From Individual to Plural Agency: Collective Action I

334 Pages·2016·9.99 MB·English

by  Kirk Ludwig

From Individual to Plural Agency

From Individual to
Plural Agency
Collective Action
Volume 1
Kirk Ludwig
1
3
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For 林 世 娉

Preface
This is the first of a two-volume project on the nature and structure of collective
action and intention. The project is a single sustained argument that grounds
collective action in individual agency. The fundamental tenet of the project is that
allcollectiveorjointintentionalaction,fromtwopeopleshakinghandsorbuildinga
cabinet, to the Paris mob storming the Bastille, cooperate mergers, and the United
NationspassingtheConventionAgainstGenocide,whilenotmereaggregatesofthe
actionsofindividualagents,cannonethelessbeanalyzedintermsofconceptswhich
arealreadyinplayinourunderstandingofindividualagency.
Theprojectwasoriginallyconceivedofandwrittenasonebook,FromIndividual
toInstitutionalAgency,dividedinthreeparts,butitoutgrewtheboundsofasingle
volume. The book in your hands, From Individual to Plural Agency, comprises the
firsttwopartsoftheoriginalproject,andwhatwasconceivedofasthethirdpartof
the original project now appears as a second volume, From Plural to Institutional
Agency (in forward looking references to the second volume, I will refer to this as
Volume2).
The first part (of the overall project and of this book) develops an analysis of
individualaction,agency,andintention,withspecialattentiontothelogicalformof
singularactionsentences(e.g.,‘Hemeltedthechocolate’),thecontentofintentions
directed at individual actions (‘He intended to melt the chocolate’), and the logical
role of the modifier ‘intentionally’ in action sentences (‘He melted the chocolate
intentionally’). The account is built around a refinement of the standard event
analysisofsingularactionsentences,onwhichtheactionverbistreatedasintrodu-
cing two quantifiers over events. To say that he melted the chocolate is, on this
account, to say (roughly) that he did something (was the immediate agent of some
event)thatbroughtitaboutthatthechocolatemelted(thataneventofmeltingofthe
chocolateoccurred).Thispartisfoundationaltothewholeproject,andtheaccountis
developedwithaneyetoitsapplicationinthedomainofcollectiveaction.
The second part (of the larger project, and of this book) develops an account of
pluraldiscourseaboutcollectiveactionandintention.Itfocusesonanaccountofthe
logicalformofpluralactionsentences(‘Webuiltaboat’,‘Wegotmarried’,‘Wemet
inthelibraryonWednesdaynight’),ofpluralsentencesattributingintentions(‘We
intend to reform campaign finance’, ‘We intend to rule the world’), of the content
individuals’ intentions when they are engaged in joint intentional action (we-
intentions), and of the logical role of ‘intentionally’ as a modifier in plural action
sentences(‘Webuiltaboatintentionally’).
Pluralactionsentencesaretypicallyambiguousbetweenadistributiveandcollect-
ive reading. ‘We built model airplanes when we were kids’ could be read as saying
that we each did so (distributive reading), or as saying that we did so together
(collective reading). Onthe distributive reading,thereisaquantifierover members
ofthegroupthattakeswidescopeovertheeventquantifierintroducedbytheaction
verb. For each of us, there are one or more events of model airplane assembly of
viii 
which he is the agent. We get the collective reading, on the account developed, by
reversing theorderof the quantifiers (leavingaside some details). On the collective
reading,foroneormoreeventsofairplaneassemblyeachoneofus(andnoonenot
oneofus)wasadirectagentofit.Thatis,groupagencyinvolvesmultipleagentsofa
singleevent,notaneventofwhichthereisasinglegroupagent.Thekeypointisthat,
on this analysis, the superficial appearance that there is a group agent—the we as
apparent agent in the surface form of the sentence—disappears. While the group
doesn’tdisappear(itisstillreferredtoin‘eachofus’),onlyitsmembersareagentsof
anything. This insight can then be employed in an account of the content of
intentionsofagentswhoparticipateinjointintentionalaction,we-intentionsinthe
terminology introduced by Raimo Tuomela, that shows what distinguishes them
from individual intentions, but draws only on the conceptual resources already
available from our understanding of individual intentions. To put it roughly, we-
intentions are directed toward each member of a group contributing to a goal in
accordancewithasharedplan.Thisinturnenablesustoexplainthelogicalroleof
‘intentionally’ in collective action sentences, and so to provide a general account of
collective intentional action (at least insofar as it is expressed in plural action
sentences).Thisservesasthefoundationforthethirdpartoftheproject.
The third part of the overall project, now a separate volume, shows that the
account of collective action developed in the context of plural action sentences can
beextendedtothecaseofinstitutionalandmobactiondespiteanumberofapparent
obstacles. What are the obstacles? First, we use grammatically singular terms in
action sentences about institutions (‘Chrysler donated $6 million to help save
Detroit’sartcollection’),ontheonehand,andmobsandcrowds(‘Themobattacked
onlythoseindividualswhointerferedwithitsactions’),ontheother.Second,atleast
manysentencesinvolving“institutionalagents”seemtonottoadmitofthedistribu-
tive/collectiveambiguitythatmotivatesthemultiple-agentsaccountofpluralaction
sentencesontheircollectivereadings.Forexample,thereappearstobenodistribu-
tive reading of ‘The United States declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941.’
Third, institutional groups, and mobs and crowds, can survive changes in their
membership over time, and might have had different members than they in fact
do, in contrast to plural groups (as we might call them). Fourth, the capacity to
persist through change in members gives institutions the capacity for perpetual
existence and the ability to act over periods longer than any individual or single
groupofindividualscould.Fifth,inthecontextofinstitutional,andeveninthecase
ofmobaction,onthefaceofit,collectiveactionbyagroupdoesnotalwaysinvolve
the participation of every member of the group—e.g., in a group announcing
something by way of a spokesperson. All of these problems can be solved within
an individualist framework. The key idea in the resolution of these difficulties,
which I can only mention here, is that institutional membership itself is a socially
constructed relation, a status role, that is time indexed, and that more generally
institutionsare(occupied)networks ofstatusrolesandmanyoftheircharacteristic
actions havetobeunderstoodasimposingstatusfunctionsonacttypes. Thisthird
part of the overall project, then, is concerned with developing a conceptual frame-
work for understanding what this comes to and how it can be used to give a
compellingindividualistaccountoftheagencyofinstitutions.
 ix
Asnotedabove,FromIndividualtoPluralAgencycompriseswhatwasoriginally
conceivedofasthefirsttwopartsofoneproject.Thesecondvolumeintheproject,
From Plural to Institutional Agency, includes the third part of the overall project.
Theirambitiontakentogetherisnottoprovideacompleteaccountofthenatureand
structure of the social world, but rather to show what is essential to its atomic
components, how they are grounded in our understanding of individual agency,
andhowtheymaybeelaboratedintostructuresthatserveasthescaffoldingforsocial
andinstitutionalreality.
I was introduced to the topic of collective action and intention in John Searle’s
seminars at Berkeley in the late 1980s. At the time, Searle was working on the
material that later appeared in “Collective Intentions and Actions” (Searle 1990).
He argued against what he took to be Tuomela and Miller’s (Tuomela and Miller
1988)reductiveaccountofwe-intentionsintermsofintentionstodoone’spartina
collective action in conditions of common knowledge (see (Tuomela 2005) for a
rejoinder), and instead for an account which saw what was distinctive about we-
intentions aslyingnotintheircontentbutintheirmode.Ithoughtthatthatcould
not be the right answer to the puzzle—as if the word ‘intend’ were ambiguous
between anindividualist and collectivistsense. In‘Weintend topool ourresources
to buy all the lottery tickets and to take our shares to the bank when we win’, the
attitude verb must be interpreted in the same way across the clauses, but the first
clause we understand to announce a shared intention while in the second, on the
mostnaturalreading,onlyindividualintentionsareinvolved(weeachintendtotake
hisorherownsharetohisorherownbank).Thedifferencehadtolie,Ithought,in
the content of the intention. But I could not see at the time how to tell the story.
MichaelBratmangaveatalkatBerkeley,inspring1990,onmaterialthatwaslaterto
appearinhis“SharedCooperativeActivity”(Bratman1992),whichseemedtometo
beontherighttrackinlocatingwhatisdistinctiveabouttheintentionsofindividuals
who are participating in collective intentional activity in their content, while at the
same time drawing only on concepts already at play in our understanding of
individual intention (I compare my ultimate view with Bratman’s in Chapter16
}16.3).ItwouldbealongtimebeforeIcamebacktotheproblemofcollectiveaction
andintentionafterleavingBerkeley.DuringtheintervalIwouldbeengagedinteralia
on work in the theory of meaning and natural language semantics. It was the
occasion of Raimo Tuomela giving a talk at the University of Florida in spring
2003, “We-intentions Revisited” (Tuomela 2005), that prompted me to return to
theproblem.Itstruckmethenthattherewasalargebodyofworkonthesemantics
of action sentences that had not been brought to bear on the problem of collective
action, and it seemed to me immediately that at least some of the conceptual
problems in the area could be given a clearer formulation, and that some of the
problemsclearedup,bythinkingabouttheproblemsofcollectiveactioninthelight
oftheeventanalysisofsingularactionsentences.Thatwasthegenesisofthecurrent
project.Iwroteupsomethingthatspringaboutthecentralidea.Ireceivedvaluable
comments and objections from my colleagues John Biro, David Copp, Hana Filip,
Michael Jubien, Marina Oshana, Greg Ray, and Gene Witmer, and presented
versions of the evolving account at conferences and colloquia in the next three
years. The ideas developed in this period were published in Noûs in “Collective