A Pragmatic Approach to Agency in Group Activity

Herman Witzel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9783110629088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

A Pragmatic Approach to Agency in Group Activity builds towards an action theory that explains how new forms agency develop in group activity. The approach starts from practical insights about group activity and develops a new understanding of agency from there.
This study shows how practical interactions and structures in group activity disrupt individual agency. It is concluded that important features of agency can be realized on a group level. Different types of group activities are analyzed in order to better understand these mechanisms and, consequently, revisit our understanding of agency. It is argued that "intentionality, " the key concept in individual action theory, merely serves as a pseudo-explanatory connection between specific features of agency and their realization in humans. This is contrasted with empirical research showing that how humans act is far from the idealized concept of intentionality. Consequently, intentionality as a key explanatory concept is rejected and replaced by a diverse set of features of agency for a similarly diverse set of kinds of agency. In this view, groups display new forms agency beyond individual agency without making the groups agents themselves. Such is the nature of group agency.

1Introduction

“U.S. strikes ISIS camp in Lybia,” “How ISIS recruits children then kills them,” “Uber losing 1$B a year in China,” “Ford plans four new SUV models,” “Apple rebuffs FBI, sparks anger and praise.” These headlines are taken from the arbitrarily chosen day February 19th, 2016 from the CNN website (Botelho and Starr, 2016; McLaughlin, 2016; Yan, 2016; Isodore, 2016; Botelho et al., 2016). They are completely comprehensible as long as one knows the groups in these statements, e.g., the U.S. and China are governmental states, ISIS is a terror organization, Ford, Uber and Apple are business corporations, FBI is an intelligence agency. Headlines like this are also ubiquitous. Looking at any other news website on any other day yields similar statements.

The ubiquity is owed to the tremendous importance of groups and their activity in our society–especially in our time (French, 1995, for a historic perspective). The comprehensibility, in comparison, is not so easily explained. At face value, the headlines state that the respective groups display agency. They perform actions and they interact with each other. The headline about Apple and the FBI even suggests they can be praised or blamed for their actions. When taken literally, such statements refer to groups as if they were agents engaged in full-blown agency.

The literal interpretation, however, is problematic: groups are not beings themselves; they are groups of human beings. Human beings, on the other hand, are agents. The immediate suggestion is that groups are not really agents themselves, but merely groups of agents. Saying a group acts, consequently, is a simpler way of saying the members of the group act. The appearance of group names in these statements is merely for abbreviation (Ludwig, 2014, for such a claim in more technical detail). The abbreviation-interpretation, too, is immediately challenged. The first headline from above, for example, could easily read ‘U.S. pilots strike ISIS camp in Lybia’, but this would be ambiguous: U.S. pilots might strike an ISIS camp without the U.S. striking the camp–maybe they have gone rogue, or they are striking the ISIS camp for another state like Iraq with Iraq military equipment allowed by the U.S. government. Even if the U.S. pilots strike the ISIS camp within their regular duty, they only perform the very last stage of the strike, namely actually dropping the bombs. Other agents gathered relevant intelligence, decided the strike and prepared it. It is not immediately obvious how the overall activity of striking the ISIS camp can be understood solely in terms of the individuals’ agency.

In either interpretation, literal or abbreviatory, a first glance at the statements does not provide a simple, easily comprehensible understanding. Accordingly, our practical reactions vary between the two interpretations. We make demands for compensation, for example, directed at the entire group, while we may also demand that specific individuals resign from their positions within the group. We impose business restrictions on a company affecting all of its members, while, at the same time, we charge specific individuals who played an outstanding role in whatever happened. Sometimes the target of our practical reactions is the group as a whole, and sometimes it is individuals within the group. This is an immediate consequence of the difficulty to ascribe agency in group activity.

The clarification of agency in group activity is, therefore, an important and non-trivial task. Intuitively and philosophically, however, agency is first and foremost concerned with individuals. In particular, agency is almost unanimously thought to be characterized by intentionality since Elisabeth Anscombe’s influential monograph “Intention” from 1957. Intentionality in agency, in turn, is usually associated with states of mind or a combination of states of minds in line with the equally influential 1963’s paper “Action, Reasons and Causes” by Donald Davidson. Thus, the dominant view on agency characterized by intentionality is inherently individual.

Nonetheless, most theories of agency in group activity attempt to make sense of intentionality on a group level in order to recover continuity with the dominant view on individual agency. In fact, the major, bi-annual philosophical conference on the topic is called “Collective Intentionality” (Collective Intentionality X, 2016). On a group level, clearly, there is no direct equivalent to the states of minds of individuals, which are used to characterize intentionality in individual agency. Consequently, the explanation of intentionality on a group level forces philosophers to use alternative features readily accessible without a study of the human mind. Different proposals focus on different features for agency in group activity, for example, planning (Bratman, 1999), procedures for decision making (List and Pettit, 2013; French, 1995), forms of commitment (Gilbert, 1990), or basic individual social attitudes enabling us to make sense of intentionality on a group level (Searle, 1990; Tuomela and Miller, 1988; Tomasello et al., 2005). Notably, the features by themselves already provide powerful explanations of agency in group activity without direct reference to any form of intentionality. Indeed, the framing of the respective accounts in terms of intentionality for the sake of theoretical continuity usually adds little to their explanatory power.

While a continuity of individual agency and agency in group activity makes immediate sense, it is worthwhile to realize that the direction of continuity can go two ways. One option is to start with individual action theory, and then extend this to group activity. Another option is to start with group activity that seems to display features of agency. This comes with the pragmatic advantage that those features are out in the open: we need not look into the individual agents’ minds to understand agency in group activity, but we can simply look at the practice of group activity. In a second step, the demand of continuity can be understood as a challenge to action theory for individual agency. The aim of this text, ultimately, is to push forward this pragmatic approach and offer a new way to think about agency in general and about agency in group activity in particular.

The structure of this thesis roughly follows the brief discussion up to now. In the second chapter, I show that the challenge of ascribing agency in group activity comes from a fundamental disruption of individual agency in group activity. Statements like “Ford plans four new SUV models” suggest that the explanation of group activity cannot refer to individual agency alone. Indeed, when agents engage in group activity, they face a coordination problem: they must properly coordinate their interaction for successful group activity. When an individual agent only interacts with her environment, she can adjust her actions and decisions to circumstances. In group activity, in contrast, the agents can influence each other even before anything has happened. This responsiveness enables agents to link their respective actions together by linking their agency together, i.e. the agents do not simply adjust their own actions to what the other agents do, but they already influence each other on their way to action.

In order to understand the challenge for the ascription of agency in group activity, thus, I analyze various examples of how agents usually coordinate themselves in group activity and how this affects the agents’ agency. I uncover a general coordination principle, which is the basis for all forms of coordination. In order to coordinate, agents need to create some form of external link between them relevant for their respective agency. This can be as simple as external information flows, e.g., established by verbal or non-verbal communication, which carries relevant information for the mutually depended action decisions, a definition of roles settling what to expect from each other, or a set of simple rules to which agents agree and adhere to. By doing so, the individual agent’s agency is no longer self-sufficient, but rather relies on external factors. This by itself does not necessarily pose a problem for agency. Even in the absence of other agents an agent is dependent on external factors. In more complex group activity, however, this principle does impact individual agency in a fundamental manner.

In large groups with complex goals, this becomes particularly evident. Companies, for example, usually persist through large time spans during which hundreds or even thousands of agents at each given time must be properly coordinated. The performance of such group activity, notably, is largely independent of agents leaving and entering the group. Furthermore, many agents do not necessarily know what the other agents are doing–or they do not even know many of the other agents at all, yet, they contribute to the same overall activity.

The respective coordination problems in such group activity cannot be championed with simple information flows or simple rules. Rather, the methods for coordination have to ensure successful group activity largely independent of the specific individual agents. This is also achieved by establishing external links between the agents. In contrast to simpler forms of group activity, however, the links are not merely relevant or helpful for the individual agents, but crucial to the exercise of agency: structures of goals and means are defined on a group level, and the group organization is set up accordingly; the individuals are provided with incentives to contribute to the group activity irrespective of their endorsement of the group activity; procedures are defined to ensure reliability and consistency in execution and so on and so forth. In consequence, the agents in such group activity often do things that they did not decide to do; they bring about goals that are not their own goals; even the way how they do things often is prescribed by working procedures, or heavily restricted by policies. In short, features crucial for agency are established on a group level, and the individual agents draw from these resources for their performance. As a consequence, it is not possible anymore to describe the display of agency in group activity solely on the individual level. Instead, one has to invoke group level features to explain agency in group activity. This is the fundamental disruption of individual agency in group activity.

The disruption of agency in group activity presents a challenge for action theory. It is not clear how exactly individual agency is eroded in group activity, or simply takes another form. What is obvious, however, is that the disruption of agency in group activity is gradual and not an all-or-nothing matter. In simple cases of group activity, the results can be fully explained with recourse to the individual agents’ agency added by some helpful external mechanisms. In more complex cases, key features of agency are established on a group level, while others remain with the individuals. Developing a convincing theory of agency for these dynamics is challenging, but they also present the opportunity to think about agency from a new perspective. The coordination in these group activities replaces key features of agency on the individual level by respective features on the group level. In doings so, those features are directly observable. Understanding group activity, therefore, provides an independent access to agency or, at least, to the various features relevant for agency.

Hence, in chapter three, I analyze group activity independently of concepts of individual agency in order to provide an original basis for the study of agency in group activity. To help with the clarity of the explanatory scope and the structure of research, I draw a research map for group activity. The research map contains distinct types of group activity in need of explanation especially with respect to agency. I characterize the different types of group activity using untainted concepts independent of existing accounts of agency or group activity. This way, the research map remains neutral with respect to theory building, but highlights the basic concepts needed for understanding group activity. I subsequently discuss different positions on group activity to find out about features of agency most relevant to group activity.

In order to draw the research map, I analyze the different meanings of ‘together’ as they appear in descriptions of group activity. Agents do many things ‘together’, but there are different reasons why we describe it this way. Indeed, the analysis reveals distinct types of group activity based on equally distinct concepts. For example, agents work together towards the same goal and recognize each other in doing so. This alone usually suffices to say that two or more agents do something together. However, agents do not need to have the same goal to do something together. They may only coordinate themselves in order to realize, for example, a common means to their different personal goals. Neither of the two, goals or coordination, is required when agents do something together simply for the sake of doing it together rather than alone.

Naturally, combinations are possible as well. Many times, agents coordinate to achieve a common goal, and they may even do so partly because they enjoy doing it together. The range of group activities from this analysis alone, consequently, is rather wide. More importantly, the differentiating characteristics are completely distinct, which implies that research on agency in group activity requires a differentiated approach as well. To make matters worse, group activity is not restricted to things agents do ‘together’ in any of the above meanings. Indeed, group activity is not always properly described as doing something ‘together’, i.e. there are important cases where multiple agents bring about some result in a non-incidental manner, yet, they do not do it together.

Authority, for example, empowers individual agency by forcing other agents into joint activity. An agent in authority quite literally extends the reach of her agency using other agents. The involved agents do not bring about a result together, but the agents under authority do something for the agent in authority–not with them. On the other hand, authority can, indeed, be used as a helpful coordination method when acting ‘together’ in a proper sense. Eventually, a mix of the two cases gives rise to a new form of group activity: individual agents may do something for the group, but do not do it with other members of the group at the same time. The authority, so to speak, comes directly from the group to empower the group activity. Authority, therefore, walks the lines between individual agency, acting together and a form of group activity that goes beyond acting together. The same is true for the related principle of authorization. Agents may authorize other agents to act in their name to expand the reach of their individual agency, or agents authorize each other to be more efficient in doing something together, or the group establishes a structure such that individual agents are authorized to act in the name of the group in a way that goes beyond acting together with the other group members.

The important insight about authority and authorization is that agency–even in the individual case–can disassociate from the agents in non-mysterious ways. All an agent in authority actually does is giving orders, yet, the result of what another agent does when following the order is traced back to the agency of the person in authority. Clearly, the reason is that the explanation of what is happening in terms of agency must refer mainly to the person in authority: she orders what to do based on a decision that she made, presumably to serve her goals–the executing agent does not contribute much to the story of agency. This is in line with the discussion of the disruption of agency in the second chapter: when fundamental aspects of agency are established on a group level, then agency cannot be described solely on the basis of the agents actually executing the actions. Accordingly, I pick up group activity so characterized for the research map under the header of corporate activity. I provide examples for corporate activity that are not as ambiguous as cases of authority and authorization to show that, indeed, corporate activity deserves treatment in its own right.

With the discussion of group activity that cannot be described as doing something ‘together’, the research map for group activity can be completed. In the next step, I discuss several positions on agency in group activity. The literature is still fragmented and unstructured, and little has been done to consolidate the field, yet. The research map, at least for the work at hand, helps clarify what exactly the respective positions explain and compare them appropriately. In fact, it turns out many of the positions, which appear to compete with each other at first glance, aim at different types of group activity. This, fortunately, helps the purpose of studying the literature. The aim is to find out about how philosophy of action accounts for the transfer of crucial features of agency onto the group level. Since many of the positions aim at different types of group activity, their ideas can complement each other instead of competing against each other.

The reason why many of the positions appear to compete lies in the common reference to some sort of ‘intentionality’ on the group level. In fact, group intentionality in one form or another is the focal point of philosophical discussion. The focus on intentionality is so prominent because intentionality is thought to be the very mark of individual agency. Naturally, the positions on agency in group activity drive for continuity with individual action theory. However, where intentionality in individual agency is usually understood in terms of an agent’s mental life, any construction of intentionality on a group level is forced to spell out what exactly it means in terms of more basic non-mental concepts. As a positive consequence, the different accounts highlight different features on the group level and how they enable group activity or even group agency.

The most influential accounts on agency in group activity already propose very different features. Michael Bratman spells out what it means to plan something together, which is supposed to constitute shared intentionality (Bratman, 2014). Pettit and List describe how decision making in groups may go beyond the individual level (List and Pettit, 2013). Notably, their account does not put a form of group intentionality in the center of their discussion. John Searle argues for an inherent social motivation, which is the basis for ‘we-intentions’ on the individual level that enable agents to act together (Searle, 1990). In a similar manner, Raimo Tuomela and Kaarlo Miller describe a special ‘we-mode’ in an agents reasoning ultimately resulting in participatory ‘we-intentions’ (Tuomela and Miller, 1988). Margaret Gilbert introduces a ‘joint commitment’ on the group level that allows for ‘joint intentions’ (Gilbert, 1990). Those five positions shape the philosophical discourse, but there is a host of alternative positions of which I select a few particularly inspiring. Peter French discusses how organizational structures in corporations make them agents (French, 1995). David Schweikard synthesizes and supplements existing positions and highlights the specific relations between the individuals’ intentions enabling elaborate group activity (Schweikard, 2011). James Butterfill, Elisabeth Pacherie and Michael Tomasello provide insight for simpler forms of group activity by focusing on the explanatory power of predictions and expectations (Butterfill, 2012), basic forms of team reasoning that enables a less sophisticated notion of shared intentionality (Pacherie, 2013), and a basic motivation to share emotions as a stepping stone towards sharing intention (Tomasello et al., 2005), respectively. Finally, there are insightful contributions on the topics of authority and authorization used in group activity by Abraham Sesshu Roth (Roth, 2014) and David Copp (Copp, 1979).

With so many fundamentally different concepts, most of which successfully explain at least some type of group activity, the common reference to intentionality is remarkable. Clearly, theoretical continuity between individual agency and agency in group activity is a sensible demand, but it is noteworthy that the construction of intentionality on the group level refers primarily to specific, comprehensible features that stand in their own right. To make sense of agency in group activity an investigation into intentionality and its relation to those features of agency is essential.

While the different positions on agency in group activity focus on specific features and the relation to the idea of intentionality in agency, there is another hidden champion for the explanation of agency in group activity. The idea that agents in group activity somehow have a common goal is taken for granted implicitly or explicitly in virtually all of the above positions and often plays a central role in the construction of group intentionality. The appea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Disruption of agency in group activity
• 3 Characteristics of group activity
• 4 The cutlery of agency
• 5 Kinds of agency
• Bibliography
• General index
• Index of technical terms