Shared and Group Agency

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Philosophy has traditionally understood action as individual action, or the action of an individual person. However, a growing literature in contemporary action theory explores how human beings act together. For example, two persons often agree to do something together, such as walking to a restaurant, and intuitively this involves something very different from two people walking to the same restaurant separately. People often act together in other ways as well: for example, a team scores a touchdown, or Congress passes a law. How are such shared, collective, or group actions to be understood? Are they simply the sum of many individual actions, or do they involve something over and above the sum of these parts? Contemporary epistemology has begun to explore shared and group intellectual agency as well, as when two persons share knowledge, a scientific research team investigates a phenomenon, or a community writes and edits a Wikipedia page. This course will look at various theories of shared and group agency, both in the practical and intellectual realms. Questions include: Is shared agency (acting and thinking together) something over and above individual agency, and therefore in need of its own theoretical treatment?; Are there varieties of shared and group agency, each requiring different theoretical treatment?; Can groups do things, literally speaking? Can groups know things, literally speaking?