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ABSTRACT
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).
Notes
1 This paper is a descendent of a talk given at a workshop of the project ‘Joint Practical Knowledge: Shared Agency and Knowledge of Other Minds’ which was held in Santiago, Chile, in December 2016. Thanks very much to Johannes Roessler and Glenda Satne who ran this project, organized the workshop, and for very helpful discussion and comments on the occasion. I am grateful to two anonymous journal referees for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions, and also to the participants of the Santiago workshop, in particular Guy Longworth, Naomi Eilan, Sebastian Rödl and Abe Roth for their excellent comments on the original paper. Thanks to Hemdat Lerman and the participants of a postgraduate research seminar at the University of Warwick for very helpful comments and discussion. Thanks also to Matthew Soteriou for very helpful discussion of the ideas in this paper over a number of years.
2 For examples of such work, see Bratman (Citation1999, Part 2, 2014); Gilbert (Citation1990, Citation2000, Citation2009); Searle (Citation1990).
3 The treatment in Mourelatos (Citation1978) builds on influential discussions in Ryle (Citation1949, Citation1954), Kenny (Citation1963) and Vendler (Citation1957[Citation1967]). For infuential discussion of the importance of this work both for general metaphysics, and for a range of issues in the philosophy of mind and action see Steward (Citation1997).
4 For some different approaches to this issue, see Stout (Citation2016), Steward (Citation2013), Crowther (Citation2018), and the essays collected in Stout (Citation2018).
5 For an attempt to develop this analogy see Crowther (Citation2011). For discussion of these issues as they bear on an understanding of the notion of ‘experience’, see Soteriou (Citation2018).
6 For classic discussion of such habituals see Ryle (Citation1949, 43, p.126–129) and see also Comrie (Citation1976, 24–32).
7 One might raise questions about this. Can’t friendship unfold over time? Well, a friendship might occupy a more or less lengthy interval of time. But that does not establish that friendship unfolds over the time that it exists. Again, can’t it be true that a friendship grows and develops over time, and doesn’t that show that it is something that occurs or unfolds. But that friendship can develop doesn’t entail that friendship is something that unfolds or can occur. Plants can grow and develop. That is not a reason to think that plants unfold or occur.
8 The idea of individuals ‘being in community with one another’ is clearly very abstract. The substance of the notion of things being in community with one another is intended to emerge through reflection on different varieties of the state. Perhaps what can be said about the most general notion of such a state is: (i) it is relational; (ii) it is a state that is instantiated in virtue of individuals ‘being together’, in a way that must be made determinate in some way; and at least in the kinds of cases discussed in this paper (iii) it is a relation that depends for its obtaining, throughout the time it obtains, on a continuity of processes and events that occur in a way that manifests the relevant mode of togetherness. (See section 4(a) below) The content of (iii) should alert the reader to the fact that I do not assume that such states can be reductively explained in terms of specific processes or occurrences, understood independently of the notion of the state itself. That this explanatory interdependence is egregious is something that would have to be argued for, rather than just assumed.
9 For more detailed discussion of these issues see Rothstein (Citation2004). For an attempt to explain the distinction between process and accomplishment by developing aspects of the analogy between mass and count notions see Crowther (Citation2011).
10 For the identification and development of this idea about states and processes, and for applications to a range of issues in the metaphysics of mind and action, see Soteriou (Citation2013).
11 This is not to imply that ‘living life together’ doesn’t have a stative reading, according to which it could pick out a what I have called a ‘state of community’. Particularly in the present tense form ‘live life together’, such a reading is natural. Rather, given the way this notion was introduced in (a), I want to just stipulate the process or activity reading, in order to enable me to make the relevant ontological distinctions clearer, and to be precise about the idea that a ‘state of community’ depends upon the occurrence of processive continuity of a certain kind.
12 I thus understand states of community as relations which are existence-entailing. Perhaps this might be queried. One relevant thought here, put to me by an anonymous referee, might be that a close friendship might survive death, and that various things that one does, after a friend’s death – honouring them in various ways, for example – might be explained by the persistence of one’s friendship. One might make the same point about love. (I take it that the thought here is that the state may not be extensional, rather than that the friendship or love continues to take some extensional object). I would respond that in these cases the relevant explanatory work can be done by affective and emotional states that were constitutively involved in the original relation, but which now survive independently of the relation.
I do not think it the job of the philosopher to stipulate talk of the survival of friendship or love beyond death out of existence. But I do think that what survives, however meaningful, significant and action-determining it may be for the individual, is something less than the original relation; something that needs to be characterized at least in part, in terms of loss. I also want to emphasize here that such remarks are completely independent of any commitments about the ways in which those who have suffered such loss live with that loss. I will always think of the friends of mine who have passed away as my friends and of my deceased grandparents as those that I love. It is unthinkable to me that I should stop thinking in this way.
13 See footnote 17 for further discussion relevant to these ideas.
14 The idea that life lived together may have shared telic processes or events as ‘constituents’ I understand to be just the claim that such processes and events are parts of such a life. I do not take such a notion of constitution to imply that these parts are ‘explanatorily basic’; that is, that it is possible to reductively explain the notion of the living of a life in terms of the relevant parts, independently of the notion of such a life. Neither do I think that the nature of the continuity of processes and events required for a state of community of the relevant kind to obtain can be explained independently of the state itself (see footnote 8 and Section 4(a)).
15 That hunting together is a state the individuation of which involves the occurrence of a single relatively determinate shared process-type does not entail that it does not contain, as constituents, other shared process types, such as walking in single file to the hunting grounds together. It is difficult to delineate precisely the grounds on which hunting together is a relatively determinate process type, by comparison with doing the kinds of things that we do together, given that we are friends. But it nevertheless seems evident to me that there is some relevant difference of determinacy here, however, that difference is to be accounted for.
16 The normativity that I allude to here is neither moral nor rational, but natural, where ‘natural normativity’ involves the idea that there is an ‘ought’ determined by what kind of state (or living being, property, or process) something is, and what it is for it to be fulfilled or to exist in its fullest and most complete way. These Aristotelian ideas are, of course, controversial, and I can’t defend them fully here. For related applications of these notions in contemporary discussion, though, see Foot (Citation2001) and Thompson (Citation2008).
17 There is a certain degree of idealization and simplification involved here. The kind of friendship discussed in this paragraph is ‘relatively close friendship’. In the face of this, someone might want to insist on a place for friendships that can survive even in conditions of geographical separation and the loss of contact details on both sides, in which there are no such patterns of repeated joint activity.
One strategy here might be to maintain that these are not cases of genuine friendship. A different strategy might be to distinguish between degrees of friendship, and accompany this with the idea that in such circumstances, friendship can continue to obtain in virtue of the truth of various counterfactuals; for example, that one remains friends with someone with whom one has lost contact, because one would call, were one to discover their number, and the call would be warmly received, or, were one to stumble upon their email address, then one would write to them, and renew contact. I see no reason to insist on the first strategy, given our ordinary conception of friendship. The second strategy raises questions about how the relevant counterfactuals are to be constrained.
What I would want to emphasize in the face of cases of this kind, though, is just that they do not threaten the idea that the notion of repeated patterns of joint activity occupies an explanatorily central place in our everyday conception of friendship. Given the concession that cases of this kind involve the persistence of friendship, it still seems that we understand these cases, essentially, in terms of what they are not: that is, in terms of the idea that they are relations which involve specific kinds of departure from cases of friendship that involve such repeated joint activity. They are unusual or degraded forms of a basic kind of friendship relation.
18 Here the processive continuities involved in forms of friendship bear relations to other interesting examples of multi-agent process. A very primitive instance of this, for example, is the process of the preservation of a species through reproduction. Where an instance of reproduction occurs as a constituent of the preservation of a species through reproduction, the occurrence of reproduction at time t implies that there will (all things being equal) be future instances of reproduction.
19 For further discussion relevant to these issues, see Longworth (this volume).
20 Bratman argues that an approach that is conservative in this way is methodologically preferable to the kind of approach developed, for example, in work by John Searle and Margaret Gilbert, who attempt to explain shared intentional action in terms of elements that do not have application at the level individual agency.
21 The paragraph that follows presents, in a compressed fashion, claims developed in Bratman (Citation2014, Chapters 2 and 3)
22 I’m particularly grateful to two anonymous referees, whose questions and comments have been very helpful with respect to the discussion in this section. I have also benefitted from thinking through the very interesting discussion offered in Satne and Salice (Citationms, under review), a paper which develops and applies ideas from Satne and Salice (Citation2015).
23 Sleep talking is a common childhood disorder of sleep, in which there is out loud vocalization during sleep. Put two children who sleep talk in the same room as one another and when they fall asleep they will sleep talk (nonsense) together. See Horne (Citation2007, 254). There is a fundamental form of mutual responsiveness that is a necessary condition for shared intentional activity that such co-sleeping children do not share while asleep, even if they are mutually responsive in such minimal ways. Such mutual responsiveness arguably requires being wakefully conscious, and the availability of capacities that is distinctive of that condition.
24 This is not to rule out that Bratman might hold that there are shared intentional actions which are atelic. For discussion of this see section (c) below.
25 The question about whether Bratman (Citation2014) intends his own account of shared intentional action to be non-circular is subtle, and engaging with it fully would require much fuller discussion of the nature and scope of the planning theory than I can offer here. Bratman (Citation2014, 45–46) for example suggests that he is happy for his account to make reference to the notion of joint activity, where such reference is a mode of specification of action which is neutral with respect to the intentionality of the activity. He suggests, further, that the existence of such notions of action can be put to work in making sense of joint activities that only have intentional specifications. But this raises further questions. For instance, if ‘joint activity’ is not a mere abstraction from shared intentional action, why should shared intentional action, rather than joint activity, be the most basic form of sociality or shared agency? These are questions that cannot be pursued here.
26 See Section 6 for further discussion of this possibility.
27 And at least where the notion of policy retains anything of the distinctive character that it has when it is understood as an element of a planning theory, friendship is obviously not explicable in terms of the notion of shared policy.
28 I remind the reader of that my use of ‘ought’ here is not a moral nor a rational ought, but an ought that indicates commitment to the teleological idea that in virtue of the kinds of things they are, states, relations, processes or activities involving living beings (indeed those living beings themselves) have a ‘most complete’ mode of existence that determines the specific content of the ‘ought’ in each case. (See footnote 16). Further questions concerning the substantiation of this view about ‘ought’, as well as its relations, in cases of joint action, to rational notions of normativity, I will have to take up elsewhere. It is also a question worth exploring elsewhere whether the temporal ontology of joint action developed here has consequences for the epistemology of joint action. On the epistemology of joint action see the papers by Longworth, Satne, and Roessler, in the special edition of which this paper is a part.
29 See, for example, the framing discussion in Bratman (Citation2014, Chapter 1). Much will turn here on how we are to understand the implications of the notion of a ‘basic’ form of sociality in such discussions. Is it consistent with such basicness that there are a plurality of such basic forms? The spirit of the introductory discussion of Bratman (Citation2014, Chapter 1) appears to be that it is not. But the letter is, I think, neutral.
30 These ideas reflect aspects of what Bratman (Citation2014, 45–46) calls the ‘pervasive partiality of modest sociality’. The pervasive partiality of modest sociality takes in the idea that in a pluralistic society most shared actions occur even though there is considerable divergence in the motivational background of the agents engaged in the shared action, their reasons for engaging in such shared intentional action, and in the kinds of values placed on the outcome of the shared action by participants.