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Question Session 05

Week 05 Questions:

Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science

[email protected]

this is being recorded

Alex

Do we consider any group action as a joint action?

background on individual failure

Intention: throw ball through hoop.

Outcome: window breaks

Intention: throw ball through hoop.

Outcome: success!

descriptions of action:

Steve broke the window.

Steve tried to throw the ball through the hoop.

descriptions of action:

Steve threw the ball through the hoop.

Steve tried to throw the ball through the hoop.

even abject failure is compatible with acting intentionally

Alex

Do we consider any group action as a joint action?

just an action involving a gruop.

group in the orindary sense (we are a group of people ta a lecture)

(Not assuming that the group is itself an agent)

If so, is there some higher tier of joint action?

Argument: We have examples of group actions unaffected by individual failures
as well as ones where an individuals failure to comply has more apparent consequences.

For instance if we decide to go swimming and swim 40 laps each, we could end up with you swimming the 40 laps and me barely making 35, still we would (possibly) consider it as a joint action.
However if we were to take part in synchronised swimming, then me not quite swimming correctly has a higher impact on the action in general as opposed to the previous case.

Alex

Do we consider any group action as a joint action?

‘examples of collective enterprise in which agents' relations to one another are far more attenuated---industrial production, stadium "waves," complicated bank heists, military maneuvers.
In all these cases a group has acted together in a way that is difficult to map onto the minuscule or marginal contributions of its members’

(Kutz, 2000, p. 2)

How to make into objection?

what Bratman claims

claim contradicting it

reasons for contradicting claim

I suggest we accept this on the grounds that group actions are of interest to the behavioural sciences. (Which is not to postulate group agents!)

Kutz’ own response is that weaker sufficient conditions can be given.

‘Groups are nothing more or less than agents who intend to participate in collective action.

[...] a minimalist conception of the conditions of collective action.

Although particular types of joint activities may require high degrees of responsiveness and robust mutual expectation, joint action as such merely requires that there be sufficient overlap among the objects of agents' participatory intentions.’

(Kutz, 2000, p. 31)

what Bratman claims

the continuity thesis

‘once God created individual planning agents and ... they have relevant knowledge of each other’s minds, nothing fundamentally new---conceptually, metaphysically, or normatively--needs to be added for there to be modest sociality.’

(Bratman, 2014, p. 8)

claim contradicting it

Something ‘fundamentally new’ is needed to explain group action.

reasons for contradicting claim

Group actions are joint actions, yet in stadium waves (&c) Bratman’s sufficient conditions for shared intention do not apply.

Kutz’ own response is that weaker sufficient conditions can be given.

But maybe we can find another way to defend this objection?

Group Agents?

Q1. What is a group agent?

‘By a group agent I mean a group whose members combine to act within group roles in such a way that the group as a whole simulates or mimics an individual agent.

We can ascribe goals or purposes to the group, we can ascribe representations of the environment that bear on how those purposes can be realized,

and we can see the behaviors of suitable members as actions attributable to the group: as attempts by the group to satisfy its purposes in a way that makes sense according to its representations.’

(Pettit, 2014, p. 1641)

Q2. Do any group actions have group agents?

On accounts like Bratman’s or Gilbert’s, ‘it makes some sense to say that the result is a kind of shared action: the individual people are, after all, acting intentionally throughout.

However, in a deeper sense, the activity is not shared: the group itself is not engaged in action whose aim the group finds worthwhile, and so the actions at issue here are merely those of individuals.

Thus, these accounts ... fail to make sense of a ... part of the landscape of social phenomena’

(Helm, 2008, pp. 20--1)

Helm (2008, pp. 20-1)

Start with Helm’s challenge ([because I can answer it at the end]).

This is bad: who can explain what sharing amounts to? This is just a metaphor. Our problem is to discipline the metaphor, not to write as if we already understood it.

It is hard to understand what Helm is aiming for here, but I think the idea is that the actions should be not merely those of individuals but of the group itself.

The objection says something is missing, but actually our interest is driven by the thought that both Gilbert’s and Bratman’s approaches are inadqeuate as attempts to characterise shared agency.

How to make sense of this idea?

aggregate subject

I think Helm wants what I will call an ‘aggregate subject’. (He uses the term ‘plural robust agent’, but this is because he ignores a distinction between aggregate and plural subjects which will be important later.)

Meet an aggregate animal, the Portuguese man o' war (Physalia physalis), which is composed of polyps.

Here you can say that ‘the group [of polyps] itself’ is engaged in action which is not just a matter of the polyps all acting.

To illustrate, consider how it eats. Wikipedia: ‘Contractile cells in each tentacle drag the prey into range of the digestive polyps, the gastrozooids, which surround and digest the food by secreting enzymes that break down proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, while the gonozooids are responsible for reproduction.’

This jellyfish-like animal is a crude model for the sort of aggregate agent Helm (and others) suggest we need.

But how can such a thing exist? Humans do not mechanically attach themselves in the way that the polyps making up that jellyfish-like animal do.

So how are aggregate agents possible?

Preview of what is to come later in the course

‘collective intentions are the product of a distinctive mode of practical reasoning, team reasoning, in which agency is attributed to groups.’

(Gold & Sugden, 2007)

So these researchers are aiming to build a kind of aggregate subject.

They think, in a nutshell, that aggregate subjects are not only a consequence of self-reflection, but can also arise through (a special mode of) reasoning about what to do.

Gold and Sugden (2006)

But what is team reasoning? I’m so glad you asked ...

what Bratman claims

the continuity thesis

(Bratman, 2014, p. 8)

claim contradicting it

Something ‘fundamentally new’ is needed to explain group action.

reasons for contradicting claim

Group actions are joint actions, yet in stadium waves (&c) Bratman’s sufficient conditions for shared intention do not apply.

Kutz’ own response is that weaker sufficient conditions can be given.

But maybe we can find another way to defend this objection?

self-representing aggregate subjects

How?

aggregate subject

How can such a thing exist? Humans do not mechanically attach themselves in the way that the polyps making up that jellyfish do.

So how are aggregate agents possible?

Dennett: Intentional Stance

Are you familiar with Dennett’s intentional stance and Dennett's ingeneous twist?

‘What it is to be a true believer is to be … a system whose behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy.’

(Dennett, 1987, p. \ 15)

Dennett 1987, p. 15

If we accept this, then it is easy to see how there could be aggregate subjects. There are aggegrate subjects just in virtue of the fact that people sometimes behave in a way that they form a system whose behaviour is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy.

But I think this is unsatisfying for two kinds of reason. One is very general: the twist in the intentional stance is almost certainly wrong, as I think even Dennett now acknowledges.

The other is that this approach neglects the subject’s own perspective. Doesn’t it matter whether, from the perspective of the subjects themselves, there is an aggregate agent? (This is just a hunch, not an argument.)

Cordula’s Imperative

Cordula’s Imperative: Theorise about shared agency from the point of view of the subject.

Humans from around two years of age or earlier can readily attribute states to an imaginary agent, identify how it needs to act given those states and perform actions on its behalf. Note that in acting on behalf of imaginary agents they may be furthering their own real-world objectives (as in `Teddy wants to go to the park.').

Joint action sometimes involves imaginary agents as well---not teddies, of course, but imaginary composite agents.

Lucina and Charlie each want to complete a multi-step task. Lucina imagines that she and Charlie are an aggregate subject, Lucina-and-Charlie, and attributes to this imaginary agent the intention of completing the task. Charlie does the same, ascribing the same intention to the imaginary agent.

Do such imaginary activities presuppose shared intentions? Certainly we require something to make it the case that it is not merely an accident that Charlie imagines the same agent and attributes the same intention as Lucina. %\footnote{The case described here is not one of joint acton _with_ an imaginary agent. The actual agents, Lucina and Charlie, are real. But what makes their action interestingly joint is the fact that they each construe themselves as acting on behalf of an imaginary composite agent, Lucina-and-Charlie.}

This is a joint action in that Lucina and Charlie work together to achieve an outcome which occurs as a common effect of their actions.

Incidentally, this case indicates that some of the functions assigned to shared intention can be also fulfilled by imaginings. Charlie and Lucina construe their actions as if they were the actions of a single agent, and it is this imaginary exercise which makes them responsive to each others' actions and causes them to coordinate their activities by executing complementary parts of what must be done on behalf of the imaginary agent.

What does this get us? An imaginary aggregate subject. But is there more?

self-representing agents

More than an imaginary aggregate subject?

‘The intentional or conversational stance not only enables us to identify and understand patterns that would escape [...] an individualistic stance [...]

In the case of self-representing agents, it is also responsible for generating the very patterns that appear in the interaction between them. [...]

the perspective is of the greatest importance in understanding agency’

(Pettit, 2014, p. 1658)

Helm’s position appears similar: ‘a basic account of what must be the case if there are to be plural agents: there must be a projectible pattern of rationality in the group’s responses constitutive of an evaluative perspective held jointly by members of the group, such that each of us can be held rationally accountable for his or her responses in light of that joint evaluative perspective’ (Helm, 2008, p. 38)

Also: ‘he is a member of a plural agent whose evaluative perspective he both shares and helps constitute; that is, we each must care about us as a plural agent.’ (Helm, 2008, p. 40)

Pettit (2014, p. 1658)

imaginary -> reflectively constituted

aggregate subject

How?

aggregate subject

The question was, how could there be any such thing as aggregate subjects given that humans don’t mechanically attach themselves to each other in the way that polyps do.

Following Pettit and List, I suggested that one answer to this involves self-reflection playing a role in constituting the aggregate subject.

what Bratman claims

the continuity thesis

(Bratman, 2014, p. 8)

claim contradicting it

Something ‘fundamentally new’ is needed to explain group action.

reasons for contradicting claim

Group actions are joint actions, yet in stadium waves (&c) Bratman’s sufficient conditions for shared intention do not apply.

Kutz’ own response is that weaker sufficient conditions can be given.

But maybe we can find another way to defend this objection?

Have we defended the objection? Jein.

We have identified cases where Bratman’s conditions do not apply.

But our self-reflective group agents seem compatible with the contiunity principle

Keyboard Shortcuts?f

Question Session 05

Week 05 Questions:

Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science

[email protected]

Keyboard Shortcuts`?f`