Shared Agency

A Planning Theory of Acting Together

By: Michael E. Bratman

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Paperback | 20 March 2014

At a Glance

Paperback
234 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.39 x 15.6 x 1.35

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Human beings act together in characteristic ways, and these forms of shared activity matter to us a great deal. Think of friendship and love, singing duets, dancing together, and the joys of conversation. And think about the usefulness of conversation and how we frequently manage to work together to achieve complex goals, from building buildings to putting on plays to establishing important results in the sciences.

With Shared Agency, Michael E. Bratman seeks to answer questions about the conceptual, metaphysical and normative foundations of our sociality and to establish a framework for understanding basic forms of sociality. Bratman proposes that a rich account of individual planning agency facilitates the step to these forms of sociality.

There is an independent reason - grounded in the diachronic organization of our temporally extended agency - to see planning structures as basic to our individual agency. Once these planning structures are on board, we can expect them to play central roles in our sociality. This planning theory of individual agency highlights distinctive roles and norms of intentions, understood as plan states. In Shared Agency Bratman argues that appeals to these planning structures enable us to provide adequate resources for an account of sufficient conditions for these basic forms of sociality. Shared agency emerges, both functionally and rationally, from structures of interconnected planning agency.

Industry Reviews

"The book is without a doubt a major work in the field, essential reading for anyone interested in shared agency, shared intention, or theories of intentional agency more generally.... This remarkable book is important not only in virtue of the extent to which it already demonstrates that fecundity, but also in virtue of the further work on shared agency to which it is sure to give rise." --Australasian Journal of Philosophy "For philosophers working on shared agency, this book is a required reading. It is an exceptionally clear presentation of what is deservedly one of the most influential contemporary accounts of shared agency (the influence extends outside philosophy to developmental psychology and artificial intelligence)... The book is beautifully written and, for someone interested in shared agency, a joy to read." --Analysis Reviews "It is a major achievement and a must-read for anyone interested in issues of collective action and intentionality...The view it presents is powerful and illuminating and will serve as a touchstone for future." -- Ethics work in this area." "Bratman takes great pains to attend to and to thoroughly explicate the finer details of his proposal while simultaneously exposing the less nuanced and more extravagant commitments of alternate views. His book deserves to be widely read by philosophers of agency and action theorists, as well as anyone with an interest in and the sophistication to deeply examine how it is that we act together." - Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review

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