Philosophy Research Seminar - Dr Thomas Smith (Manchester)
| Dates: | 19 February 2020 |
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| Times: | 15:10 - 16:55 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff |
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Title:
Collectivity in Action
Abstract:
A staple of the joint action literature is the good case/bad case pair. For some phi, in each case, some agents are phi-ing. In the good case, this is a paradigm case of joint action. The bad case is a ringer for this case, but a paradigm non-case of joint action. There is then a question of how to account for the difference between the two cases.
My view is that in the good case, the agents collectively saturate an argument place of the act-type phi; in the bad case, they saturate it, but not collectively
On first inspection, this proposal is a non-starter. Collective saturation appears to be neither necessary nor sufficient for many a paradigm case, and non-collective saturation appears to be neither necessary nor sufficient for many a ringer case. I show that while this is indeed the case on a monadic decomposition of an action report, an action report – and the action it reports – can be construed as having a certain sort of dyadic form. On this construal what is reported is that a causal – in the archaic sense of explanatory – relation holds of, on the one hand some agent(s), and on the other hand some change(s). I show that my proposal works when married to this dyadic construal.
Travel and Contact Information
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4.4
Roscoe Building
Manchester
