Aggregate Subjects
Assume we do need a theory of shared intention in order to solve The Problem of Joint Action. Perhaps we construct such a theory using the idea that a shared intention is an intention of an aggregate subjects. Before doing this, we need to know what aggregate subjects are, whether there are any, and whether they could have intentions.
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Notes
Aggregate Subjects
Are there aggregate subjects and, if so, can they have intentions?
Theories of team reasoning require that teams can have preferences. To have a preference is to be a subject (of the preference), so teams are aggregate subjects.
If aggregate subjects can have not just preferences but also intentions, then it is possible that to have a shared intention is to be a part of an aggregate subject which has an intention.
Reductive Strategy
On the Reductive Strategy, there is no need for aggregate agents in constructing an account of shared intention.
On a view like Bratman (2014)’s, for us to have a shared intention is just for us each to have certain intentions and for this to be common knowledge among us.
This is a reductive strategy: nothing other than ordinary individual subjects need have intentions.
Background: Terminology
Why aggregate? From biology (an aggregate or colonial organism): Wikipedia: ‘the Portuguese man o' war is a colony of four different types of polyp or related forms’
Theories of group agency are theories of aggregate subjects.
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