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Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems

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Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems

Part of the book series: Philosophical Studies Series ((PSSP,volume 122))

Abstract

This volume brings together approaches from philosophy, engineering, computer science and AI. The aim of this introductory article is to provide a conceptual framework in order to facilitate the dialogue between the different approaches and to situate the contributions to this volume with respect to it. The first step is to carefully distinguish different types of agents and their capacities. Then the different kinds of collective agency and cooperation in natural and artificial systems will be investigated. Of particular interest is the point at which a group of agents starts to engage in some form of collective agency. As will become apparent, different kinds of collective agency involve agents with different kinds of capacities. Finally, the relevance of the proposed framework for practice and research will be discussed with a focus on social simulations. It will be suggested that the operationalization and modeling of social simulations can be improved with the help of philosophical approaches, whereas philosophical hypotheses about cooperation and collective agency might be tested with the help of social simulations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term autonomy has a very demanding connotation which stems from Kant’s moral philosophy. For Kant, autonomous agents are free rational agents who are the source of the authority behind the moral laws that bind them. The concept of autonomy used when speaking about agents in MAS is, of course, far less demanding.

  2. 2.

    The so-called “belief-desire-intention” or BDI software model based on Bratman’s approach is the standard model for MAS (Rao and Georgeff 1995).

  3. 3.

    This contrast is misleading at first because agency is imbued with normativity almost all the way down. The concept of adaptivity already has a normative dimension. Adaptivity is a value for the agent whose behavior can be adjusted to his or her environment. Another type of normativity comes into play, as we have seen, with the rationality constraints which intentional agents are subject to. Therefore, one has to keep in mind that Korsgaard refers to a specific and particularly demanding kind of normativity.

  4. 4.

    For more on the controversy concerning whether hunting chimpanzees are acting jointly or not see Boesch (2005) who thinks that they are and Tomasello and Hamann (2012) who deny this.

  5. 5.

    The term “collective intentionality” is sometimes used specifically to describe this view in contrast to shared or joint intentionality that does not presuppose collective agents; but I am not differentiating between shared, joint and we-intentions here.

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Acknowledgments

I am thanking Anja Berninger and Mog Stapleton for helpful comments on former versions of the paper.

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  1. Institute of Philosophy, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Catrin Misselhorn

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  1. Catrin Misselhorn
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Correspondence to Catrin Misselhorn .

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    Catrin Misselhorn

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Misselhorn, C. (2015). Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems. In: Misselhorn, C. (eds) Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15515-9_1

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