It is a truism that humans are social animals. Thus, it is no surprise that we understand the world, each other, and ourselves in terms of social kinds such as money and marriage, war and women, capitalists and cartels, races, recessions, and refugees. Social kinds condition our expectations, inform our preferences, and guide our behavior. Despite the prevalence and importance of social kinds, philosophy has historically devoted relatively little attention to them. With few exceptions, philosophers have given pride of place (...) to the kinds studied by the natural sciences, especially physics. However, philosophical interest in social kinds is growing in recent years. I critically examine answers to a cluster of related questions concerning the metaphysics of social kinds. Are social kinds natural kinds? Do social kinds have essences? Are social kinds mind dependent? Are social kinds real? (shrink)

I defend a novel view of how social kinds (e.g., money, women, permanent residents) depend on our mental states. In particular, I argue that social kinds depend on our mental states in the following sense: it is essential to them that they exist (partially) because certain mental states exist. This analysis is meant to capture the very general way in which all social kinds depend on our mental states. However, my view is that particular social kinds also depend on our (...) mental states in more specific ways—some of them causal, others metaphysical. I defend a minimal but metaphysically important notion of essence—one that takes as primary that the essential properties of a kind constitute its identity—and argue that this minimal notion of essence is all that is needed to vindicate my claim that social kinds are essentially mind-dependent. (shrink)

The existence of group agents is relatively widely accepted. Examples are corporations, courts, NGOs, and even entire states. But should we also accept that there is such a thing as group consciousness? I give an overview of some of the key issues in this debate and sketch a tentative argument for the view that group agents lack phenomenal consciousness. In developing my argument, I draw on integrated information theory, a much-discussed theory of consciousness. I conclude by pointing out an implication (...) of my argument for the normative status of group agents. (shrink)

This paper offers a comparison of three different kinds of collective attitudes: aggregate, common, and corporate attitudes. They differ not only in their relationship to individual attitudes—e.g., whether they are “reducible” to individual attitudes—but also in the roles they play in relation to the collectives to which they are ascribed. The failure to distinguish them can lead to confusion, in informal talk as well as in the social sciences. So, the paper’s message is an appeal for disambiguation.

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, (...) individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory. (shrink)

The aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even have rights and (...) a moral status? I will tentatively defend the (increasingly widely held) view that, under certain conditions, artificial intelligent systems, like corporate entities, might qualify as responsible moral agents and as holders of limited rights and legal personhood. I will further suggest that regulators should permit the use of autonomous artificial systems in high-stakes settings only if they are engineered to function as moral (not just intentional) agents and/or there is some liability-transfer arrangement in place. I will finally raise the possibility that if artificial systems ever became phenomenally conscious, there might be a case for extending a stronger moral status to them, but argue that, as of now, this remains very hypothetical. (shrink)

Many theorists have defended the claim that collective entities can attain genuine agential status. If collectives can be agents, this opens up a further question: can they be conscious? That is, is there something that it is like to be them? Eric Schwitzgebel argues that yes, collective entities, may well be significantly conscious. Others, including Kammerer, Tononi and Koch, and List reject the claim. List does so on the basis of Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. I argue here that (...) List’s rejection is too quick, and that groups can, at least in principle, display the kind of informational integration we might think is necessary for consciousness. However, group consciousness will likely differ substantially from the individual experiences that give rise to it. This requires the defender of group consciousness to face up to a similar combination problem as the panpsychist. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to a critical ontology of social objects. Recent works on collective intentionality and norm-following neglect the question how free agents can be brought to collectively intend to x , although x is not in their own interest. By arguing for a natural disposition to empathic understanding and drawing on recent research in the neurosciences, this article outlines an ontological framework that extends collective intentionality to questions of oppression and status asymmetries. In a contribution to this (...) journal, Wisnewski (2005) unfortunately mischaracterizes the problem of meaning in social criticism. Implementing status problems in studies of collective intentions and construing social facts as both subjective and objective in character helps explain why agents can have persistent "misunderstandings" of social objects. (shrink)

In spite of the booming interest in social epistemology, explicit analyses of group knowledge remain rare. Most existing accounts are based on theories of joint intentionality. I argue that this approach, though not without merit or useful applications, is inadequate both when it comes to accounting for actual group knowledge attributions and for purposes of meliorative social epistemology. As an alternative, I outline a liberal, de-intellectualized account, which allows for the complex distribution of epistemic states typical of most real-world collectives, (...) and makes minimal requirements as to the psychological underpinnings of collective states of knowing and the formal features of groups. The account is inspired by theories of distributed and extended cognition. It is guided by the principle that we should use the same standard when dealing with social and individual epistemology. Careful attention to what is normally required—and, in particular, not required—for attributing knowledge to individuals lends support the more liberal view. (shrink)

This article presents a new proposal for understanding the establishment and maintenance of cooperation: the cooperation afforder with framing hypothesis, producing what can be called cooperation from afforder-framing . Three key moves are present. First, a special variety of the Stag Hunt game, the Cooperation Afforder game, will reliably produce mutualistic cooperation through an evolutionary process. Second, cognitive framing is a credible candidate mechanism to meet the special conditions and requirements of the Cooperation Afforder game. Third, once mutualistic cooperation is (...) established in this way, it will plausibly lead to broader forms of cooperation, even to limited forms of altruism. (shrink)

Recent work in metaphysics has focused on the nature of artefacts, most accounts of which assume that artefacts depend on the intentions of their individual makers. Artefacts are thus importantly different from institutional kinds, which involve collective intentions. However, recent work in social ontology has yielded renewed focus on the social dimensions of various kinds, including artefacts. As a result, some philosophers have suggested that artefacts have a distinctly social dimension that goes beyond their makers' individual intentions but which stops (...) short of the collective intentionality of institutional kinds. I aim to combine these insights into an account of artefacts that involves disjunctive conditions of mind-dependence: Artefacts can either depend on the singular intentions of their makers or they can depend on the collective acceptance of particular social groups. Whether the first or second disjunct is satisfied depends on the artefact's context of creation. I'll argue that this applies not to artefact kinds but to individual artefacts. I then consider two objections to my view based on Robinson Crusoe cases and show how my account allows us to fit artefacts into a taxonomy of social kinds. (shrink)

The topics of social ontology, culture, and institutions constitute a problem complex that involves a broad range of human social and cultural cognitive capacities. We-mode social cognition and shared intentionality appear to be crucial in the formation of social ontology and social institutions, which, in turn, provide the bases for the social manifestation of collective and shared psychological attitudes. Humans have ‘hybrid minds’ that inhabit cultural–cognitive ecosystems. Essentially, these consist of social institutions and distributed cognition that afford the common grounds (...) for the objectives of we-mode shared intentionality. As such, they stabilize social cognition normatively and offer predictive power in social interaction. Full-blown we-mode shared intentionality fundamentally depends on the functions of social institutions. (shrink)

The social cognition of domestic cats is a scarcely studied topic due to the reputation of the animal as individualistic. Nevertheless, cats are capable of cognitively demanding cooperative activities such as a communal nest-moving. The cognitive abilities of free-ranging cats are evaluated against the background of the shared intentionality hypothesis, proposed by a research group of Michael Tomasello. Although their comparative studies are carried out on chimpanzees, they are valuable as a source of conceptual work linking empirical cognitive studies with (...) the philosophical accounts of joint agency. We critically analyze theoretical cognitive concepts interpreting the triadic interactions of great apes and the collective hunting among chimpanzees. Contrary to the shared intentionality hypothesis, it is argued that cats have cognitive abilities to share attention, truly cooperate and constitute shared meanings. Finally, we introduce the concept of the natural interaction ritual by Randall Collins and outline its significance for our case study about cats as well as for a general biosemiotic theory of the development of symbols. (shrink)

A group is lying when it makes a statement that it believes to be untrue but wants the addressee(s) to believe. But how can we distinguish statements that the group believes to be untrue from honest group statements based on mistaken beliefs or confusion within the group? I will suggest a narrative constraint for honest group statements, made up of two components. Narrative coherence requires that a new group statement should not conflict with group knowledge on the matter, or beliefs (...) of relevant operative subgroups, unless a coherent rationale is given. Narrative intention looks at the process of gathering new evidence on the area of expertise of the group and requires that the group position behind the statement is formed in good faith. The narrative constraint will help to distinguish group lies from more innocent erroneous statements of group beliefs when there is an internal disagreement within the group, including in cases involving spokespersons. (shrink)

Attributing moral responsibility to an agent requires that the agent is a capable member of a moral community. Capable members of a moral community are often thought of as moral reasoners (or moral persons) and, thus, to attribute moral responsibility to collective agents would require showing that they are capable of moral reasoning. It is argued here that those theories that understand collective reasoning and collective moral agency in terms of collective decision-making and commitment – as is arguably the case (...) with Christian List and Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency – face the so-called “problem of the first belief” that threatens to make moral reasoning impossible for group agents. This paper introduces three possible solutions to the problem and discusses the effects that these solutions have in regard to the possibility of attributing moral responsibility to groups. (shrink)

This paper draws from two central intuitions that characterize modern western societies. The first is the normative claim that our identities should be recognized in an authentic way. The second intuition is that our common matters are best organized through democratic decision-making and democratic institutions. It is argued here that while deliberative democracy is a promising candidate for just organization of recognition relationships, it cannot fulfil its promise if recognition is understood either as recognition of ‘authentic’ collective identities or as (...) recognition of too atomistic or individualized subjects. If deliberative democracy is to be understood as successfully providing authentic recognition of individual identities, it requires a specific understanding of how individuals’ recognition needs and desires are collectively and institutionally constituted. Furthermore, it is argued that even if deliberative democracy can provide the necessary circumstances for individual self-realization, it comes with homogenizing tendencies and cannot fully avoid the problems of multiculturalism. (shrink)

Institutions generate cooperative benefits that explain why they exist and persist. Therefore, their etiological function is to promote cooperation. The function of a particular institution, such as money or traffic regulations, is to solve one or more cooperation problems. We go on to argue that the teleological function of institutions is to secure values by means of norms. Values can also be used to redesign an institution and to promote social change. We argue, however, that an adequate theory of institutions (...) should not be ‘moralized’ in that they should not be defined in terms of the values they are supposed to promote. (shrink)

Corporate responsibility requires a conception of collective agency on which collective agents are able to form moral judgments and act on them. In spite of claims to the contrary, existing accounts of collective agency fall short of this kind of corporate autonomy, as they fail to explain how collective agents might be responsive to moral reasons. I discuss how a recently proposed conception of shared valuing can be used for developing a solution to this problem. Although the resulting conception of (...) corporate autonomy is useful for making sense of corporate responsibility, it also gives rise to what I call ‘the Corporate Autonomy Problem’. Autonomous collective agents are in principle entitled to the same rights as autonomous individual agents. However, at least some individual rights, such as the right to vote, the right to life, and the right not to be enslaved cannot plausibly be attributed to collective agents. This intuition is supported by normative individualism, the position according to which corporate agents are not entitled to non-derivative rights at all. I argue that without a proper solution to this problem—I sketch the available options—saving corporate responsibility requires giving up on normative individualism. (shrink)

According to John Searle’s well-known Is-Ought Argument, it is possible to derive an ought-statement from is-statements only. This argument concerns obligations involved in institutions such as promising, and it relies on the idea that institutions can be conceptualized in terms of constitutive rules. In this paper, I argue that the structure of this argument has never been fully appreciated. Starting from my status account of constitutive rules, I reconstruct the argument and establish that it is valid. This reconstruction reveals that (...) the soundness of the argument depends on whether collective acceptance as such can generate obligations. Margaret Gilbert has argued that it can, and thus far some of her central arguments have not been addressed. The upshot is that the Is-Ought Argument deserves to be taken seriously once again. (shrink)

The common assumption is that if a group comprising moral agents can act intentionally, as a group, then the group itself can also be properly regarded as a moral agent with respect to that action. I argue, however, that this common assumption is the result of a problematic line of reasoning I refer to as “the collective fallacy.” Recognizing the collective fallacy as a fallacy allows us to see that if there are, in fact, irreducibly joint actors, then some of (...) them will lack the full-fledged moral agency of their members. The descriptivist question of whether a group can perform irreducibly joint intentional action need not rise and fall with the normative question of whether a group can be a moral agent. (shrink)

Despite clear overlap between the study of extended minds and the study of group minds, these research programs have largely been carried out independently. Moreover, whereas proponents of the extended mind thesis straightforwardly advocate the view that there are, literally, extended mental states, proponents of the group mind thesis tend to be more circumspect. Even those who advocate for some version of the thesis that groups are the subjects of mental states often concede that this thesis is true only in (...) some loose or metaphorical sense. I argue that this imbalance is a mistake. A literal interpretation of the group mind thesis is no less plausible than the extended mind thesis, because group minds are particularly defensible instances of extended minds. However, the extended mind thesis, and the view that group minds are extended minds, are defensible only following a revision of the extended mind thesis. (shrink)

Can institutional objects be identified with physical objects that have been ascribed status functions, as advocated by John Searle in The Construction of Social Reality (1995)? The paper argues that the prospects of this identification hinge on how objects persist – i.e., whether they endure, perdure or exdure through time. This important connection between reductive identification and mode of persistence has been largely ignored in the literature on social ontology thus far.

Page 1. Economics and Philosophy, 26 291--320 Copyright C Cambridge University Press doi: 10.1017 / S0266267110000386 TWO KINDS OF WE-REASONING RAUL HAKLI, KAARLO MILLER AND RAIMO TUOMELA University of Helsinki.

Endorsing the idea of group knowledge seems to entail the possibility of group belief as well, because it is usually held that knowledge entails belief. It is here studied whether it would be possible to grant that groups can have knowledge without being committed to the controversial view that groups can have beliefs. The answer is positive on the assumption that knowledge can be based on acceptance as well as belief. The distinction between belief and acceptance can be seen as (...) a refinement of the ordinary language concept of belief, and it may be useful in understanding the nature of epistemic justification and classifying various types of epistemic subjects. (shrink)

A proof-theoretical treatment of collectively accepted group beliefs is presented through a multi-agent sequent system for an axiomatization of the logic of acceptance. The system is based on a labelled sequent calculus for propositional multi-agent epistemic logic with labels that correspond to possible worlds and a notation for internalized accessibility relations between worlds. The system is contraction- and cut-free. Extensions of the basic system are considered, in particular with rules that allow the possibility of operative members or legislators. Completeness with (...) respect to the underlying Kripke semantics follows from a general direct and uniform argument for labelled sequent calculi extended with mathematical rules for frame properties. As an example of the use of the calculus we present an analysis of the discursive dilemma. (shrink)

David Lewis famously proposed to model conventions as solutions to coordination games, where equilibrium selection is driven by precedence, or the history of play. A characteristic feature of Lewis Conventions is that they are intrinsically non-normative. Some philosophers have argued that for this reason they miss a crucial aspect of our folk notion of convention. It is doubtful however that Lewis was merely analysing a folk concept. I illustrate how his theory can (and must) be assessed using empirical data, and (...) argue that it does indeed miss an important aspect of real-world conventions. (shrink)

Adverbialist theories of thought such as those advanced by Hare and Sellars promise an ontologically sleek understanding of a variety of intentional states, but such theories have been largely abandoned due to the ‘many-property problem’. In an attempt to revitalize this otherwise attractive theory, in a series of papers as well as his recent book, Uriah Kriegel has offered a novel reply to the ‘many-property problem’ and on its basis he argues that ‘adverbialism about intentionality is alive and well’. If (...) true, Kriegel will have shown that the logical landscape has long been unnecessarily constrained. His key idea is that the many-property problem can be overcome by appreciating that mental states stand in the determinable–determinate relation to one another. The present paper shows that this relation can’t save adverbialism because it would require thinkers to think more thoughts than they need be thinking. (shrink)

Many contemporary accounts of social belief are committed to the view that social beliefs can only be held by a plurality of individuals. Gilbert Socializing metaphysics, 2003) characterizes “joint commitments” as the “social atoms” of social belief and other forms of social intentionality, and Tuomela maintains that social belief and other forms of social intentionality are bound by a “collectivity condition.” Such theorists thus rule out the possibility of solitary social belief, that is, a social belief held by an individual (...) that is not socially shared by members of a social group. Such theorists also reject Searle’s account of social intentionality as being too individualistic, but I argue that the same kind of solitary social intentions that can arise on Searle’s account can also arise on the accounts offered by Gilbert and Tuomela. This is a consequence of the fact that neither Gilbert nor Tuomela hold that social intentionality is a supra-individual form of intentionality that is different in kind from the intentionality of individuals who comprise and constitute plural subjects and social groups. I also argue for the possibility of solitary social belief by providing a characterization of social beliefs that is independent of their relation to collective action, and provide two illustrative real-life examples. While no doubt rare, the reality of solitary social beliefs is a consequence of the dynamical nature of social beliefs, namely their orientation to the represented, or, in the case of solitary social beliefs, misrepresented beliefs of members of a social group. (shrink)

Standard economic theory usually analyzes the decisions made by individuals as a rational process in which each individual has sound and consistent preferences and makes decisions according to the principle of subjective expected utility maximization. Starting from the pioneering work of Herbert Simon and the research of cognitive psychologists Kahneman and Tversky, the contributions provided by cognitive-behavioral theory have repeatedly shown that real agents make choices in a way that differs systematically from standard theory, hence highlighting its limits. Rather than (...) considering standard normative theory as false or unable to explain the data obtained by behavioral economists, several economists decided to develop new formal models that could include the results of different experiments and empirical observations that captured all dimensions of the choice made by an individual. In this sense, they proposed new models that were not intended to challenge standard theory but rather designed to provide a kind of psychological expansion to it. This article has the aim of describing and analyzing the advantages and limitations of these new models, which unfortunately are not always suited to describe the individual behavior, the individuals’ actions, or the equilibria due to the combination of the actions of several players. To overcome the limits of these models, we decided to take into consideration the unfortunately unfinished work of Michael Bacharach, who strived to understand the individual and collective forms of rationality without applying only analytical devices or a theoretical vision of the world but bringing rationality back to the perception level of the agents. (shrink)

Individuals are often causally inconsequential parts of highly consequential wholes. If each individual is causally inconsequential, and what she does makes no causal difference, we may be inclined to absolve each of causal responsibility for the consequences of what occurs as a result of the larger whole of which each is a part. But there is another form of responsibility – constitutive responsibility. Whatever the causal consequences may be, each individual constitutes part of that whole and each therefore bears responsibility (...) of at least that sort for the whole. (shrink)

The biopsychosocial model was initially proposed to overcome the normative assumption that human diseases are exclusively due to disordered biochemical and/or neurophysiological processes. The model attempts to explain how expectations, thoughts and feelings modify the patient’s motivations to deal with illness and recovery. By considering the physical health in this perspective, healthcare professionals may test the importance of socially and culturally shared principles in alleviating illness experience. The entire biopsychosocial hierarchy may thus appear as a complex network of relationships between (...) the strict logic of scientific explanations and the emotional sustainability with which beliefs may either be defended, changed or even refused. In this paper, we aim at reviewing some of the evidence-based biomedical and psychological findings that provide a unified framework for the biopsychosocial model as a multilevel integrative process. To tackle this objective, we propose to approach the model in biosemiotic terms. It is our contention that the entire biopsychosocial hierarchy could be better understood if approached biosemiotically and the multilevel interconnection of this hierarchy re-examined in the light of a collaborative meaning-making process. (shrink)

According to many philosophers and scientists, human sociality is explained by our unique capacity to “share” attitudes with others. The conditions under which mental states are shared have been widely debated in the past two decades, focusing especially on the issue of their reducibility to individual intentionality and the place of collective intentions in the natural realm. It is not clear, however, to what extent these two issues are related and what methodologies of investigation are appropriate in each case. In (...) this article, I propose a solution that distinguishes between epistemic and ontological interpretations of the demand for the conditions of reduction of collective intentionality. While the philosophical debate has contributed important insights into the former, recent advances in the cognitive sciences offer novel resources to tackle the latter. Drawing on Michael Tomasello’s research in the ontogeny of shared intentionality in early instances of interaction based on joint attention, I propose an empirically informed argument of what it would take to address the ontological question of irreducibility, thus making a step forward in the naturalization of collective intentionality. (shrink)

This paper presents a systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of social groups. I argue against prominent views that attempt to unify all social groups or to divide them into simple typologies. Instead I argue that social groups are enormously diverse, but show how we can investigate their natures nonetheless. I analyze social groups from a bottom-up perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. We can characterize any given kind of social group with (...) four complementary profiles: its “construction” profile, its “extra essentials” profile, its “anchor” profile, and its “accident” profile. Together these provide a framework for understanding the nature of groups, help classify and categorize groups, and shed light on group agency. (shrink)

This article considers Dworkin's influential argument against legislative intent in chapter 9 of Law's Empire. The argument proves much less than is often assumed for it fails to address the possibility that the institution of the legislature may form and act on intentions. Indeed, analysis of Dworkin's argument lends support to that possibility. Dworkin aims to refute legislative intent in order to elucidate his own theory of statutory interpretation. That theory fails to explain plausibly legislative action. Dworkin's argument does not (...) refute legislative intent but instead suggests there is reason to think that the legislature is capable of intentional action. (shrink)

The sense of agency – the subjective feeling of being in control of our own actions – is one central aspect of the phenomenology of action. Computational models provided important contributions toward unveiling the mechanisms underlying the sense of agency in individual action. In particular, the sense of agency is believed to be related to the match between the actual and predicted consequences of our own actions. In the study of joint action, models are even more necessary to understand the (...) mechanisms underlying the development of coordination strategies and how the subjective experiences of control emerge during the interaction. In a joint action, we not only need to predict the consequences of our own actions; we also need to predict the actions and intentions of our partner, and to integrate these predictions to infer their joint consequences. Understanding our partner and developing mutually satisfactory coordination strategies are key components of joint action and in the development of the sense of joint agency. Here we discuss a computational architecture which addresses the sense of agency during intentional, real-time joint action. We first reformulate previous accounts of the sense of agency in probabilistic terms, as the combination of prior beliefs about the action goals and constraints, and the likelihood of the predicted movement outcomes. To look at the sense of joint agency, we extend classical computational motor control concepts - optimal estimation and optimal control. Regarding estimation, we argue that in joint action the players not only need to predict the consequences of their own actions, but also need to predict partner’s actions and intentions and to integrate these predictions to infer their joint consequences. As regards action selection, we use differential game theory – in which actions develop in continuous space and time - to formulate the problem of establishing a stable form of coordination and as a natural extension of optimal control to joint action. The resulting model posits two concurrent observer-controller loops, accounting for ‘joint’ and ‘self’ action control. The two observers quantify the likelihoods of being in control alone or jointly. Combined with prior beliefs, they provide weighing signals which are used to modulate the ‘joint’ and ‘self’ motor commands. We argue that these signals can be interpreted as the subjective sense of joint and self agency. We demonstrate the model predictions by simulating a sensorimotor interactive task where two players are mechanically coupled and are instructed to perform planar movements to reach a shared final target by crossing two differently located intermediate targets. In particular, we explore the relation between self and joint agency and the information available to each player about their partner. The proposed model provides a coherent picture of the inter-relation of prediction, control, and the sense of agency in a broader range of joint actions. (shrink)

Numerous philosophical theories of joint agency and its intentional structure have been developed in the past few decades. These theories have offered accounts of joint agency that appeal to higher-level states that are?shared? in some way. These accounts have enhanced our understanding of joint agency, yet there are a number of lower-level cognitive phenomena involved in joint action that philosophers rarely acknowledge. In particular, empirical research in cognitive science has revealed that when individuals engage in a joint activity such as (...) conversation or joint problem solving, they become aligned at multiple levels. We argue that this phenomenon of alignment is crucial to understanding joint actions and should be integrated with philosophical approaches. In this paper, we sketch a possible integration, and draw out its implications for understanding of joint agency and collective intentionality. The result is a process-based, dynamic account of joint action that integrates both low-level and high-level states, and seeks to capture the separate processes of how a joint action is initiated and sustained. (shrink)

What enables everyday collective attitudes such as the intention of two persons to go for a walk together? Most current approaches are concerned with full-fledged col- lective attitudes and focus on the content, the mode or the subject of such attitudes. It will be argued that these approaches miss out an important explanatory enabling feature of collective attitudes: an experiential state, called a “sense of us”, in which a we-perspective is grounded. As will be shown, the sense of us pre-structures (...) collective intentional states and is thus relevant to an adequate understanding of collective atti- tudes. The argument receives indirect support by insights into distortions of interaction due to implicit stereotypes. (shrink)

This paper investigates agents’ blameworthiness when they are part of a group that does harm. We analyse three factors that affect the scope of an agent’s blameworthiness in these cases: shared intentionality, interpersonal influence, and common knowledge. Each factor involves circumstantial luck. The more each factor is present, the greater is the scope of each agent’s vicarious blameworthiness for the other agents’ contributions to the harm. We then consider an agent’s degree of blameworthiness, as distinct from her scope of blameworthiness. (...) We suggest that an agent mostly controls her degree of blameworthiness—but even here, luck constrains what possible degrees of blameworthiness are open to her. (shrink)

Philosophers often talk as though each ability is held by exactly one agent. This paper begins by arguing that abilities can be held by groups of agents, where the group is not an agent. I provide a new argument for—and a new analysis of—non-agentive groups’ abilities. I then provide a new argument that, surprisingly, obligations are different: non-agentive groups cannot bear obligations, at least not if those groups are large-scale such as ‘humanity’ or ‘carbon emitters.’ This pair of conclusions is (...) important, since philosophers who endorse large-scale non-agentive groups’ abilities almost universally endorse their obligations. More importantly, the twin arguments (one for abilities, one against obligations) make the following novel contribution: abilities imply agency-involving explanations, while obligations imply action-guidance. This general conclusion should be of interest beyond social ontology. (shrink)

La ciencia económica preponderante descuidó el estudio de la cooperación humana. Esto se debe a que hay una contradicción entre ser seres racionales con propensión a maximizar el bienestar, por un lado, y la posibilidad de concretar objetivos de beneficiocomún e implementar procesos relacionales no coercitivos, por el otro lado. Sin embargo, la economía experimental se ha preocupado por hallar explicación a la actitud de reciprocidad que muestran los agentes en distintos juegos de estrategia, ya que posibilita concretar acciones colectivas (...) en las que subyace una intencionalidad compartida que permite cumplir objetivos mutuamente dispuestos. Se busca mostrar cuándo y por qué los seres humanos empiezan a relacionarse con sus semejantes y cuáles el fundamento normativo que logra orientar estos comportamientos. (shrink)

Argues that truth, moral right, political right, and aesthetic value may be understood as arising out of a naturalist account of humanity, if naturalism is rightly conceived.

It is commonplace to speak of social groups as if they were capable of the same sorts of activities as individuals. We say, “Germany won the World Cup”; “The United States invaded Iraq”; and “The world mourned the passing of Nelson Mandela”. In so doing, we attribute agency, belief, and emotional states to groups themselves. In recent years, much literature devoted to analyzing such statements and their implications has emerged. Within this literature, the issue of “intentionalism,” whether individuals must have (...) a certain self-conception in order to constitute a collectivity, has received surprisingly little attention. While Paul Sheehy has criticized this view, claiming that individuals may be related in such a way as to constitute a collective without their realizing it :377–394, 2002), little other scholarship on the topic exists. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this debate. I will argue, drawing on Edith Stein’s phenomenology of social groups, that intentionalism, as Margaret Gilbert defines it, is false. I begin by establishing Gilbert’s account, Sheehy’s criticism of intentionalism, and what I take to be its shortcomings. I then explicate Stein’s phenomenology of collectives and argue that plural subjects who do not meet intentionalist requirements can exist. Given this, intentionalism must be rejected. Because the intentionalism debate presupposes that there are irreducibly social agents, I do not argue for this claim. (shrink)

Decision-making typically requires judgments about causal relations: we need to know the causal effects of our actions and the causal relevance of various environmental factors. We investigate how several individuals' causal judgments can be aggregated into collective causal judgments. First, we consider the aggregation of causal judgments via the aggregation of probabilistic judgments, and identify the limitations of this approach. We then explore the possibility of aggregating causal judgments independently of probabilistic ones. Formally, we introduce the problem of causal-network aggregation. (...) Finally, we revisit the aggregation of probabilistic judgments when this is constrained by prior aggregation of qualitative causal judgments. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of the recent revival of Hegel studies for the philosophy of economics. We argue that Hegel’s theory of Objective Spirit anticipates many elements of modern approaches in cognitive sciences and of the philosophy of mind, which adopt an externalist framework. In particular, Hegel pre-empts the theories of social and distributed cognition. The pivotal elements of Hegelian social ontology are the continuity thesis, the performativity thesis, and the recognition thesis, which, when taken together, imply that all (...) mental processes are essentially dependent on externalizations, with the underlying pattern of actions being performative. In turn, performative action is impossible without mutual recognition in an intersubjective domain. We demonstrate the implications for economic theory in sketching an externalist approach to institutions and preferences. (shrink)

What is required for several agents to intentionally φ together? I argue that each of them must believe or assume that their φ-ing is a single end that each intends to contribute to. Various analogies between intentional singular action and intentional joint action show that this doxastic single end condition captures a feature at the very heart of the phenomenon of intentional joint action. For instance, just as several simple actions are only unified into a complex intentional singular activity if (...) the agent believes or assumes that there is a single end that each action is directed to, so several agents’ actions are only unified into an intentional joint activity if each agent believes or assumes that there is a single end that each intends to contribute to. Influential accounts of intentional joint action, including Christopher Kutz’s and Michael Bratman’s, implicitly include this condition only if participants must intend to contribute to the end under the same conception. While such a requirement successfully rules out some counterexamples, it also makes the accounts unable to appropriately accommodate and explain clear cases of intentional joint action that they ought to be able to accommodate and explain. (shrink)

According to some accounts, an individual participates in joint intentional cooperative action by virtue of conceiving of him- or herself and other participants as if they were parts of a single agent or body that performs the action. I argue that this notional singularization move fails if they act as if they were parts of a single agent. It can succeed, however, if the participants act as if to bring about the goal of a properly functioning single body in action (...) of which they would be parts. This latter version of the move manages to capture the cooperative character of joint intentional cooperative action. It does this without requiring of participants that they act on higher-order interlocking intentions. (shrink)