Social Ontology in the Making

Raimo Tuomela, Raul Hakli, Pekka Mäkelä, Raimo Tuomela, Raul Hakli, Pekka Mäkelä

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110617672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This collection does not only include articles by Raimo Tuomela and his co-authors which have been decisive in social ontology. An extensive introduction provides an account of the impact of the works, the most important debates in the field, and also addresses future issues. Thus, the book gives insights that are still viable and worthy of further scrutiny and development, making it an inspiring source for those engaged in the debates of the field today.

Joint Action and Group Action Made Precise

Gabriel Sandu

Raimo Tuomela

Abstract

The paper argues that there are two main kinds of joint action, direct joint bringing about (or performing) something (expressed in terms of a DO-operator) and jointly seeing to it that something is the case (expressed in terms of a Stit-operator). The former kind of joint action contains conjunctive, disjunctive and sequential action and its central subkinds. While joint seeing to it that something is the case is argued to be necessarily intentional, direct joint performance can also be nonintentional. Actions performed by social groups are analyzed in terms of the notions of joint action (basically DO and Stit).

A precise semantical analysis of the aforementioned kinds of joint action is given in terms of “time-trees”. With each participant a tree is connected, and the trees are joined defining joint possible worlds in terms of state-expressing nodes from the trees. Sentences containing DO and Stit are semantically evaluated with respect to such joint possible worlds. Intentional joint actions are characterized in terms of the notion of “we-intention” (joint intention), characterized formally by means of a special operator.

1 Introduction

The main concern of this paper is the logical features of joint action – such as jointly carrying a table upstairs, singing a duet, or jointly building a house. A joint social action in its broadest sense is an action performable by several agents who share a “we-attitude” (involving a joint goal, belief, or the like) and act on this we-attitude. In this paper we shall require – in analogy with the single-agent case – of a joint action that it, furthermore, be based on joint intention (basically a shared “we-intention” about which there is a mutual belief). This is full-blown joint action.¹ In contrast, there is “coaction”, collective action in which agents – without a joint intention – have the same goal, perhaps mutually believing so and possibly interacting in various ways. On the other hand, joint action is to be distinguished from action performed by a group. A group’s performing an action obviously presupposes that some of the members (or representatives) perform an action – or bring about a state of affairs – in virtue of which a relevant action can be attributed to the group. Groups can also act in a somewhat more general sense, other than by affecting a change in the world. For instance, a battalion of soldiers can see to it that nobody offends the border. In most cases they can fulfil the task by “doing nothing at all.” Obviously, also in the case of the notion of seeing to it that something is the case the group’s activity must be based on its members’ (or representatives’) relevant activity (or control-involving agentive “passivity”).

In this paper we shall investigate joint action and group action from a logical point of view. We have elsewhere presented an account of single agent action and defined two action notions, represented by the operators called DO and Stit, respectively, in order to account for ordinary action performances and intentional seeings to it that something is the case.² In that paper we also defined an operator, DO^*, corresponding to DO, to account for intentional action.

We will start by reviewing some of the ideas of our earlier work, partly in order to make this paper self-contained.

2 Single-Agent Trees

In this section we present the technical framework for analyzing action concepts in the case of single agents.³ This is necessary for a better understanding of the joint agent case, which will be an extension of the single-agent case. We use the symbols t₀, t₁,…, to denote “states” or “occasions”. (Possible worlds in the sense to be introduced later will be collections of states t₀, t₁,…) One way to individuate a state t would be to take it to consist of states of affairs P, Q, etc., which, formally speaking, would be the referents of the propositional symbols (sentences) P, Q, etc., of a formal language L. From a strictly formal point of view, this is, however, not the route we are going to take in this paper. Instead, we shall proceed in the usual way and drop states of affairs altogeth...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Social Ontology in the Making: An Introduction
• From Social Imitation to Teamwork
• We-Intentions
• Actions by Collectives
• We Will Do It An Analysis of Group-Intentions
• Group Beliefs
• Collective Goals and Communicative Action
• Cooperation and Trust in Group Context
• Joint Action and Group Action Made Precise
• Norms and Agreement
• Collective Intentions and the Maintenance of Social Practices
• Two Kinds of We-Reasoning
• Group Agents and Their Responsibility
• List of Publications
• Subject index
• Index of names