Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together By Michael Bratman

Extract

In this book, Michael Bratman articulates and defends a refined version of the account of shared agency that first appeared in ‘Shared Cooperative Activity’ (1992). The book as a whole is framed as an overarching argument for the ‘continuity thesis’, the thesis that cases of egalitarian small-scale shared activity – cases of ‘modest sociality’ in Bratman’s terminology – can be exhaustively explained with the conceptual resources already available in his account of individual planning agency (where these include intentions in addition to beliefs and desires; see Bratman 1987). Examples of such shared activities include two friends going for a walk or painting a house together. What distinguishes these from exercises of mere parallel agency, such as in the case of two strangers walking down the street, each trying to avoid colliding with the other? According to Bratman, the answer is the presence and effective functioning of a ‘shared intention’, a pattern of ordinary intentions and beliefs that coordinates several agents' activity in a way analogous to the way in which an intention coordinates a single agent's activity across time (27).