create or promote just institutions, and each individual citizen has an individual duty to do their part in this collective project. The simple view appears to work well with regard to—you guessed it—“simple” scenarios, but it is riddled with further questions and problems. In this chapter, we raise five problems for the Simple View: (a) we suggest that one cannot develop a view concerning the citizenry’s duty to promote just institutions in isolation from a conception of the ontological relationship between the state and its citizens; (b) we argue that it is not obvious that the citizenry is the right entity to be attributed duties in the first place; (c) we show that a plausible account of collective duties to promote just institutions must not remain silent on the complexities and difficulties amorphous, unorganized groups face vis-à-vis collective action; (d) we contend that without allocation principles for contributory duties amongst the citizenry, or—alternatively—a method for practical deliberation that is action-guiding in collective action contexts, the claim that the citizens have a collective duty to promote just institutions remains moot; and, finally (e) we demonstrate that the problem of reasonable disagreement is a serious threat to a collective duty to promote or create just institutions—it potentially undermines such a duty altogether and allows for conflicting contributory duties amongst the citizenry. We hope that our discussion will ultimately help improve existing theories and conceptual frameworks to better understanding citizens’ obligations to promote justice under non-ideal conditions.
... An individual-ought claim, of the form 'A ought to φ,' has an essentially actionguiding character; 8 it marks out a course of action as 'to be done' by the agent A. 9 The joint-ought claim 'A and B ought to φ and ψ,' we propose, has the same actionguiding character: it marks out a series of acts, φ-and-ψ, as to be done by the plurality of agents A and B. 10 The joint-ought claim 'A and B ought to φ and ψ' is not the claim that φ-and-ψ is to be done by a group agent comprising A and B. 11 That can be construed as an individual-ought claim, 'G ought to φ and ψ,' where 'G' denotes the group agent comprising the natural persons A and B. The subject-position of a joint-ought claim is occupied not by any one agent (group or otherwise), but by several agents. 12 Furthermore, the acts implicated in a joint-ought claim need not constitute a 'joint activity' in the sense popularized by authors such as Michael Bratman (2014) and Margaret Gilbert (2013). That is, we leave it open that A and B could succeed in doing what they jointly ought to do merely by each performing an individual act, without forming a 'shared intention' or 'joint commitment' (or whatever else might be required for joint agency). ...
We argue for three main claims. First, the sentence ‘A and B ought to φ and ψ’ can express what we a call a joint-ought claim: the claim that the plurality A and B ought to φ and ψ respectively. Second, the truth-value of this joint-ought claim can differ from the truth-value of the pair of claims ‘A ought to φ’ and ‘B ought to ψ.’ This is because what A and B jointly ought to do can diverge from what they individually ought to do: it may be true that A and B jointly ought to φ and ψ respectively, yet false that A ought to φ and false that B ought to ψ; and vice-versa. Third, either of two prominent semantic analyses of ‘ought’—Mark Schroeder’s relational semantics, and Angelika Kratzer’s modal semantics—can model joint-ought claims and this difference in truth-value.
... How the account is spelled out in more detail, depends on two choice points. First, it depends on the view of collective intentionality one adopts (e.g., Bratman 1992Bratman , 2014Searle, 2010;Gilbert 1989Gilbert , 2006. Second, the details of the view will vary based on what pragmatic and metasemantic accounts one adopts. ...
We start with an observation about implicit quantifier domain restriction: certain implicit restrictions (e.g., restricting objects by location and time) appear to be more natural and widely available than others (e.g., restricting objects by color, aesthetic, or historical properties). Our aim is to explain why this is. That is, we aim to explain why some implicit domain restriction possibilities are available by default. We argue that, regardless of their other explanatory virtues, extant pragmatic and metasemantic frameworks leave this question unanswered. We then motivate a partially nativist account of domain restriction that involves a minimal view of joint planning around broad shared goals about navigating and influencing our environments augmented with cognitive heuristics that facilitate these. Finally, we sketch how the view can be extended to account for the ways non-default restriction possibilities become available when conversationalists have shared idiosyncratic goals. EARLY ACCESS
The idea that group-level processes and organizational structures in human societies contribute to the cognitive processes of individual human beings is defended in various ways. This does not mean that individual cognitive processes are widely thought to be determined, in part, by genuine top-down influence of group-level processes. On the contrary, such top-down influence is generally associated with metaphysical oddness or worse. In this paper I claim that top-down influence is part of human cognition, and that there is no metaphysical oddness involved when we acknowledge (i) that cognition is intimately tied-up with the survival of organisms, (ii) that cultural groups serve as survival vehicles for human beings, and when (iii) we approach cognition and survival from an evolutionary angle. I use a discussion of Tomasello’s shared intentionality hypothesis to argue that human cognition consists of two superimposed ‘layers’ that can be compared with the levels of explanation required to account for systems of mutualistic symbiosis in biology.
This paper discusses current debates about the normativity of joint commitments in analytical social ontology from a methodological point of view. I argue that collective-acceptance-based, critical-emancipatory, and experimental-philosophy-based approaches to social ontology all face challenges in accommodating the dynamic and strategic aspects of joint commitment. To make up for their shortcomings, I draw on evolutionary game theory and mindshaping approaches to social cognition, while distinguishing between the mental models that individuals use for reasoning about joint commitments and the theoreticians’ models that philosophers construct for studying select aspects of social reality.
H. P. Grice seemed to rest his theory of conversational implicature on the assumption that speakers aim to cooperatively exchange information with each other. In the real world, speakers often don't. Does one of the most influential theories in 20th‐century philosophy of language rest on a mistake? Yes—but not in the way that philosophers have thought. I argue that Grice should have rested his theory on a different assumption: that speakers aim to appear to aim to cooperatively exchange information with each other. This proposal dissolves Grice's Non‐Cooperation Problem but preserves Grice's central insights about the nature of conversational implicatures. More generally, it enables the Gricean to illuminate the structure of many non‐cooperative or otherwise “non‐ideal” conversations.
This book explores the pervasive anticipation of catastrophe in contemporary society, examining how temporal expectations shape personal and collective experiences and influence our perspectives and responses.
A Time of Disastrous Anticipations highlights the role of anticipation in shaping societal narratives, exploring strategies for redefining responses to catastrophic imaginaries. Through a combination of theoretical insights with practical examples, it offers a comprehensive view of anticipation’s impact in contemporary society. The vista of disastrous anticipations reveals that catastrophe is not so much a matter out of place, but primarily a matter out of time.
Targeted at scholars, students, and professionals in sociology, disaster studies, and public policy, this book is also valuable for policymakers and practitioners interested in understanding the societal dimension of disaster anticipation.
The paper addresses how empirical rationality developed in cognitive science and AI can be bridged to epistemic knowledge argued in epistemology and philosophy of science, as a part of the effort for bridging the former, empirical sciences to the latter, philosophical inquiries. The empirical concepts of bounded and procedural rationality are applied to interpret the procedural theories of learning by doing and interaction by information sharing; empirical notions of knowledge and expertise widespread but underspecified in cognitive science and AI are more rigorously defined as cognitive knowledge and expertization process; and concepts of view, composite view, shared view and shared cognitive knowledge are introduced. Then, those arguments are deployed altogether to provide sufficient conditions for cognitive knowledge of a goal-directed adaptive agent to be epistemic knowledge (or justified true belief), and to demonstrate that cognitive knowledge shared by socially interacting agents exists (in the sense of epistemological realism) as epistemic knowledge under assumptions on motivateness, expertise and evolutionary processes of those agents.
Collective agency is often defended in terms of an interpretivist conception of agency. The idea is that the externally observable behavior of organized collectives is interpretable, and thus explainable, via the posits of beliefs, desires, and intentions. From this perspective, collective agents can be treated as black boxes. Just as an interpreter can ignore the brain processes of individual agents, she can disregard the inner workings of a collective agent. Here, I argue against such externalist versions of corporate interpretivism and defend an internalist alternative. My core claim is that knowledge of the intentional states of individual members involved in the internal processes of collectives should form the primary source of evidence in ascribing corporate intentional states. Hence, collective agents can be interpreted in an accurate manner only if the black box is opened.
According to the model of exchange as mutual assistance, an exchange can be perceived as a joint activity for mutual benefit – and needn’t involve any self-directed motives at all. This essay pushes back against this new defence of market motives. The essay develops an alternative ideal of production as caring solidarity, in which production is a joint activity of caring about one another. Points of overlap and difference are developed in some detail. The essay concludes by discussing the implications for an economics of caring solidarity, with discussion of the limitations of various market socialist strategies.
What do we owe those with whom we inquire? Presumably, quite a bit. Anything beyond what is necessary to secure knowledge? Yes. In this paper, I argue for a class of ‘zetetic rights.’ These are rights distinctive to participants in group inquiry. Zetetic rights help protect important central interests of inquirers. These include a right to aid, a right against interference, and a right to exert influence over the course of inquiry. Building on arguments by Fricker, I defend these rights, and explore cases of their violation: zetetic wrongings. I argue that zetetic wrongings constitute a distinctive, ubiquitous, and significant form of injustice in our epistemic and zetetic lives. To improve our inquiries and avoid epistemic injustice, we need to contend with zetetic wronging. Making this case helps show that a complete picture of epistemic life must account for the deep influence of our cooperative ties to one another.
In this paper I will argue in favor of the so-called content account of collective intentionality by critically discussing John Searle's approach. I will raise two objections against the view: it will be argued that the approach cannot adequately explain the difference between individual and collective intentional attitudes. Moreover, it will be shown that Searle's view has problems to account for a characteristic way in which collective mental states can fail. Both objections reveal crucial advantages of the content account. Finally, a modified version of this view is outlined that is able to overcome objections that have been raised against this type of theory.
In this article, firstly, cooperative interaction between robots and humans is discussed; specifically, the possibility of human/robot joint action and (relatedly) the possibility of robots occupying institutional roles alongside humans. The discussion makes use of concepts developed in social ontology. Secondly, certain key moral (or ethical—these terms are used interchangeably here) issues arising from this cooperative action are discussed, specifically issues that arise from robots performing (including qua role occupants) morally significant actions jointly with humans. Such morally significant human/robot joint actions, supposing they exist, could potentially range from humans and robots jointly caring for the infirm through to jointly killing enemy combatants.
I argue first that some propositions are obligatory without being obligatory for anyone (i.e., they are impersonally obligatory): if each of us has promised to vote and thus has an obligation to vote, then it is obligatory (i.e., morally required) that we all vote, but it is not obligatory for anyone that we all vote (because, for example, what is obligatory for you is that you vote, not that we all vote). I argue next that “ought-implies-can” fails for impersonal obligatoriness: if each of us has promised to (and can) finish first in a given race, and thus it is impersonally obligatory that we all finish first (i.e., that we all finish at the same time), it does not follow that anyone (or we) can make it the case that we all finish first (we may be unable to coordinate). I defend instead the following principle: if a proposition is (impersonally) obligatory—or forbidden—at time t, then it is historically contingent at t (i.e., both the proposition and its negation are logically compatible with the history of the world up to and including t).
The question of what it means to be an ally in a social justice movement arises both from allies and from the members of marginalized social groups with whom they wish to join forces in collective social justice efforts. Allies work together with members of marginalized social groups to achieve social justice, but because of their privileged social position, allies do not directly experience the systemic and structural disadvantages that the movement or movements they support aim to address. Because different social positions yield different experiences, insights, and knowledge, it is not always clear to the people involved—either those aiming to be allies or those with whom they seek to ally themselves—how best to work together for change. The goal of this chapter is to examine a number of the analytic complexities that result when we recognize that successful social movements must involve the collective action of people who are differently placed, both epistemically and with respect to power and agency, within structures of privilege and oppression. The chapter will at once seek to explain why ally-ship can seem fraught while also using the idea of ally-ship to advance the understanding of the ontology of social groups, the ontology of collective action and collective agency, and the way that differential knowledge and power both within and among social groups complicates the idea of what it means to act together in the context of collective responsibility and collective obligation.
In this article on collective responsibility, the concern is twofold. First, several types of collective responsibility are distinguished: principally, collective natural, institutional, and moral responsibility. Second, numerous modes of application of various kinds of collective responsibility are identified and analyzed, including collective responsibility for the outcomes of joint institutional mechanisms (such as voting systems), for organizational action (by multi-layered structures of joint action), and the outcomes of chains of institutional responsibility (such as the verdicts of juries in criminal trials). Throughout, the concept of collective responsibility as joint responsibility is used.
Many demands for democratic inclusion rest on a simple yet powerful idea. It's a principle of affected interests. The principle states that all those affected by a collective decision should have a say in making that decision. Yet, in today's highly globalized world, the implications of this 'All-Affected Principle' are potentially radical and far-reaching. Empowering Affected Interests brings together a distinguished group of leading democratic theorists and philosophers to debate whether and how to rewrite the rules of democracy to account for the increasing interdependence of states, markets, and peoples. It examines the grounds that justify democratic inclusion across borders of states, localities, and the private sector, on topics ranging from immigration and climate change to labor markets and philanthropy. The result is an original and important reassessment of the All-Affected Principle and its alternatives that advances our understanding of the theory and practice of democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
To be part of a conversation is to be subject to various conversation-specific norms. In this paper I examine the nature of these norms and consider how distinctly epistemic norms relate to these.
Might knowledge normatively govern conversations and not just their discrete constituent thoughts and (assertoric) actions? I answer ‘yes’, at least for a restricted class of conversations I call aimed conversations. On the view defended here, aimed conversations are governed by participatory know-how—viz., knowledge how to do what each interlocutor to the conversation shares a participatory intention to do by means of that conversation. In the specific case of conversations that are in the service of joint inquiry, the view defended is that interlocutors (A, B, ... n) must intentionally inquire together into whether p, by means of an aimed conversation X, only if A,B, ... n know how to use X to find out together whether p. The view is supported by considerations about instrumental rationality, shared intentionality, the epistemology of intentional action, as well as linguistic data.
The category of conversation is both broader and narrower than the category of testimony. It is broader because conversations involve more than testimony. It is narrower because not all testimony takes place within conversation. Nevertheless, the epistemologies of conversation and testimony overlap in interesting ways. On the account to be defended here, both conversation and testimony essentially involve joint agency and joint achievement, including epistemic joint agency and achievement. Moreover, it will be argued, appreciation of this point resolves an important dispute in the epistemology of testimony: whether addressees have a special epistemic standing over eavesdroppers and other overhearers of testimony. The claim defended here is that they do, and precisely in virtue of their participation in joint agency.
By treating linguistic representation as arising from social interaction, practice-theoretic approaches to language presuppose a capacity for joint action, and this presupposition exposes it to a potential circularity. The presupposition seems to arise when communities are said to endorse or accept rules. Practice theory takes mental representation, including the intentionality of thought and action, to be a consequence or product of linguistic representation, and the intentionality of action is a species of mental representation. Several decades of intensive work on joint action, however, has yielded a range of theories, all of which require sophisticated mental representations, such as propositional attitudes, mind-reading, mutual knowledge, and so on. From the perspective of contemporary social ontology, there is simply no way that practices sufficiently sophisticated to support practice-theoretic accounts of representation could arise without the prior existence of human-like representational capacities. Social accounts of representation in the vein of Wittgenstein, Sellars, or Brandom, one might argue, are simply non-starters. Call this the “social ontology objection” to practice-theoretic accounts of language. The object of this essay is to rebut the social ontology objection by providing a minimalist account of joint action and thereby putting practice theory on a firm social-ontological foundation.
What do we want from machine intelligence? We envision machines that are not just tools for thought but partners in thought: reasonable, insightful, knowledgeable, reliable and trustworthy systems that think with us. Current artificial intelligence systems satisfy some of these criteria, some of the time. In this Perspective, we show how the science of collaborative cognition can be put to work to engineer systems that really can be called 'thought partners', systems built to meet our expectations and complement our limitations. We lay out several modes of collaborative thought in which humans and artificial intelligence thought partners can engage, and we propose desiderata for human-compatible thought partnerships. Drawing on motifs from computational cognitive science, we motivate an alternative scaling path for the design of thought partners and ecosystems around their use through a Bayesian lens, whereby the partners we construct actively build and reason over models of the human and world.
The ability and knowledge to manage financial tasks may be compromised in old age, especially when the need to navigate the care and social benefit systems increases. Managing financial tasks may consist of a variety of actions of both the older people themselves and their representatives, often family members. This study explored how financial tasks related to the care and everyday life of older people who need long-term care are managed by using the ideas of modalities of agency and distributed agency. We analysed interviews of 19 older persons and their family members with a qualitative case analysis. All the older persons who participated in the study distributed the agency in financial tasks among their family members, but to different levels and for different reasons. We identified three types of distributed agency – inevitable, assimilated and minimal distributed agency – in which the older persons’ knowledge about financial tasks and their ability to manage financial tasks differed. Within these types, the cases differed in terms of the know-how of the family members and the reasons why the older people’s knowledge about financial tasks or their ability to manage their financial tasks were diminished. We conclude that older persons with long-term care needs require help in regard to financial tasks, and the older people’s and their family members’ ability to manage financial tasks could be enhanced by making the benefit systems and online banking more user-friendly and by improving the help from care staff.
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