Bratman on shared intention

SATS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-181
Author(s):  
Christian Kietzmann
Keyword(s):  
Human Agency ◽  
Shared Intention ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Michael Bratman ◽  
Single Person ◽  
Analytic Strategy ◽  
Individual Planning ◽  
Main Components ◽  
Shared Agency ◽  
Central Claim

AbstractIn work that spans almost four decades, Michael Bratman has developed a rich account of human agency. At the centre of this account lies an understanding of intentions as individual planning states. A significant strand in this enterprise has been his work on shared agency, culminating in his 2014 monograph, which aims to extend his account of individual agency to cover cases of what he calls “modest sociality”, i.e. simple cases of acting together. Central to this endeavour is Bratman’s analysis of shared intention, which for him is not asui generisphenomenon, but can be understood in terms of his concept of individual agency, as the main components of his account of shared intention are already available in his account of the intentions of a single person.In this paper, I want to critically examine Bratman’s approach to shared intention. I will proceed as follows: In Section 1, I will describe the analytic strategy that guides Bratman’s analysis. Section 2 will introduce his central claim that the fulfilment of a list of conditions suffices for a shared intention to be present. In Sections 3 to 5, I will discuss and criticise some of these conditions. In Section 6, I will draw some positive conclusions from my critical arguments.

scholarly journals Practical Intersubjectivity and Normative Guidance: Bratman on Shared Agency

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-48
Author(s):  
Abraham Sesshu Roth
Keyword(s):  
Power Sharing ◽  
Interpersonal Coordination ◽  
Shared Intention ◽  
Interesting Issue ◽  
Michael Bratman ◽  
Individual Planning ◽  
Shared Agency

AbstractIn an important new book on shared agency, Michael Bratman develops an account of the normative demand for the coordination of intentions amongst participants in shared agency. Bratman seeks to understand this form of normative guidance in terms of that associated with individual planning intentions. I give reasons to resist his form of reductionism. In addition, I note how Bratman’s discussion raises the interesting issue of the function or purpose of shared intention and of shared agency more generally. According to Bratman, the function of shared intention is to promote interpersonal coordination of intention and action. I suggest that power sharing amongst participants must also be included as a function of shared intention.

scholarly journals Modest Sociality: Continuities and Discontinuities

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Pacherie
Keyword(s):  
Small Scale ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Planning Agency ◽  
Intentional Agency ◽  
Individual Planning ◽  
Shared Agency ◽  
Central Claim

AbstractA central claim in Michael Bratman’s account of shared agency is that there need be no radical conceptual, metaphysical or normative discontinuity between robust forms of small-scale shared intentional agency, i.e., modest sociality, and individual planning agency. What I propose to do is consider another potential discontinuity, whose existence would throw doubt on his contention that the structure of a robust form of modest sociality is entirely continuous with structures at work in individual planning agency. My main point will be that he may be wrong in assuming that the basic cognitive infrastructure sufficient to support individual agency doesn’t have to be supplemented in significant ways to support shared agency.

Stumbling on the rehabilitation gold? Foucault vs. Foucault in San Quentin and beyond

Ethnography ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bowen Paulle
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Intelligence ◽  
Rehabilitation Program ◽  
Prison System ◽  
The Other ◽  
Trauma Treatment ◽  
Treatment Model ◽  
Authentic Self ◽  
State Prison ◽  
Main Components ◽  
Central Claim

This article examines GRIP, a rehabilitation program currently spreading through California’s state prison system. While most ‘violent offenders’ come to GRIP hoping to increase chances of parole, this yearlong program with four main components – stopping violence, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, understanding victim impact – is meant to create conditions in which inmates can ‘do the work’ leading to genuine transformation. A central claim is that due in part to the trauma-treatment model GRIP follows, inmates end up ‘stumbling on the gold’ and going through changes (involving recovery of an ‘authentic self ’ rooted in childhood) that helps enable skillful responses even to ‘moments of imminent danger’. Understandably, researchers of such programs may seek theoretical inspiration from the ‘dominant’ version of Foucault. Yet this paper sets out to change the conversation about prisons and rehabilitation in part by demonstrating the utility of the ‘other’ Foucault’s pragmatic recovery of body-based self-disciplining practices and regimes.

scholarly journals Two Approaches to Shared Intention: An Essay in the Philosophy of Social Phenomena

2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Shared Intention ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Michael Bratman ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Common ◽  
Technical Terms

AbstractDrawing on earlier work of the author that is both clarified and amplified here, this article explores the question: what is it for two or more people to intend to do something in the future? In short, what is it for people to share an intention? It argues for three criteria of adequacy for an account of shared intention (the disjunction, concurrence, and obligation criteria) and offers an account that satisfies them. According to this account, in technical terms explained in the paper, people share an intention when and only when they are jointly committed to intend as a body to do such-and-such in the future. This account is compared and contrasted with the common approach that treats shared intention as a matter of the correlative personal intentions, with particular reference to the work of Michael Bratman.

scholarly journals Shared Agency in Modest Sociality

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Ludwig
Keyword(s):  
Planning Theory ◽  
Michael Bratman ◽  
Shared Agency

AbstractA contribution to a symposium on Michael Bratman, Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together.

Tocqueville’s Religious Terror

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-180
Author(s):  
Jason Frank
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Common Cause ◽  
Social Question ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Collective Actor

One of the central ironies of Alexis de Tocqueville’s political thought was that the democratic era that promised to bring conscious human agency to an equal mankind, freeing human beings from their bondage to tradition and their submission to the sacred, actually threatened them with unprecedented forms of domination. Tocqueville’s sense of “religious terror” is engendered from the spectacle of everyone being “driven willy-nilly along the same road” and having “joined the common cause, some despite themselves, others unwittingly, like blind instruments in the hands of God.” “Religious terror” is both a symptom and a diagnosis of his concern with the deflated status of individual agency in democratic contexts, and with the related eclipse of the political by the social question. This chapter explores this dimension of Tocqueville’s thought and its relation to his denial of such agency to any collective actor, to deny heroism, and its associated grandeur, to the popular will.

scholarly journals Controversy and human agency in ‘portrait masks’ from the studio of André Sanou

Africa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 768-801 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Homann
Keyword(s):  
Burkina Faso ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Societal Values ◽  
Bobo Dioulasso

AbstractThis article examines artist André Sanou's individual agency in the invention and popularity of ‘portrait masks’ in and around Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. Rather than depicting abstract qualities of unseen natural forces, common among masks in this region, Sanou created the first portrait mask headpiece in a stylized but highly naturalistic manner, using a photograph as reference. It clearly depicted a specific human being, redefining the mask as a portrait of the deceased whom it honoured. Sanou's act gave rise to a wildly popular mask genre. However, portrait masks have aroused debate about the (im)propriety of naturalistic representation in masquerade. I argue that the features that make André Sanou's portrait mask genre so popular – celebrating specific individuals who are visually identifiable by their physiognomic likeness – are the same ones that make the genre controversial. The controversy illustrates the messy business of reconciling creative differences with societal values that individual artists, patrons, organizers, performers and audience members who serve as gatekeepers of cultural institutions maintain and at times negotiate. As the portrait mask genre demonstrates, masquerade is not necessarily a steadfast, uncompromising institution. Individuals can unsettle or disrupt accepted mask practice, even as they broaden its scope and invigorate audiences.

scholarly journals Bratman, Searle, and Simplicity. A comment on Bratman, Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Björn Petersson
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
Planning Theory ◽  
Group Agency ◽  
Intentional States ◽  
Shared Agency ◽  
Central Claim

AbstractMichael Bratman’s work is established as one of the most important philosophical approaches to group agency so far, and Shared Agency, A Planning Theory of Acting Together confirms that impression. In this paper I attempt to challenge the book’s central claim that considerations of theoretical simplicity will favor Bratman’s theory of collective action over its main rivals. I do that, firstly, by questioning whether there must be a fundamental difference in kind between Searle style we-intentions and I-intentions within that type of framework. If not, Searle’s type of theory need not be less qualitatively parsimonious than Bratman’s. This hangs on how we understand the notions of modes and contents of intentional states, and the relations between modes, contents, and categorizations of such states. Secondly, by questioning whether Bratman’s theory steers clear of debunking or dismissing collectivity. Elsewhere I have claimed that the manoeuvres Bratman suggested to avoid circularity in his conceptual analysis (in 1992 and 1997) undermine the strength of his resulting notion of collective action. Bratman responds in detail to this objection in his new book and I return to the issue towards the end of the paper.

Human Agency, Responsibility, and Tawḥīd

2019 ◽  
pp. 162-184
Author(s):  
Taraneh R. Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Holistic Vision ◽  
Communal Responsibility

This chapter continues to treat Şaban Ali Düzgün’s work, exploring his take on human agency and moving from an abstract sense of communal responsibility towards more concrete and constructive Muslim responses to the trauma of Western colonialism. By highlighting his understanding of human agency, it explores Düzgün’s theological and conceptual toolbox, showing how he draws confidently on Enlightenment and classical Islamic resources to produce a holistic vision of the individual in positive relationship with God. Specifically, this chapter shows how Düzgün finesses conceptions of human knowledge and affirms human plurality—a plurality facilitated by divine unity that does not stand in antagonistic relationship to individual agency. For Düzgün, tawḥīd, or God’s utter oneness, stands in positive and open relation to an empowered individual piously conscious of her responsibility to society and those around her.

We-Narratives and the Stability and Depth of Shared Agency

2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen ◽  
Shaun Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Joint Action ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
The Self ◽  
Shared Intention ◽  
Basic Approach ◽  
Intentional States ◽  
Joint Actions ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Shared Agency

The basic approach to understanding shared agency (or joint action) has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for different reasons, what binds them to one another such that they have some reason for continuing to participate in the joint action in the face of conflicting reasons? This is particularly pressing in cases of joint actions that unfold over long periods of time. There are a variety of ways that the problem of stability and depth of shared intention might be addressed. We review some of those ways in section 1. We do not intend to challenge these approaches. Instead, in this article, we want to suggest that narrative is an additional, perhaps in some cases a predominant, way in which stability and depth are achieved. According to some theories, narrative plays a crucial role in the development of the self. Our suggestion is that the narratives we tell about our joint projects contribute to the development of a stable and deep “we.”

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