From Individual to Plural Agency

Kirk Ludwig develops a novel reductive account of plural discourse about collective action and shared intention. Part I develops the event analysis of action sentences, provides an account of the content of individual intentions, and on that basis an analysis of individual intentional action. Part II shows how to extend the account to collective action, intentional and unintentional, and shared intention, expressed in sentences with plural subjects. On the account developed, collective action is a matter of there being multiple agents of an event and it requires no group agents per se. Shared intention is a matter of agents in a group each intending that they bring about some end in accordance with a shared plan. Thus their participatory intentions (their we-intentions) differ from individual intentions not in their mode but in their content. Joint intentional action then is a matter of a group of individuals successfully executing a shared intention. The account does not reduce shared intention to aggregates of individual intentions. However, it argues that the content of we-intentions can be analyzed wholly in terms of concepts already at play in our understanding of individual intentional action. The account thus vindicates methodological individualism for plural agency. The account is contrasted with other major positions on shared intention and joint action, and defended against objections. This forms the foundation for a reductive account of the agency of mobs and institutions, expressed in grammatically singular action sentences about groups and their intentions, in a second volume.

Kirk Ludwig is a Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. He taught at the University of Florida from 1990 to 2010 and was the Colonel Alan R. and Margaret G. Crow CLAS Term Professor from 2008 to 2010, when he joined Indiana University, Bloomington. He works primarily in the Philosophy of Mind and Action, Philosophy of Language, and Epistemology. He is the editor of Donald Davidson (CUP, 2003), co-author with Ernie Lepore of Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality (OUP, 2005) and Donald Davidson's Truth-theoretic Semantics (OUP, 2007), and co-editor with Ernie Lepore of Companion to Donald Davidson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

- Preface - 1: The Problem of Collective Agency - Part I: Singular Action Sentences - 2: What is an Event? - 3: The Logical Form of Singular Action Sentences - 4: Action, Motivation, Explanation, and Intention - 5: Conditional Intentions - 6: What is it to be the agent of an event or state? - 7: The Content of I-intentions - 8: The Adverb 'Intentionally' - Part I: Summary and Conclusion - Part II - Plural Action Sentences - 9: Logical Form of Plural Action Sentences - 10: Extensions and Explanations - 11: Consequences, Collective Actions, Illustrative Cases - 12: What are Shared or Group Intentions? - 13: The Distinctive Content of We-Intentions - 14: Some Initial Objections and Replies - 15: Collective Intentional Behavior - 16: Relation to Other Accounts - 17: Does the Account Require More of Collective Action than is Reasonable? - Part II: Summary - 18: Conclusion - Bibliography - Index