Abstract
In temporally extended agency, past, present, and (normally) future thought and action are tied together in distinctive ways. In shared intentional activity, the thoughts and actions of the participants are tied together in distinctive ways. My conjecture is that a fundamental ground of these human capacities for temporally extended and shared intentional agency are human capacities for planning agency. The conceptual, metaphysical, and normative resources in play in our planning agency provide a backbone of our temporally extended and shared intentional agency.
© Michael E. Bratman 2012
This essay is based on my presentation at the August, 2010 Collective Intentionality Conference, Basel, Switzerland; in this final version I benefited from helpful comments from an anonymous referee for this volume. Sections 1, 2, and 3 are mostly taken, with the kind permission of the American Philosophical Association, from my “Agency, Time, and Sociality,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 84:2 (2010): 7–26. © American Philosophical Association. Throughout (and especially in Sects. 4 and 5) I draw from (Bratman 2014); see that monograph for further developments, complexities, and references.
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Notes
- 1.
For a similar contrast see Ferrero (2009).
- 2.
I offer a framework for thinking about our planning agency in my Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (1987).
- 3.
Though I do not argue that this is the unique realization.
- 4.
- 5.
My initial thinking about this idea was aided by comments from Philip Cohen.
- 6.
- 7.
These complex contents of relevant intentions need not be explicitly conscious (though of course they may). Instead, these contents may be implicit in relevant, underlying dispositions of tracking, adjustment, and responsiveness in thought and action—dispositions that are grounded in the agent’s plan states.
- 8.
Though questions remain about the idea of being out in the open.
- 9.
A caveat is that, as indicated earlier, we have not precluded the possibility that shared intention and shared intentionality are multiply realizable. To keep the discussion manageable, I put this qualification aside here.
- 10.
Here I am disagreeing with Margaret Gilbert (see Gilbert 2009).
- 11.
So my theory is compatible with Michael Tomasello’s conjecture that the great apes are planning agents who nevertheless do not have a capacity for shared intentional activity (see Tomasello 2009).
- 12.
Searle writes: “all intentionality, whether collective or individual, could be had by a brain in a vat…” (1990, p. 407). Strictly speaking, this is not yet to say that shared intentional activity is solely a matter of what could be had by a brain in a vat. But since Searle’s entire theory of “collective intentionality” is a theory of the we-intentions that could be had by a brain in a vat, it seems that he at least implicitly endorses this stronger thought. And it is this stronger thought that Gilbert and I reject. (John Hund makes a related point (See Hund 1998, p. 129). [Thanks to Facundo Alonso for this reference.])
- 13.
Petersson discusses this idea of a group causal agent within the context of a purported criticism of my account of the contents of the intentions central to shared intentionality. In my Shared Agency (forthcoming) I explain why I do not think this criticism works. Here, however, I just want to draw on Petersson’s positive proposal of the idea of a group causal agent.
- 14.
- 15.
See my “Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency” in Bratman (2007).
- 16.
My remarks in this paragraph draw from my 2009b (pp. 163–4).
- 17.
J. David Velleman alludes to this interpretive issue in his (1997, p. 201). Velleman himself seeks a theory in the spirit of the first, more ambitious interpretation.
- 18.
Pettit and Schweikard (2006, p. 32) interpret Gilbert in this way.
- 19.
In correspondence (December, 2008) Gilbert noted her preference for this second reading, citing her A Theory of Political Obligation (2006, pp. 144f), where she says: “It is useful to have a label for those who are jointly committed with one another in some way. I have elsewhere used the label ‘plural subject’ for the purpose and shall use it that way here. To put it somewhat formally: A and B (and …) (or those with feature F) constitute a plural subject (by definition) if and only if they are jointly committed to doing something as a body—in a broad sense of ‘do’.”
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Bratman, M.E. (2014). Acting over Time, Acting Together. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Schmid, H. (eds) Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6934-2_15
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