Abstract
This chapter reinterprets the praxiological approach to collective actions and cooperation with the use of the contemporary philosophy of shared agency. It begins with a discussion of Kotarbiński’s account of collective actions, shows its peculiar character and defends the view that Kotarbiński’s account of cooperation implies modularity. It also highlights the role of the necessary and sufficient conditions of cooperation. In the next step, to show the topicality of necessary and sufficient conditions and the specificity of intentionality in cooperation, the chapter explores selected philosophical accounts of shared agency. This exploration is supplemented by a new account of minimally joint intentionality which is based on automatic imitative behaviour. In the final step, the chapter discusses the issue of the constraints of shared action.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth stressing that the appropriate understanding of intersubjectivity, as a framework for the philosophical discussion of shared agency, should, logically, be a theoretical warranty of possibly unnarrowed scope of shared agency. Still, some authors, although they make use of intersubjectivity, do not see this warranty. See Roth (2003: 65).
- 2.
By ‘sharedness’ I do not mean here such issues as tradition, culture or space—all of them may (sometimes even should) be shared.
- 3.
There is one significant exception: if an agent A fights the goals of agent B, and B does not respond in any way to A’s actions, then A’s action is negatively cooperative, but it is not a case of shared agency. Notice also that one cannot call such actions as ‘doing something together’ (except for the well-known mafia case recalled by Bratman (2014: 49)). Kotarbiński did not make this point explicitly, but this is a simple consequence of his view.
- 4.
The greatest value of the action-theoretical investigations of negative cooperation lays (probably) in the fact that it helps to comprehensively explicate the difference between cooperative and non-cooperative behaviour (despite the fact that the term ‘negative cooperation’ may superficially appear as misleading!). Naturally, this is only one of the many virtues of these investigations.
- 5.
This criticism does not seem to be just in the case of Raimo Tuomela’s theory (e.g. Tuomela 2007) which has also been enlisted by Smith, together with Searle’s, Gilbert’s and Bratman’s.
- 6.
Translation slightly changed.
- 7.
Translation altered (in Wojtasiewicz’s version of this quote, we can find, inter alia, ‘leadership’ instead of more proper ‘management’).
- 8.
Notice that quite a similar situation has been an object of investigation in the case of definition of proxy agency recently proposed by Kirk Ludwig. He observed that in the proxy agency, a person’s (or subgroup’s) doing something counts as or constitutes or is recognized as another person’s (or group’s) action (Ludwig 2014: 76).
- 9.
This is the way in which Kotarbiński suggests that the significance of an agent’s activity in a shared action depends on her objective input to cooperation (not only the subjective effort in playing her part).
- 10.
This is a motive from Smith (2014), but I use this term in a slightly different sense.
- 11.
Translation slightly altered.
- 12.
Here we can see why, actually, the original Kotarbińskian praxiology faces problems with the concept of intention. On the spectrum of options considered here, there are cases of effective, ineffective and counter-effective action which may be intentional, intended, unintentional or unintended, but there is no—it seems—authentic option for intention without action. This is the most problematic dimension of the reistically marked action theory.
- 13.
Naturally, this sort of ‘translation’ of Kotarbiński’s account, to be precise, would require additional conditions. I ignore this issue here.
- 14.
More on the role of this distinction (see e.g. Brennan 2012).
- 15.
In other words, there is additional reason to focus on Bratman’s approach to shared agency in this book.
- 16.
In Chap. 5 it has occurred that it was Kotarbiński, not Bratman, who introduced the concept of a plan into action theory on a larger scale. Now it should be also plain that he was also pioneering in his attempt at the explication of shared agency by the use of this concept.
- 17.
- 18.
Bratman is aware that his structure is cognitively demanding. He wants to escape this criticism, inter alia, by highlighting the fact that although such demandingness is against the idea of parsimony, his theory is still parsimonious with respect to the reductionism (it does not require introducing further conceptual resources, as e.g. Searle’s (1990) to explain shared agency). To support this stance, he—being aided by Manuel Vargas—recalls David Lewis’ distinction between quantitative and qualitative parsimony (Bratman 2014: 106, 184). However interesting this manoeuvre is, we should notice that such a cognitively demanding structure does not fit to the model of bounded resources to which Bratman’s early theory (1987) is subscribed. But if we take the idea of agents of limited resources seriously (as I have tried to do so throughout this book) the distinction between qualitative and quantitative parsimony cannot combat this idea.
- 19.
In this sense, authority is not only a warrant of effectiveness, but it also is one of the warrants which condition efficiency of massively shared agency (see also Chap. 4).
- 20.
We should note that authority relations also modify the idea of authorship in small-scale cases of cooperation. The result is fully Kotarbińskian: If I want to move a table from one room to another, because I want to eat dinner with my friends there, the reason you have to help me in this activity may be just the fact that I asked for your help and promised you to pay $20 for your help.
- 21.
Here I highlight the difference between cooperation and coordination; notice that I use these terms in the sense that implies, in both cases, human agents. Of course, coordination may be possible without humans (as in the case of traffic) (see e.g. Schuppert 2011).
- 22.
With respect to the limits in space, it is only a sketch. More detailed account requires a separate study.
- 23.
I have given an initial account of it in Makowski (forthcoming). Here I use and develop arguments proposed in this essay.
- 24.
I say ‘authority’ to stress the subgroup’ initiative and to refer to Shapiro’s proposal, but it is rather plain that there is no true authority here (in the strict sense of the word), the existence of which would require any acknowledgement from other agents involved in the whole activity.
- 25.
In motor psychology, this way of motor coordination is called entrainment (see e.g. Schmidt et al. 2011).
- 26.
I use the term in the sense of ecological psychology (without sticking to any particular view—J.J. Gibson’s ‘possibilities of action’, D.A. Norman’s ‘perceived clues’ or W.W. Gaver’s ‘perceptible suggestions’).
- 27.
This suggests that I interpret such intentionality in a strong sense (as involving beliefs and intentions). One might propose a competitive account which is weaker and fully based on the psychology of (intentional) automatic behaviour (as in the Chap. 6). To estimate which account is psychologically more realistic and explanatorily more convincing, one would need to discuss these options in more detail. For now—regardless the result of such an estimation—it is important that both these accounts are committed to intentionalism.
- 28.
Naturally, the idea of automatic imitation which is at stake here is slightly different from Kotarbiński’s approach to this issue (briefly discussed in the previous chapter).
- 29.
The way I use Byrne’s proposal is of course very sketchy. Nevertheless, I believe that his account offers at least a direction, in which the explanation of how the wave is created can go.
- 30.
Byrne, who identifies—standardly in psychology—‘intendingness’ with intentionality, considers string parsing as ‘unintentional’. From the previous chapter (section “Context: Automatic Actions in Contemporary Empirical Accounts”) we already know that, according to the implications of the Simple View in psychology, this may still mean that an action is intentional. Hence, in what follows I interpret Byrne’s idea of the unintentional as the unintended.
- 31.
Heyes (2011) points to three ways in which intentions interfere with automatic imitation: ‘input modulation, where broadly attentional processes influence the extent of action stimulus processing; output modulation, where imitative motor representations are inhibited or allowed to gain control of overt behavior;
and intervention, where context-dependent intentions have a direct effect on the process that converts activation of an action
stimulus representation into activation of a topographically similar response representation’ (Heyes 2011: 497) Of course, this ‘tripartite scheme’ refers to the processes which stabilize the psychology of copying individual (i.e. they do not apply directly to the stability of shared activities), but it does not mean that some of them may be present in the intersubjective context. I stipulate that the third type: intervention—which is not sufficiently empirically supported in the context of the psychology of an individual (Heyes 2011: 476)—is in play when the stability of such multi-agent actions as stadium behaviour is needed to understand how it is possible.
- 32.
Of course, this is a speculation. Nevertheless, it seems to be the most convincing explanation. The point is that such intentions must appear, because otherwise a longer series of imitative behaviour (an imitation of an imitation of an imitation… etc.) could lose its automatic power and effectiveness. The occasional relevant dispersion of intentions to perform the whole action provides a minimal but sufficient dose of collective intentionality. This is interesting not only because it shows another condition of cooperation in this case, but also because it suggests that full automaticity of imitative behaviour on a large scale of multi-agent cooperative actions seems to be impossible.
- 33.
Naturally, they are interesting also for other reasons, as for example for its hyper-minimalism with respect to emotional aspects of doing something together as a group, group-identity, the issues of obligations, commitment, solidarity and so on. Such minimalism concerning the intentional aspects of cooperation recently has received some support from enactive psychology (Fantasia et al. 2014).
- 34.
Paternotte might disagree with the way I interpret him here. My interpretation has been purposively watered down to highlight only the most salient aspects of his approach.
- 35.
Naturally, there are important cases which do not support this view (e.g. Prisoner’s dilemma).
- 36.
The fact that effective joint activities may be more or less efficient constitutes a separate issue. Let me also note here that Paternotte does not explicitly distinguish effectiveness and efficiency (he discusses the constraint of effectiveness under the heading of efficiency). The lack of this distinction leads him to the more serious discussion of the constraint that recommends making shared actions more efficient, that is, he considers the issue of maximal definitions. But the conclusion he makes only supports the usefulness of this distinction.
- 37.
This dimension of the effectiveness of shared actions—unnoticed by Paternotte—is very general, but it may be used to better recognize other, more detailed approaches.
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Makowski, P.T. (2017). Shared Agency: The Praxiological Approach. In: Tadeusz Kotarbiński’s Action Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40051-8_7
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