Shared Agency Without Shared Intention

Abstract

The leading reductive approaches to shared agency model that phenomenon in terms of complexes of individual intentions, understood as plan-laden commitments. Yet not all agents have such intentions, and non-planning agents such as small children and some non-human animals are clearly capable of sophisticated social interactions. But just how robust are their social capacities? Are non-planning agents capable of shared agency? Existing theories of shared agency have little to say about these important questions. I address this lacuna by developing a reductive account of the social capacities of non-planning agents, which I argue supports the conclusion that they can enjoy shared agency. The resulting discussion offers a fine-grained account of the psychological capacities that can underlie shared agency, and produces a recipe for generating novel hypotheses concerning why some agents (including, arguably, the great apes) do not engage in shared agency.

How to be minimalist about shared agency

“…By contrast, they have had a much harder time handling cases where participation is automatic and unthinking (as when we get off a packed NYC subway), 2 reluctant (as when the 1 Here is a non-exhaustive list of shared agency theorists who have committed themselves to some version or other of the Shared Intention Thesis: John Searle (1990, p. 402), Christopher Kutz (2000, p. 74-81), Abraham Roth (2004, p. 361), Philip Pettit and David Schweikard (2006, p. 23-24), and Facundo Alonso (2009, p. 445). Here are some exceptions: Sara Rachel Chant (2006), Stephen Butterfill (2012Butterfill ( , 2016, Scott Shapiro (2014), Katherine Ritchie (2020), Samuel Asarnow (2020), and Jules Salomone-Sehr (2022. Two of the most influential accounts of shared agency, namely, those of Margaret Gilbert and Michael Bratman, are largely consistent with the Shared Intention Thesis.…”

Conditional intentions and shared agency

“…The same limitations are explicitly acknowledged by(Bratman, 1999, 144). (Gilbert, 2000, 28-30) argues that interpersonal normative states actually do a better job of fulfilling these roles Asarnow (2020). andSalomone- Sehr (2022) extend this methodology by attempting to construct forms of shared agency using individual psychological states other than intention.6 This is known as the "Settle Problem" in the literature, and was originally raised byVelleman (1997).…”