Dynamics of Sociality

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 1-15

  Bratman, Michael E ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 56749143276     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4975.2006.00125.x     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. See essays 5-8 in my Faces of Intention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
2. and "Shared Valuing and Frameworks for Practical Reasoning," in Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, eds. R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler. and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004), 1-27.
3. In appealing to a "public context" rather than explicitly to common knowledge I have learned from Scott Shapiro, "Law. Plans, and Practical Reason," Legal Theory 8 (2002): 387-441, at 412.
4. Finally, concerning interdependence, see "I Intend that We J," 153 57.
5. See my Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987; reissued by CSLI Publications, 1999) and Faces of Intention.
6. Concerning this strategy see in particular "Shared Intention" in Faces of Intention, esp. sec. V.
7. In this respect Philip Pettit's description of my view as a "mutual-awareness" analysis is inaccurate. See his "Collective Persons and Powers." Legal Theory 8 (2002): 443-70, at 456.
8. Some of the implications of these interintention interconnections are nicely brought out in Abraham Sesshu Roth's discussion of what he calls the "bridge intention proposal" (though Roth thinks this proposal does not fully account for what he calls "practical intersubjectivity"). See his "Practical Intersubjectivity," in Socializing Metaphysics, ed. Frederick F. Schmitt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2003). 65-91.
9. For this account of shared valuing see my "Shared Valuing and Frameworks for Practical Reasoning." My formulation here makes explicit what was only implicit in that earlier work, that we do indeed intend to engage in and be guided by relevant shared deliberation.Thanks to Scott Shapiro for helping me see the need for making this explicit.
10. Gilbert Harman, "Desired Desires," reprinted in his Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 117-36, at 129-30.
11. See my "Three Theories of Self-Governance," Philosophical Topics 32 (2004): 21 46, and reprinted in my Structures of Agency.
12. See my "Valuing and the Will," Philosophical Perspectives:Action and Freedom 14 (2000): 249-65.
13. and my "Autonomy and Hierarchy," Social Philosophy & Policy 20 (2003): 156-76. Both are reprinted in my Structures of Agency.
14. Here I am drawing on ideas in my "Practical Reasoning and Acceptance in a Context," as reprinted in Faces of Intention.
15. For a useful discussion of related ideas see Anthonie Meijers, "Collective Agents and Cognitive Attitudes," Protosociology 16 (2002): 70-86.
16. Meijers, however, argues that all cases of "collective belief" that are not merely a summative matter are ones of context-relative collective acceptance. (For an alternative view see Margaret Gilbert, "Belief and Acceptance as Features of Groups," Protosociology 16 [2002]: 35-69.) I do not take a position on this issue here. All that I claim is that there is a phenomenon of shared valuing and that it is context-relative and has the features I have highlighted.
17. Example courtesy of Daniel Markovits, "Contract and Collaboration," The Yale Law Journal 113 (2004): 1417-1518, at 1456.
18. I discuss this example also in "Shared Valuing and Frameworks lor Practical Reasoning."
19. This is a theme in many of my discussions of these matters. For a recent discussion see my "Temptation Revisited," in my Structures of Agency.
20. Concerning this last point see my "Anchors for Deliberation." in Christoph Lumer and Sandro Nannini, eds. Intentionality, Deliberation and Autonomy (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, forthcoming).
21. See e.g., Margaret Gilbert. "What Is It for Us to Intend?" in her Sociality and Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowraan & Littlefield, 2000), 14-36, esp. 16-17 and 25-26.
22. For a somewhat related view see Abraham Sesshu Roth, "Shared Agency and Contralateral Commitments," Philosophical Review (forthcoming).
23. Gilbert discusses "shared values" in her "Shared Values, Social Unity, and Liberty," Public Affairs Quarterly 19 (2005): 25 49.
24. For Gilbert's different approach to walking together see her "Walking Together: A Paradigmatic Social Phenomenon," Midwest Studies 15 (1990): 1-14. Facundo Alonso also discusses a similar example in unpublished work.
25. My talk of "significant loss" comes from T. M. Scanlon's formulation of his Principles M, D, and L. My point here is that these principles and their ilk need not be engaged by low-level, relatively nonconsequential shared agency. See Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 7.
26. I borrow talk of "hard" cases from Ronald Dworkin. See his "Hard Cases," as reprinted in his Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 81-130.
27. Cass Sunstein, "Incompletely Theorized Agreements," Harvard Law Review 108 (1994 95): 1733-72.
28. Recent contributions to a vigorous debate about these matters include: Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, chap. 7.
29. and Niko Kolodny and R. Jay Wallace, "Promises and Practices Revisited." Philosophy and Public Affairs 31 (2003): 119-54.
30. For a fascinating discussion of forms of shared intention in children, and of implications for broad issues about human cognition, see Michael Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Joseph Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll, "Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 675-735.
31. Blain Neufeld has raised the question of whether John Rawls's discussion of the transition from a political framework seen by the participants as a mere "modus vivendi" to a "constitutional consensus," and from there to an "overlapping consensus." provides an example of the spillover effect (or perhaps, more broadly, an example of the overall social dynamics sketched here). (See John Rawls, Political Liberalism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], esp. 158 68.) The issue is complex; but let me make two brief points. First, I have been assuming that the participants of an initial shared activity, such as painting together, will frequently value shared governance; and I have appealed to this as a potential source of rational pressure in the direction of increased stability and depth, where this may include the spillover effect. In contrast (as Rawls makes clear in his remarks at p. 147) we cannot make an analogous assumption concerning the parties in a political framework seen by them as a mere "modus vivendi." Nevertheless, and this is my second point, it is important that Rawls's primary concern in his discussion is to respond to the worry that the idea of an overlapping consensus is Utopian, and to do this by tracing a plausible social route to such a consensus. To the extent that Rawls's story of this social route is, despite the difference just noted, a special case of a social dynamics common to human sharing, Rawls's response to worries about utopianism would be strengthened.
32. I'd like to reflect briefly on some similarities and differences between the ideas I have been sketching and some central ideas in Pettit's essay, "Collective Persons and Powers." (Pettit discusses these matters in a series of recent publications, but for present purposes I will focus solely on this paper.) There is, first, an important commonality, since we both see the basic structure of shared intention (as he calls it, "shared purpose"-p. 457) as one that can be strengthened in important ways. Pettit is willing to accept something like my account of this basic structure (see p. 457), though, as I noted earlier, I do not think his characterization of my model as a "mutual awareness" account is fully apt. However, whereas I focus on increases in stability and depth of shared intentions and shared valuings, Pettit focuses on an overall "rational unity required of an intentional subject" (457).