Die Dimension des Sozialen

Neue philosophische Zugänge zu Fühlen, Wollen und Handeln

Karl Mertens, Jörn Müller, Karl Mertens, Jörn Müller

• Verlag: De Gruyter
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN drucken: 9783110349931
• eBook-ISBN: 9783110386585
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Epistemology in Philosophy

Fühlen, Wollen und Handeln werden im Allgemeinen als Zustände oder Aktivitäten verstanden, die einen individuellen Träger haben. Die Analyse dieser Phänomene im Rahmen der Moralpsychologie wie auch der "philosophy of mind" war dementsprechend bis in die jüngere Vergangenheit hinein primär auf das Individuum fokussiert. In der neueren Diskussion gibt es jedoch verschiedene Ansätze, die unsere Rede vom geteilten Fühlen ("?shared emotions"), gemeinsamen Wollen (in Form "kollektiver Intentionalität") sowie vom gemeinschaftlichen Handeln in ihrer grundlegenden Bedeutung betrachten und mit philosophischem Inhalt zu füllen versuchen.
Die Beiträge des Bandes gehen der Frage nach, inwieweit Fühlen, Wollen und Handeln im sozialen Rahmen gedeutet werden können - oder sogar müssen. Angestrebt ist ein multiperspektivischer Zugang, mittels dessen die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des neuen Sozialitätsparadigmas im Bereich der untersuchten Phänomene umfassend ausgelotet werden sollen. Deshalb finden Beiträge aus der analytischen Philosophie, der Phänomenologie, der Geschichte der Philosophie sowie der Soziologie Berücksichtigung.

Handeln

Christine Chwaszcza

Intentions in Collective Agency: A Third-Person Approach

1 Introduction

Elisabeth Anscombe’s contributions to the analysis of intentions and intentional action are widely acknowledged, but a common understanding of her analysis is still lacking. What I take to be at the core of Anscombe’s analysis in Intention is the thesis that the family of concepts that we associate with “intentions” is a family of non-referential concepts. Most importantly, the concept “intention” does not “refer” to any particular type of mental states. Rather, what we call “intentions” manifests itself in the form of certain types of descriptions that we use when we address what I will call “intelligent behavior,” that is to say, behavior or activities that are qualified by certain cognitive competences, or deliberation (cf. Anscombe 2000, 84ff.). Famously, Anscombe addressed those competences as practical knowledge and reasons for action. Since it remains highly contested what those labels might mean, I prefer a neutral circumscription and will speak of “cognitive-cum-deliberative aspects.“ Here I will focus on the “cognitive” part.

The analysis of the cognitive aspects that might rightly be called practical knowledge in collective agency is the main task of this article, and cannot be summarized in advance. What I would like to emphasize in this introduction is the methodological point of Anscombe’s thesis that our accounts of those cognitive-cum-deliberative aspects derive from the form(s) of description that we use for characterizing intelligent behavior, and must not be identified with particular mental states (cf. Anscombe 2000, 84).

Speaking of “descriptions” of intelligent behavior, I mean to include both the identification of activities as intentional as well as the individuation of what it is that a person does “under a description.” “Intentions”, thus understood, are, in an important sense, qualifications of “the stance,” to borrow a phrase of Dennett’s (1987), that an observer takes towards an agent or a happening. Given familiarity with the concept of intentions, human agents, at least, can use the concept abstractly and attribute it to themselves and others. They can express intentions when speaking about their activities, plans, or projects.²³⁵ They can also make intentions themselves objects of reflection and communication. In what follows, I will reserve the term “agency” for the performance of activities by beings who are able to reflect not only on their own activities, but also on the cognitive-cum-deliberative aspects that are involved in their performance and planning. That, I assume, restricts the group of relevant agents to human beings.

It is important to note that the third-person approach to intentions is neither behavioristic nor anti-mentalistic, nor does it aim at the elimination of the first-person perspective, as will become clear. Analogous to the communicative turn in philosophy of language, the third-person approach emphasizes the communicative aspects of intentional agency, which evidently manifests itself in our capacity to (mutually) “understand” each other’s activities, to “make sense” of (not only human) behavior, and to distinguish (at least with respect to human behavior) a variety of fine-grained differences in modes of performance expressed by such qualifications as intentional, purposive, inadvertent, negligent, (in-)voluntary, absent-minded, and so on. The Wittgensteinian background of Anscombe’s analysis might be approximately summarized in the simplifying slogan: If “intentions” are understood as communicating the “meaning” of intelligent behavior, it cannot be something “in the mind of the agent” because nothing “in there” could do the job. For that reason I call Anscombe’s analysis a third-person approach.

What the third-person approach, as I understand it, carefully tries to avoid, is simply the temptation to identify the cognitive and mental processes involved in activities that qualify as intentional with the form of the descriptions that we use to identify or individuate those activities.²³⁶ Generally, many aspects – though not all – of the structure and functioning of our minds are not directly accessible to us, even from a first-person perspective. It therefore seems wise to assume that our understanding of mental concepts is helped by metaphors and the use of abstract, or ideal, models of those processes that are accessible to us because they operate on the level of conscious reasoning and can be made an object of reflection. The danger of idealization is especially acute when it comes to the analysis of cognitive-cum-deliberative aspects of intentional behavior, because of the tendency to explicate them by recourse to ideal models of thinking and cognition, such as canons of logical inference, probabilistic reasoning, decision and game theory, the so-called “desire-belief”-model of practical reasons, or teleological and means-end-accounts of practical deliberation. Although I am personally convinced that to some extent each of these models captures part of our mental activities, I still believe that as “descriptive” accounts of how the minds works, all have serious limitations even at the level of rationalizations. Since descriptive and explanatory questions are at least in part empirical questions, I think that they cannot be adequately answered purely by means of conceptual analysis and the tools of a priori philosophical psychology. The empirical part, of course, can hardly be supplied by philosophers. But for exactly that reason I think that philosophers are well advised to give careful analyses of relevant phenomena and raise questions about their explications, rather than try to make phenomena fit their preferred model of rationalization.

Although Anscombe never extended her analysis of intentions to multiple-person activities, one advantage of the third-person approach to “intentions in collective agency” is fairly obvious: If “intentions” are not states of mind, “intentional collective agency” does not require a “collective mind,” even in activities whose performance requires collective agency. But ontology is not a main interest here. The difficult task of a third-person approach to collective agency consists rather in the exploration of the cognitive and deliberative structures that are required for it – and that, in fact, can help us to a better understanding of the cognitive-cum-deliberative aspects of human agency in the case of individual undertakings too.

In this article I would like to address one preliminary issue and one important building block for any further account. First, I would like to elucidate the multifarious character of collective activities by distinguishing different types of collective activities and the differences in cognitive-cum-deliberative challenges that their performance raises. Notoriously, philosophical discussions focus on two challenges, i. e. mutual understanding and reciprocal adjustment of activities and plans of participating agents. That is the second topic that I will pick up in arguing that practical knowledge, understood as a form of knowing how, is crucial in interpersonal activities. I will also explore how intentions in collective agency differ from normative interpersonal commitments.

2 Not a Single Kind: Some Variations of Collective Agency

Classifications are not interesting per se, but only if they help to focus the object of study. From a third-person approach the most interesting issue is the “interpersonal” or “interactive” quality of collective agency, sometimes also characterized as “togetherness”, which I will analyze as a special quality of “mutuality” and “reciprocity” in collective agency.²³⁷ Since neither quality is self-explanatory, it seems helpful to articulate more clearly what is special about collective agency. I will, therefore, suggest going beyond particular examples such as Gilbert’s “walking together” and Bratman’s “painting the kitchen together” by contrasting collective agency with other forms of interaction, which are similar but different.

Given the fact that human agency is largely embedded in institutional and conventional structures, I would like to start my classification with a negative point by drawing a distinction between “collective agents” and “collective agency.” Collective agents are frequently found in institutional contexts,²³⁸ even though their range of activities is usually confined to rather special tasks and occasions. For example “the people” – conceived of as a technical political term that denotes the totality of all individual persons who have the status of citizens – is a collective agent. Whereas “the people” seems to be an agent that is mainly represented by official persons who act “in the name of the people,” the electorate, a subgroup of the people in a democratic regime consisting of the totality of individual citizens who have a right to vote, is undoubtedly a genuine agent because there are certain acts that only the electorate as a collective can perform: for example, “selecting a government by voting” or “deciding a referendum.”

One collective dimension of the electorate is fairly obvious: It is not enough that some members of the electorate participate in an election, but at least a minimum quorum has to participate, otherwise what takes place will not count as an election in many places (and certainly not in democratic theory). Another collective dimension might be more contested, but can be defended along the following lines: The electorate cannot be reduced to its individual members if that means that we consider those individuals “simply” as individual persons. The reason is that the socio-political status of individuals is decisive for their group-membership, and that status is not an attribute that any individual has qua individual, but only qua member of the relevant socio-political institutional framework. That framework again is partly²³⁹ constituted by a web of relations that hold between the individual members. Because relations cannot be reduced to properties of individual relata, it seems reasonable to concede that “having a specific socio-political status” is an exemplar of a genuine “group” quality. Usually, those relations include the ascription of mutual rights and duties, which seems to be the paradigm model for Gilbert’s account of a “plural subject”. This will be discussed in section 3.3.²⁴⁰

If we look at the activity of voting, however, that is to say, at how members of the electorate perform their task of selecting a government, it is usually the case that each member does so by acting “individually” in contrast to “interactively”, namely by registering and casting his vote in the right place at the right time, which is usually done “secretly” and separately from others. Although an electorate might serve as a paradigm example for a collective agent, the performance of elections, i. e. “voting”, is not an instance of collective agency as the term will be understood in the following, because it lacks an adequate interactive dimension of performance. I thus summarize a first interim result: although there exist “collective agents” (similar to “plural subjects” in Gilbert’s terminology), there is no necessary connection between the acceptance of their existence and collective performance.

Putting the focus on interactivity and performative aspects of agency provokes some caveats in light of recent discussion of “collective action.”

First, interactivity does not require that all participants in collective agency share the same goal or intend to promote a common (ultimate) goal.²⁴¹ As Bratman rightly insists, it would seem strange to exclude activities like “painting the kitchen together “from the relevant class of activities, although participants frequently join in such activities despite the fact that they have very different, or even independent, goals: One painter might want to paint the kitchen in order to make it look more beautiful, whereas the other might want to do it just in order to please the first. Relevant for the collective quality of the activity are not the reasons why participants engage in it, but the joint performance itself.

Second, whereas “painting the kitchen” is an example of a “face-to-face”- type of joint performance, the “face-to-face” quality is not constitutive for jointness. Joint activities can also be performed at spatial distance or in temporal sequences, especially when communication is possible. Almost all moderately complex undertakings involve “temporal acting at a distance” insofar as they require preparation, planning, step-by-step achievements, or intermediate goal achievements. The temporal dimension is already obvious in individual agency, e. g. if we allow that agents can intend to drive from Boston to New York or intend to major in physics, both of which are standard examples of temporally extended activities that require planning, intermediate-goal achievements, and also intraas well as interpersonal coordination roughly along Bratman’s account of intentions as plans. An analogous collective agency activity might be “establishing a business,” “forming a family,” or “raising kids.” Spatial distance is also a standard phenomenon, but may be less obvious, because it is often facilitated by more formal ways of communication and organization. Nevertheless, it seems that phenomena such as “scholars from different universities intend to organize a workshop,” and undertakings such as “constructing a pipeline” qualify no less as joint undertakings than does “painting the kitchen.” The cognitive problems they raise may indeed be different from those in face-to-face-performances, but that is exactly one of the questions to be explored in this article.

Third, I would also like to argue that having a common or shared goal by itself is not only not necessary, but also not sufficient for collective agency because agents might pursue that goal by independent and unorganized activities, which involve no form of direct interaction, not even at a distance. One might simply know that there are others “out there,” who pursue the same goal. Given human psychology I would not exclude that some persons might feel, or experience, their activities as being part of an achievement of a larger group. But such self-characterizations need involve neither interaction nor any other interpersonal dimension: they can, although need not, be fully unilateral. Whether that is the case or not depends on how individual agents perceive of those others, with whom they (might) feel connected. For agents can take account of other persons’ activities and intentions in a purely prognostic or diagnostic sense, in which they treat them just as part of one’s “social environment,” i.e. as being there and predictably acting in certain ways. As a matter of fact, given the social nature of humans, agents constantly form intentions and perform activities against a background of “prognostic” assumptions about the behavior of other agents. For example, I simply count on th...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Titel
• Impressum
• Vorwort
• Inhalt
• Karl Mertens und Jörn Müller: Einleitung: Fühlen, Wollen und Handeln als soziale Phänomene
• Fühlen
• Wollen
• Handeln
• Angaben zu den Autorinnen und Autoren
• Personenindex