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69Joint action without and beyond planningDissertation, University of Edinburgh. 2013.Leading philosophical accounts of joint activity, such as Michael Bratman’s account of ‘shared intentional activity’, take joint activity to be the outcome of two or more agents having a ‘shared intention’, where this is a certain pattern of mutually known prior intentions that are directed toward a common goal. With Bratman’s account as a foil, I address two lacunas that are relatively unexplored in the philosophical literature. The first lacuna concerns how to make sense of the apparently join…Read more
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779Shared Goals and DevelopmentPhilosophical Quarterly 65 (258): 94-101. 2015.In 'Joint Action and Development', Stephen Butterfill argues that if several agents' actions are driven by what he calls a "shared goal"—a certain pattern of goal-relations and expectations—then these actions constitute a joint action. This kind of joint action is sufficiently cognitively undemanding for children to engage in, and therefore has the potential to play a part in fostering their understanding of other minds. Part of the functional role of shared goals is to enable agents to choose m…Read more
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735An Account of Boeschian Cooperative BehaviourIn Catrin Misselhorn (ed.), Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems, Springer Verlag. 1st ed. 2015.Philosophical accounts of joint action are often prefaced by the observation that there are two different senses in which several agents can intentionally perform an action Φ, such as go for a walk or capture the prey. The agents might intentionally Φ together, as a collective, or they might intentionally Φ in parallel, where Φ is distributively assigned to the agents, considered as a set of individuals. The accounts are supposed to characterise what is distinctive about activities in which seve…Read more
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65Review of Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman, edited by Manuel Vargas and Gideon Yaffe (review)Journal of Social Ontology 1 (2): 377-379. 2015.
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45Conceptions of Cognition for Cognitive EngineeringInternational Journal of Aviation Psychology 21 (1): 85-104. 2011.Cognitive processes, cognitive psychology tells us, unfold in our heads. In contrast, several approaches in cognitive engineering argue for a shift of unit of analysis from what is going on in the heads of operators to the workings of whole socio-technical systems. This shift is sometimes presented as part of the development of a new understanding of what cognition is and where the boundaries of cognitive systems are. Cognition, it is claimed, is not just situated or embedded, but extended and d…Read more
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190Shared intention and the doxastic single end conditionPhilosophical Studies 173 (2): 351-372. 2016.What is required for several agents to intentionally φ together? I argue that each of them must believe or assume that their φ-ing is a single end that each intends to contribute to. Various analogies between intentional singular action and intentional joint action show that this doxastic single end condition captures a feature at the very heart of the phenomenon of intentional joint action. For instance, just as several simple actions are only unified into a complex intentional singular activit…Read more
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387Common Knowledge and Reductionism about Shared AgencyAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (2): 315-326. 2016.Most reductionist accounts of intentional joint action include a condition that it must be common knowledge between participants that they have certain intentions and beliefs that cause and coordinate the joint action. However, this condition has typically simply been taken for granted rather than argued for. The condition is not necessary for ensuring that participants are jointly responsible for the action in which each participates, nor for ensuring that each treats the others as partners rat…Read more
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110Review of Michael Bratman's Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together (review)Analysis 75 (2): 346-348. 2015.
Gothenburg, Sweden
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Collective Intentionality |
Collective Responsibility |
Moral Responsibility |
Moral Psychology |