A Pragmatic Approach to Agency in Group Activity by Herman Witzel

Author:Herman Witzel
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

3.2.2.4Roth and Copp on authority and authorization

I have now reviewed models that account for almost all types of group activity. Group activity characterized by authority and authorization, however, is still uncovered. Given that authority structures and closely related authorization processes are presumably one of the most used mechanisms to establish successful group activity, the neglect of this aspect is surprising, to say the least. More often than not, authority is explicitly excluded and authorization is not even mentioned. The reason lies, I believe, in the different types of authority and authorization discussed in my analysis above. Both phenomena walk the lines between group activity properly described as multiple agents acting together, group activity that involves multiple agents but cannot be so described, or even individual agency.

I briefly discuss two convincing positions that can be applied to authority and authorization, respectively, which link these phenomena to the problem of agency in group activity.

Copp’s primary and secondary actions. In his 1979 paper “Collective actions and secondary actions,” Copp agrees that a group “can only have impact “through” the actions of persons,” but he rejects the conclusion that groups, therefore, do not act at all. He also concedes that “it is not possible for a collection to have an intention,” but he regards it “a sufficient condition of an agent’s performing an action intentionally [...] that it perform it for a reason” and claims that “it is possible for a collective to have an objective and to do something in order to achieve that objective” (p.178). By having a goal and bringing it about, thus, collectives have reasons and act. The more interesting question for Copp is exactly how collectives act ‘through’ their members.

Copp’s central claim is “that the actions of a collective are constituted by actions of persons” (p.183) the same way actions of individuals may be constituted by actions of other individuals. In this view, persons are capable of ‘primary actions’, which are stand-alone actions we know from everyday human agency. However, an agent may also do something by ‘secondary actions’: “An agent’s action is a secondary action if, and only if, it is correctly attributable to this agent on the basis of [..] an action of some other agent,” i.e. secondary action of one agent is ‘constituted’ by primary actions of other agents (p.177). The constitution relation between primary and secondary actions is not a causal relation. Copp spells it out in terms of specific sufficiency conditions involving the circumstances under which an action is done and the agents and actions themselves (p.182).

While the idea of ‘primary action’ and ‘secondary actions’ in this sense is intuitive, it remains unclear how one action can sufficiently constitute another action. After all, ‘sufficiency’ is merely a logical notion while actions have substantial influence on reality. Since a causal relation is excluded by Copp, he must have in mind some other relation between the actions. While he does not give a general principle of what this relation looks like, his examples feature authorized agents acting in the name of other agents or groups.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.