The point of view of shared agency

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the special issue 'The point of view of shared agency', a collection of papers that develops, and critically assesses, a striking development in recent philosophy of mind, epistemology, and developmental psychology, that is, the fundamental reappraisal of the time-honoured distinction between a ‘first-person' and a ‘third-person perspective' on our mental lives. In recent years, the nature of the ‘second-person standpoint' has become a major focus of work across a range of disciplines. More recently, the idea of ‘first-person plural knowledge', has received some attention, for example in considering knowledge of what ‘we are doing’ when we are doing things together. This collection explores collective agency, self-knowledge, and knowledge of other minds, from this plural and relational point of view.

KEYWORDS:

• collective agency
• self-knowledge
• knowledge of other minds

The aim of the proposed collection of essays is to explore a set of issues at the intersection of three topics: collective agency, self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds. A general question that is increasingly asked, both in the psychological and philosophical literature, is how the capacity to know and understand oneself and others is related to various forms of human sociality (e.g. Heal 2003; Reddy 2008; Schilbach et al. 2013; Lavin 2014; Avramides 2015; Satne and Roepstorff 2015; Satne 2021). A common theme in some recent work on knowledge of other minds is that understanding the nature of such knowledge may require discarding the traditional view that our perspective on the mental lives of others is fundamentally spectatorial – grounded on, in Reid’s (1764/1997) terms, ‘solitary operations of the mind’, such as inferring the causes of observed behavior or direct observation. There is growing interest in the idea that in explaining the capacity for social cognition we have to make essential reference to the capacity for social interaction or ‘social operations of the mind’ (ibid.). The collection of papers in this special issue aims to help to articulate and assess that idea (all too often left merely programmatic) by focusing on the epistemology of shared agency and its bearing on the nature of social cognition.

Suppose you observe a number of people queuing and you then join the queue. Putting together your observational knowledge ‘they are queuing’ and your first-person knowledge ‘I am queuing’, you might reflect ‘we are queuing’. Compare and contrast this case: you are pushing a car with others, a passer-by asks what (all of) you are up to, and you reply: ‘we are pushing the car to the petrol station’. The latter, unlike the former, is naturally described as an example of collective agency and as involving a shared intention. How does this difference affect the explanation we should be giving of the kind of knowledge expressed by your first-person plural statement? Is the knowledge still based on putting two things together – observational knowledge of their engagement, and first-person singular knowledge of your own engagement, in the shared activity? Or does the knowledge have a unitary explanation? Does it reflect a distinctive first-person plural perspective? Specifically: should we think of it as a plural version of what Anscombe called ‘practical knowledge’ or ‘knowledge in intention’? (See Stoutland 2008; Laurence 2011; Schmid 2016).

We can distinguish two kinds of scepticism these latter suggestions are liable to meet with. One stems from traditional reductive aspirations in the theory of collective agency. The idea here, roughly, is that appeal to (unreduced) plural intentions, let alone plural knowledge, is metaphysically extravagant and in any case lacks a convincing rationale. A more subtle sceptical response may be motivated by recent work on the ‘second-person perspective’ (See for example Conant and Rödl 2014; Eilan 2014.). This response would agree that (certain kinds of) collective agency involve distinctive forms of thought that cannot be captured in terms of third-person and first-person-singular thinking alone. What it challenges is the idea that first-person plural thoughts and knowledge play an irreducible role here, one that cannot be explained in terms of first- and second-person thoughts and knowledge. Both kinds of scepticism require sustained consideration. To assess the idea of plural intentions, and plural ‘knowledge in intention’, we would need an account of the kinds of reasons, and reasoning, that would make possession of such intentions intelligible. We would also need an account of the work that they do – the supposedly irreducible role they play in explaining action and knowledge. In turn, there are questions about the sense, if any, in which the idea of plural practical knowledge would present a challenge, and alternative, to the traditional spectatorial approach to knowledge of other minds. A central concern here must arguably be the nature of human forms of communication. Some such forms may be said to be indispensable for human social cognition, and among these, some may be said to involve shared intention and ‘knowledge in intention’. This would be one way to argue for a strong connection between shared agency and the capacity to know and understand others. Whether this or any other way of making such connections is defensible is one of the large issues to be explored, from different perspectives, in the proposed collection.

As a whole, this collection of papers further develops and critical assesses a striking development in recent philosophy of mind, epistemology and developmental psychology, that is, the fundamental reappraisal of the time-honoured distinction between a ‘first-person’ and a ‘third-person perspective’ on our mental lives. Few would deny that there is some such distinction to be drawn, but it is no longer taken to be obvious that the distinction is exhaustive or that it helps to make sense of the rich variety of the social knowledge we actually seem to have. The nature of the ‘second-person standpoint’ has become a major focus of work across a range of disciplines. And some consideration has recently been given to the idea of ‘first-person plural knowledge’, for example knowledge of what ‘we are doing’ when we are doing things together.

The aim of the proposed special issue is to contribute to a better understanding of some of the difficult issues raised by this ‘interpersonal turn’ in work on social cognition. Most of the papers in the collection develop from presentations that were given at two workshops held under the auspices of a British Academy sponsored project on ‘Joint practical knowledge’, led by Glenda Satne and Johannes Roessler. The authors bring a variety of background interests to the issues discussed in the collection, including interests in the nature of collective intentionality, the epistemology of other minds, the semantics of ‘you’ and ‘we’, the nature of communication, and the human capacity for social learning. The collection thus provides various perspectives not only on how to explain the social knowledge involved in shared agency, but also on the wider significance of such knowledge, for example vis-à-vis explanations of shared agency itself, or communication, or social learning, or knowing other people.

The papers can be grouped into three overlapping sets. First, there are papers that address questions concerning the nature of shared agency, or specific varieties of shared agency.

Tom Crowther explores such questions from the unusual point of view of the ontology of shared agency, a point of view that, so he argues, reveals some difficulties with Bratman’s recent version of an ‘individualist’ analysis. A number of papers discuss what it means to share intentions, and explore various kinds of broadly non-individualist proposals, appealing to ‘normative structures of practical reasoning’ (Satne) or to shared practical reasoning in face-to-face communication (Roessler).

Second, a number of papers discuss what might be called the epistemic role of mutual engagement. Few would disagree that social cognition informs or even makes possible shared activities. What is less obvious is that capacities for shared agency should be given a substantive explanatory role in our account of social cognition. One rationale for doing so, discussed in Anita Avramides’s paper, turns on discontent with traditional approaches to our knowledge of other minds, on which such knowledge must be intelligible in terms of detached third-person relations such as observation or theorizing about the causes of observed behavior. As Avramides puts it, we should seek an ‘account of our knowledge of others that has us engaging with each other as persons.’ Another rationale derives from reflection on the nature of shared agency. Anscombe argued that, contrary to modern epistemology’s ‘incorrigibly contemplative conception of knowledge’, the knowledge one has of what one is intentionally doing is not a matter of observation (or any other mode of discovery); rather it is ‘practical knowledge’ or ‘knowledge in intention’. A number of papers explore and probe the suggestion (mooted by Stoutland 2008 and Laurence 2011) that an analogous point holds for shared intentional activities: understanding the epistemology of our knowledge of what we are doing (at least in certain cases of shared agency) requires understanding how it is possible for us to have shared ‘knowledge in intention’. The papers by Satne, and Roessler present different versions of that general idea; the contribution by Longworth critically discuss some of its commitments.

A third set of papers deal with questions about the nature of communication. Naomi Eilan argues for a ‘second-person’ view, on which ‘the distinctively human form of communication requires adoption of attitudes of mutual address, in which people are aware of each other as ‘you’, and she contrasts this with Tomasello’s view of ‘communication as collaboration’. Andrea Kern and Henrike Moll also invoke a distinctive form of social cognition in trying to understand what is distinctive about the human capacity for social learning. That capacity, they argue, is both ‘intrinsically self-conscious’ and ‘bipolar’.

Titles and abstracts

Practical knowledge and shared agency: pluralizing the Anscombean view – Satne

For Anscombe a solitary activity is intentional if the agent has self-knowledge of what she is doing. Analogously one might think that to partake in shared intentional activities is for the agents involved to have plural or collective self-knowledge of what they are doing together. I call this ‘the Plural Practical Knowledge Thesis’ (PPK). While some authors have advanced related theses about the nature of the knowledge involved in shared practical activities, this alternative remains relatively underexplored in the current literature. The paper offers an account of plural practical knowledge based on the idea that shared activities of the relevant sort share a normative structure given by practical, means-end structures and proposes a paradigmatic methodology that generalizes this account to understand what different cases of collective intentional action have in common. It then discusses the differences between the proposed approach and those due to Schmid 2016 and Laurence 2011and the reasons why it should be preferred.

Sharing non-observational knowledge – Longworth

One can know without observation what one is up to, but can one know without observation what someone else is up to? I explore two strategies for defending the claim that one can. The first strategy relies on the fact that one can know what someone is doing by accepting what they tell one about what they are doing. It proposes that testimony can preserve the credentials of a piece of knowledge so that if a benefactor has non-observational knowledge, then a recipient of their testimony can acquire non-observational knowledge by accepting it. The second strategy appeals to the existence of collective activities. It proposes that where a number of people engage in a collective activity, each can know what each is up to, and that knowledge can be had without observation. My goal is to set out both strategies. A secondary aim is to suggest grounds for greater optimism about the prospects of the first strategy than the second.

Plural practical knowledge – Roessler

The paper examines the thesis that participants in shared intentional activities have first-person plural ‘practical knowledge’ of what they are jointly doing, in the sense of ‘practical knowledge’ articulated by G.E.M Anscombe. Who is supposed to be the subject of such knowledge? The group, or members of the group, or both? It is argued that progress with this issue requires conceiving of collective activities (of the kind affording ‘plural practical knowledge’)as instances, not of supra-personal agency, but of interpersonal agency; specifically: as involving communication. There is a sense, it is suggested, in which the basic form of plural practical knowledge is relational: ‘I am doing x with you.’

I think, Smith thinks – Rödl

It has been recognized that ‘I think a is F’, considered as a predicative statement, is peculiar. The peculiarity comes out in Moore’s paradox, ‘a is F, but I do not think it is’. This statement appears afflicted by an inner tension. But if the logical form of ‘I think a is F’ is that of a predicative statement, then it is hard to discern a tension in what is said. The correlative statement ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ appears to be free from peculiarity. There seems to be no tension in ‘a is F; but Mrs. Smith thinks it is not’. Hence lining up ‘I think a is F’ with ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ we can retain our understanding of the former as predicative. This essay will bring out that ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ is, if anything, more peculiar than ‘I think a is F’, and that, should we have been inclined to think of the latter as a predicative statement, consideration of ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ must disabuse us of this idea.

Other I’s communication, and the second person – Eilan

Why do we think there are other self-conscious about, other thinkers of ‘I’ thoughts, other possessors of a first-person perspective? What is the most basic manifestation of our grip on their existence? This paper develops an answer to these questions summarized under the heading: Second Person Communication Claim (SPCC), which says: Our grip on the idea that other self-conscious subjects exist is rooted in our capacity to enter into particular kinds of communicative relations with others, in which we adopt attitudes of mutual address and think of each other as ‘you’. If the SPCC is right, our grip on the existence and nature of other I’s, and on their relation to ourselves, rests essentially on a practical capacity to treat others as partners in conversation, addressors and addressees, with all that this entails. This contrasts with the traditional approach to other minds, on which our knowledge and thought of others rests on observation and is essentially third personal and theoretical.

Knowing others as persons – Avramides

Philosophers have struggled with the problem of knowing others. The emphasis is often on the knowing here. In this paper, I want to concentrate on our conception of what is known (i.e. a person). I shall argue that we should aim to give an account of our knowledge of others that has us engaging with each other as persons. I shall argue that there is a perceptual account of our knowledge of others that has this result.

Learning from another – Moll/Kern

Learning is a capacity whereby an individual undergoes a distinctive kind of change: a change of what she is able to think or do, a change either in the scope or quality of her capacities. It is widely held that the capacity for learning takes a unique shape in humans and differs from how non-human animals learn. This view is popular among philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists. In spite of the wide agreement about its uniqueness, it remains unclear what exactly it is about human learning that makes it special. In this article, we take an Aristotelian approach and argue that the uniqueness of human learning can only be understood against the background of the human form of life. This form of life is characterized by a self-conscious relation between the form of life and its bearers. Learning is the form of the development from immature to mature bearers of the human form of life and carries the following three characteristics: It is second-personal, its content is general, and the learner's relation to the knowledge or the capacities she acquires is reflective.

Temporal ontology and joint action – Crowther

The aim of the paper is to describe the temporal ontology of that basic manifestation of social agency that is the living of life together. The distinction between states, processes and events is clarified. There are notions of ‘doing things together’ that fall into each of these temporal categories. The ontology of the state of friendship is examined as one instance of living life together. Friendship is a state of community between agents that is sustained by a continuity of processes and events that are characteristic manifestations of the state, some (but not all) of which are processes of doing things together. The continuity of processes and events involved in friendship is distinctive in lacking a telic point. Further instances of shared life that possess this characteristic temporal structure are described. It is argued that this notion of a mode of shared life cannot be recovered from various kinds of temporally extended agential structures that are the ingredients of Michael Bratman’s work on shared agency. In so doing, I clarify the notion of a shared life and make a case for the fruitfulness of approaching questions about joint action from the perspective of work on the ontology of time occupation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).