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From Individual to Plural Agency
From Individual to
Plural Agency
Collective Action

Volume 1

Kirk Ludwig

1
3
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For 林 世 娉
Preface

This is the first of a two-volume project on the nature and structure of collective
action and intention. The project is a single sustained argument that grounds
collective action in individual agency. The fundamental tenet of the project is that
all collective or joint intentional action, from two people shaking hands or building a
cabinet, to the Paris mob storming the Bastille, cooperate mergers, and the United
Nations passing the Convention Against Genocide, while not mere aggregates of the
actions of individual agents, can nonetheless be analyzed in terms of concepts which
are already in play in our understanding of individual agency.
The project was originally conceived of and written as one book, From Individual
to Institutional Agency, divided in three parts, but it outgrew the bounds of a single
volume. The book in your hands, From Individual to Plural Agency, comprises the
first two parts of the original project, and what was conceived of as the third part of
the original project now appears as a second volume, From Plural to Institutional
Agency (in forward looking references to the second volume, I will refer to this as
Volume 2).
The first part (of the overall project and of this book) develops an analysis of
individual action, agency, and intention, with special attention to the logical form of
singular action sentences (e.g., ‘He melted the chocolate’), the content of intentions
directed at individual actions (‘He intended to melt the chocolate’), and the logical
role of the modifier ‘intentionally’ in action sentences (‘He melted the chocolate
intentionally’). The account is built around a refinement of the standard event
analysis of singular action sentences, on which the action verb is treated as introdu-
cing two quantifiers over events. To say that he melted the chocolate is, on this
account, to say (roughly) that he did something (was the immediate agent of some
event) that brought it about that the chocolate melted (that an event of melting of the
chocolate occurred). This part is foundational to the whole project, and the account is
developed with an eye to its application in the domain of collective action.
The second part (of the larger project, and of this book) develops an account of
plural discourse about collective action and intention. It focuses on an account of the
logical form of plural action sentences (‘We built a boat’, ‘We got married’, ‘We met
in the library on Wednesday night’), of plural sentences attributing intentions (‘We
intend to reform campaign finance’, ‘We intend to rule the world’), of the content
individuals’ intentions when they are engaged in joint intentional action (we-
intentions), and of the logical role of ‘intentionally’ as a modifier in plural action
sentences (‘We built a boat intentionally’).
Plural action sentences are typically ambiguous between a distributive and collect-
ive reading. ‘We built model airplanes when we were kids’ could be read as saying
that we each did so (distributive reading), or as saying that we did so together
(collective reading). On the distributive reading, there is a quantifier over members
of the group that takes wide scope over the event quantifier introduced by the action
verb. For each of us, there are one or more events of model airplane assembly of
viii 

which he is the agent. We get the collective reading, on the account developed, by
reversing the order of the quantifiers (leaving aside some details). On the collective
reading, for one or more events of airplane assembly each one of us (and no one not
one of us) was a direct agent of it. That is, group agency involves multiple agents of a
single event, not an event of which there is a single group agent. The key point is that,
on this analysis, the superficial appearance that there is a group agent—the we as
apparent agent in the surface form of the sentence—disappears. While the group
doesn’t disappear (it is still referred to in ‘each of us’), only its members are agents of
anything. This insight can then be employed in an account of the content of
intentions of agents who participate in joint intentional action, we-intentions in the
terminology introduced by Raimo Tuomela, that shows what distinguishes them
from individual intentions, but draws only on the conceptual resources already
available from our understanding of individual intentions. To put it roughly, we-
intentions are directed toward each member of a group contributing to a goal in
accordance with a shared plan. This in turn enables us to explain the logical role of
‘intentionally’ in collective action sentences, and so to provide a general account of
collective intentional action (at least insofar as it is expressed in plural action
sentences). This serves as the foundation for the third part of the project.
The third part of the overall project, now a separate volume, shows that the
account of collective action developed in the context of plural action sentences can
be extended to the case of institutional and mob action despite a number of apparent
obstacles. What are the obstacles? First, we use grammatically singular terms in
action sentences about institutions (‘Chrysler donated $6 million to help save
Detroit’s art collection’), on the one hand, and mobs and crowds (‘The mob attacked
only those individuals who interfered with its actions’), on the other. Second, at least
many sentences involving “institutional agents” seem to not to admit of the distribu-
tive/collective ambiguity that motivates the multiple-agents account of plural action
sentences on their collective readings. For example, there appears to be no distribu-
tive reading of ‘The United States declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941.’
Third, institutional groups, and mobs and crowds, can survive changes in their
membership over time, and might have had different members than they in fact
do, in contrast to plural groups (as we might call them). Fourth, the capacity to
persist through change in members gives institutions the capacity for perpetual
existence and the ability to act over periods longer than any individual or single
group of individuals could. Fifth, in the context of institutional, and even in the case
of mob action, on the face of it, collective action by a group does not always involve
the participation of every member of the group—e.g., in a group announcing
something by way of a spokesperson. All of these problems can be solved within
an individualist framework. The key idea in the resolution of these difficulties,
which I can only mention here, is that institutional membership itself is a socially
constructed relation, a status role, that is time indexed, and that more generally
institutions are (occupied) networks of status roles and many of their characteristic
actions have to be understood as imposing status functions on act types. This third
part of the overall project, then, is concerned with developing a conceptual frame-
work for understanding what this comes to and how it can be used to give a
compelling individualist account of the agency of institutions.
  ix

As noted above, From Individual to Plural Agency comprises what was originally
conceived of as the first two parts of one project. The second volume in the project,
From Plural to Institutional Agency, includes the third part of the overall project.
Their ambition taken together is not to provide a complete account of the nature and
structure of the social world, but rather to show what is essential to its atomic
components, how they are grounded in our understanding of individual agency,
and how they may be elaborated into structures that serve as the scaffolding for social
and institutional reality.
I was introduced to the topic of collective action and intention in John Searle’s
seminars at Berkeley in the late 1980s. At the time, Searle was working on the
material that later appeared in “Collective Intentions and Actions” (Searle 1990).
He argued against what he took to be Tuomela and Miller’s (Tuomela and Miller
1988) reductive account of we-intentions in terms of intentions to do one’s part in a
collective action in conditions of common knowledge (see (Tuomela 2005) for a
rejoinder), and instead for an account which saw what was distinctive about we-
intentions as lying not in their content but in their mode. I thought that that could
not be the right answer to the puzzle—as if the word ‘intend’ were ambiguous
between an individualist and collectivist sense. In ‘We intend to pool our resources
to buy all the lottery tickets and to take our shares to the bank when we win’, the
attitude verb must be interpreted in the same way across the clauses, but the first
clause we understand to announce a shared intention while in the second, on the
most natural reading, only individual intentions are involved (we each intend to take
his or her own share to his or her own bank). The difference had to lie, I thought, in
the content of the intention. But I could not see at the time how to tell the story.
Michael Bratman gave a talk at Berkeley, in spring 1990, on material that was later to
appear in his “Shared Cooperative Activity” (Bratman 1992), which seemed to me to
be on the right track in locating what is distinctive about the intentions of individuals
who are participating in collective intentional activity in their content, while at the
same time drawing only on concepts already at play in our understanding of
individual intention (I compare my ultimate view with Bratman’s in Chapter 16
}16.3). It would be a long time before I came back to the problem of collective action
and intention after leaving Berkeley. During the interval I would be engaged inter alia
on work in the theory of meaning and natural language semantics. It was the
occasion of Raimo Tuomela giving a talk at the University of Florida in spring
2003, “We-intentions Revisited” (Tuomela 2005), that prompted me to return to
the problem. It struck me then that there was a large body of work on the semantics
of action sentences that had not been brought to bear on the problem of collective
action, and it seemed to me immediately that at least some of the conceptual
problems in the area could be given a clearer formulation, and that some of the
problems cleared up, by thinking about the problems of collective action in the light
of the event analysis of singular action sentences. That was the genesis of the current
project. I wrote up something that spring about the central idea. I received valuable
comments and objections from my colleagues John Biro, David Copp, Hana Filip,
Michael Jubien, Marina Oshana, Greg Ray, and Gene Witmer, and presented
versions of the evolving account at conferences and colloquia in the next three
years. The ideas developed in this period were published in Noûs in “Collective
x 

Intentional Behavior from the Standpoint of Semantics” (Ludwig 2007a). Those

ideas, refined, corrected, extended and related to others, form the core of the present
book.
From the beginning, it was clear that there were severe limits to the scope of the
account in terms of plural action sentences, since it is not immediately apparent how
it can be extended to sentences about institutional action or about mobs and crowds.
Moreover, scarcely any joint intentional actions we engage in are free from some
reference to, or some context or background involving, institutions or institutional
practices, including, as I am thinking broadly of institutions, the institution of
language. The story of collective intentional behavior, for us, cannot be complete
until it is extended to the institutional context. Prima facie, if plural action is merely a
matter of multiple agents of one or more events, it would seem incredible that when
we organize ourselves into structures of assigned roles, and assign functions in social
interactions to various things by mutual agreement, novel agents of a different type
make a sudden appearance on the scene. Institutional agency ought to be continuous
with informal collective intentional activity. But it is one thing to have a big picture
about how the social is grounded in individual agency and another to see how the
resources available could be adequate to the task. I slowly put together the tools that
I needed for the extension. Among the most important tools were the concept of a
constitutive rule and of a status function (the latter introduced in Searle 1995). Three
key insights were that constitutive rules could be given a deflationary analysis in
terms of essentially intentional action types that embed a pattern of activity which
can be described neutrally with respect to whether it is instantiated intentionally, that
status functions are the result of tacit agreements to use items in functional roles
specified by constitutive rules in social transactions, and that membership in insti-
tutions (as I said above) is a status function that is typically conferred relative to a
condition that is time indexed. A précis of many of these ideas appears in “Proxy
Agency in Collective Action” (Ludwig 2014b). A more detailed story of the develop-
ment of these ideas I will leave to Volume 2.
I owe a considerable intellectual debt to the many philosophers who have con-
tributed to the development of the field of action theory and collective intentionality.
While I have followed some different lines of development from many to whom
I owe stimulation and insight, I would not have been in a position to develop the
account of the mechanisms of collective action in this book without their pioneering
work. Though this will hardly exhaust my intellectual debts, I wish to single out in
particular (in alphabetical order) Michael Bratman, David Copp, Donald Davidson,
Margaret Gilbert, John Searle, and Raimo Tuomela. There are more people who have
contributed to my thinking about the topics in this book, and who have contributed
comments and feedback on it, than I will be able to properly thank here. Among the
many (excluding those already mentioned) are Daniel Buckley, Sara Chant, Aaron
Edidin, Zachary Ernst, Luca Ferrero, Charles Hermes, Daniel Linsenbardt, Larry
May, Paul McNamara, Seamus Miller, Anna Moltchanova, Wade Munroe, Abe Roth,
Kevin Savage, Ernie Sosa, and Andrew Smith. I owe a special debt to Marija Janković
for many helpful discussions, and for criticisms that helped me to clarify and refine,
and I hope finally to get right, the account of we-intentions. I would also like to thank
three readers for Oxford University Press for helpful comments about content and
  xi

useful suggestions about how to improve the presentation. Finally, I thank my wife,
Shih-Ping Lin 林 世 娉, for her support and encouragement, and for reading multiple
drafts of the book manuscript and filling the margins and pages with red ink. Despite
this collective effort to ensure that I have got things right and avoided errors,
whatever infelicities remain—remain my individual responsibility.
Contents

List of Figures, Diagrams, and Tables xvii

1. The Problem of Collective Agency 1

1.1 Social Reality and Forms of Collective Agency 2
1.2 Subject Matter of this Book 5
1.3 Method and Organization 9
1.4 Scope and Limits 11

Part I. Singular Action Sentences

2. What is an Event? 17
3. The Logical Form of Singular Action Sentences 21
3.1 The Event Analysis of Singular Action Sentences 21
3.2 Separating out Thematic or Case Roles 23
3.3 Action Verb and Event Type 25
3.4 Uniqueness of Agent and Event 25
3.5 Integrating Tense into the Analysis 27
3.6 Negative Actions 31
3.7 Summary 34
4. Action, Motivation, Explanation, and Intention 36
4.1 Action, Desire, and Practical Reasoning 36
4.2 Intention 40
4.3 Summary 44
5. Conditional Intentions 46
5.1 Conditional Intentions and Reasons for and against Action 48
5.2 The Epistemic Status of the Antecedent 51
5.3 Control over the Antecedent 53
5.4 Influence over the Antecedent 55
5.5 Conditional Commitment 56
5.6 Satisfaction Conditions for Conditional Intentions 58
5.7 Multistage Action Plans 61
5.8 Summary 62
6. What is it to be the Agent of an Event or State? 66
6.1 Primitive Actions and Their Consequences 67
6.2 What does Event Time Index in Action Sentences? 69
6.3 Forms of Agency 71
6.4 Solution to a Puzzle about Adverbs of Action 74
6.5 Abbreviations and Formulations 76
6.6 What is it to be the Primitive Agent of an Event or State? 78
6.7 What are Actions? 82
6.8 Summary 84
xiv 

7. The Content of I-Intentions 85

7.1 The Satisfaction Principle 86
7.2 Intention Sentences with an Infinitival Complement 87
7.3 Self-referentiality, Deviant Causal Chains, and Control 88
7.4 A Margin for Error 97
7.5 Incorporating the Lessons in the Analysis 99
7.6 Extension to Sentential Complements 102
7.7 Summary 106
8. The Adverb ‘Intentionally’ 108
8.1 ‘Intentionally’ as Creating an Intensional Context 108
8.2 ‘Intentionally’ in Logical Form 111
8.3 The Simple View 112
8.4 Knowledge, Belief, Intention, and Intentional Action 115
8.5 Summary 116
Part I Summary and Conclusion 117
1. The Logical Form of Singular Action Sentences 117
2. The Logical Form of Attributions of I-intentions 120
3. The Contribution of the Adverb ‘Intentionally’ 123

Part II. Plural Action Sentences

9. Logical Form of Plural Action Sentences 131
9.1 Plural Noun Phrases and Collectives 131
9.2 The Prima Facie Case for Plural or Collective Agents 134
9.3 The Distributive Reading of Plural Action Sentences 135
9.4 The Collective Reading of Plural Action Sentences 138
9.5 Summary 144
10. Extensions and Explanations 146
10.1 Plural Quantifiers and Compound Subjects 146
10.2 Verbs Expressing Essentially Collective Actions 151
10.3 Doing Things Together and Doing Things with Others 160
10.4 The Plurality Reading 164
10.5 Summary 165
11. Consequences, Collective Actions, Illustrative Cases 168
11.1 Consequences 168
11.2 Collective Actions 172
11.3 Illustrative Cases from the Literature on Collective Action 177
11.4 Summary 181
12. What are Shared or Group Intentions? 182
12.1 The Prima Facie Case for Group or Shared Intention as Such 183
12.2 Reasons Against Group Intention per se 184
12.3 Shared Intention as Distributed Intentions 186
12.4 Summary 190
  xv

13. The Distinctive Content of We-Intentions 191

13.1 An Initial Proposal 192
13.2 Counterexamples to the Initial Proposal 193
13.3 Shared Intention as a Matter of Intending to Share a Plan 197
13.4 Review and Generalization 202
13.5 Response to the Counterexamples to the Initial Proposal 205
13.6 Summary 205
14. Some Initial Objections and Replies 207
14.1 The Coercion Objection 207
14.2 The Initiation Objection, or the Problem of Alfonse and Gaston 210
14.3 The Shared Plan Objection 211
14.4 Deception about One’s Intention to Engage in Collective Action 216
14.5 The Shared Belief and Knowledge Requirement 219
14.6 Summary 221
15. Collective Intentional Behavior 223
15.1 Collective Intentional Behavior 223
15.2 Coordination, Cooperation, and Collective Intentional Action 225
15.3 Conclusion and Review 228
16. Relation to Other Accounts 231
16.1 Tuomela’s Account of We-intentions 232
16.2 Searle’s Account of We-intentions 238
16.3 Bratman on Shared Cooperative Activity and Shared Intention 247
16.4 Velleman on Genuine Shared Intention 256
16.5 Gilbert, Joint Commitments, and the Plural Subject 261
16.6 Summary 271
17. Does the Account Require More of Collective Action than
is Reasonable? 273
17.1 Questions Q1–Q3: Must Every Agent be and be Intended
to be Involved? 274
17.2 Questions Q4 and Q5: What Groups Act and Act Intentionally? 283
17.3 Summary 286
Summary of Part II 288
1. The Distributive and Collective Readings of [5] 288
2. We-intentions 289
3. Collective Intentional Action 291
4. Relation to Other Accounts 292
5. Objections 293
18. Conclusion 296

Bibliography 301
Index 311
List of Figures, Diagrams, and Tables

Figures
4.1 Practical syllogism corresponding to action explanation. 38
5.1 Taxonomy of antecedents. 50
16.1 Hawk–Dove game. 255

Diagrams
5.1 Taxonomy of conditional intentions in terms of their antecedents. 64
11.1 The case of the carpenters. 173
11.2 The case of the Siamese twins. 175

Tables
6.1 Abbreviations of determinate agency relations 76
1. (Part I Summary) Abbreviations of determinate agency relations 119
 1
The Problem of Collective Agency

On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched the greatest air and seaborne invasion in history
across the English Channel, securing a narrow beachhead on the Normandy coast
between the Cotentin Peninsula to the west and the mouth of the Orne River to the
east. The invasion began with airdrops of three airborne divisions to secure exits from
the beaches for the seaborne landings of the US First Army and the British Second
Army. The battlefield had been isolated from the rest of France by a sustained bombing
campaign against the transportation infrastructure in France, principally rail stock and
exchange yards and bridges. The invasion was massively and meticulously planned
and, though little went according to plan, at nightfall nearly 175,000 American,
Canadian, and British troops had entered Normandy on a shallow front that stretched
90 kilometers. Some 6,000 vessels covered the sea off the coast to the horizon.
The invading armies were each divided into three divisions of between 15,000 and
20,000 men, of three to four regiments each, divided into three or four battalions, of
three or four companies, of three or four platoons, which were divided into three
squads of between nine and twelve men. We speak both of what the individuals do
who are members of organized groups like these and of what the groups do. The US
Army 4th Division landed at Utah beach. It was led by the 2nd battalion of the 8th
infantry regiment. The second wave of landing craft carried the 1st infantry battalion,
and combat engineers and naval demolition teams. Demolition teams consisted of
five Navy Seabees and two or three Army engineers. Each man carried fifty to
seventy-five pounds of explosives on his back. They set explosives to blow up
beach obstacles, each member of these teams doing his part in a sequence of actions
they had rehearsed numerous times. What each group did, from the squad to the
platoon, battalion, regiment, division, and army, depended upon and was determined
by what individuals did as a part of the group of which they were immediate
members and towards whose efforts they were contributing.
What is the relation between what the individual members of these groups did
and what the groups did, and particularly what they did intentionally? When
groups act their members act. Though what the group does is distinct from what
any one of its members do, what the group does it does in virtue of what its
members do. No single individual cleared the obstacles from Utah beach on the
morning of June 6, 1944. This was done by the ten demolition teams in the second
wave of landings. But it would not have happened except for what the individuals
who were members of these teams did. The fundamental problem of collective
agency is understanding the relation between individual and collective action, from
the simplest cases like two people moving a bench, or carrying on a conversation,
to the play of a game of football, the congress passing a law, the nation electing a
     

president, or the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, and the conduct of wars
between nations.

1.1 Social Reality and Forms of Collective Agency

Groups do things both intentionally and unintentionally. The invasion of Normandy
was done intentionally. The landing of the E Company of the first battalion of the 4th
division a kilometer south of their target on Utah Beach was unintentional. When we
elect a new president, or you help me push a car to the side of the road, we do so
intentionally. In contrast, while we are collectively poisoning the environment,
something none of us has the power to do alone, we are not doing so intentionally.
It is rather a by-product of various things we do intentionally, both individually and
as groups.
When groups act intentionally we conceive of them as social units.1 When we
poison the environment together, we are not acting as a group, in any capacity. When
we push a car together, or elect a new president, we are acting as a group, and to act as
a group is to be doing something intentionally, even if in so doing we are doing other
things unintentionally. When we act as a group, that is, when we are doing something
together intentionally, then we also form a social unit. Groups conceived of as
designed for joint intentional action are by their nature social groups. Thus, the
organization of peoples into nations, clubs, teams, colleges, legislatures, police
departments, ministries, navies, armies, divisions, and so on are their organization
into social groups, for these are all groups understood in terms of certain kinds of
collective goals, and so in terms of characteristic types of collective intentional
actions in which they are designed to engage.
Collective intentional action is the most fundamental form of social reality. Every
social institution, relation, practice, or interaction rests upon the capacity of groups
of individuals to engage in various forms of collective intentional behavior.
A fundamental understanding of the social requires an understanding the nature of
collective agency and of how the various aspects of the social world are grounded in
it. There is nothing that would resemble a human mode of life that did not involve
our intentional participation in collective action. In this sense, although we must
ultimately understand collective agency in terms of our capacities as individuals to
engage in intentional behavior, still we could not understand our own forms of life
without understanding it as being grounded in collective agency.

1
In saying this, I am limiting the social to collections capable of collectively intentional behavior. It
might be protested that this is too narrow a definition. We say ants and bees are social insects, with castes
and hierarchies and a division of labor that is similar in many respects to human social arrangements, albeit
with the roles being biologically determined. My own view is that this is a useful extension of a vocabulary
that applies in the first instance to forms of organization that rest on the capacity for collective intentional
behavior. The point of the extension is to facilitate understanding by drawing attention by analogy to
salient similarities that help us to organize discussion of colonies of insects. But just as we do not treat the
use of the word ‘colony’ here as having the same meaning as the use of ‘colony’ in the context of human
societies, so I think we do not use the word ‘social’ in the same sense, but rather in a extended or allied
sense. In any case, there is an important distinction to be drawn between the forms of organization we see
in ant, bee, and termite colonies and the forms of organization that rest on the capacity for collective
intentional behavior, and I intend my use of ‘social’ to be restricted to the latter.
      

There are many things we do by ourselves as a matter of necessity and as a matter

of practicality. No one else can raise our eyelids or make a fist for us. We can only do
these things by ourselves. And even if we could imagine brushing our teeth with
someone else, doing it alone clearly improves efficiency. Yet group action extends
what it is possible to do far beyond the powers of individual agents, and in two quite
different respects, each of which shapes in important ways the nature of the social
world. In some cases, it is a matter of the greater causal powers of groups. Most
people cannot lift a piano alone or carry a dresser up a flight of stairs, and massive
construction projects like the pyramids or the Great Wall of China are far beyond the
capacities of any individual. Nonetheless, it is a contingent fact that no individuals
are powerful enough to do these things. There is nothing conceptually incoherent
about a single individual lifting a piano, carrying a dresser up a flight of stairs, or
building the pyramids or the Great Wall of China. In contrast to these sorts of things,
where as a practical matter we must work together to get something done, though in
principle individuals can do them, there are things that by their nature only groups
can do, things which, if they are to be done at all, must be done with others. For
example, no one can undertake an orchestral performance of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony, carry on a conversation, play a game of chess or football, elect a new
president, or get married, just by him or herself. By their nature these require other
cooperating participants. These are also examples of joint actions that are essentially
intentional. No one can carry on a conversation, for example, unintentionally. Thus,
group action is important for two at least reasons: first, for the greater powers it gives
us to get things done by the multiplying effect it has on the powers of individual
agency; second, for the possibility it opens up of forms of action which are by their
nature unavailable to individuals, and which define the social world that is central to
our self-understanding.
Collective intentional behavior is implicated in every social practice or interaction,
in every institution, from the simplest to the most complex. Our doing something
together unintentionally does not in itself constitute a social practice or social
interaction. If you and I each roll a boulder down a hill, not knowing of the other,
we may together dam a small stream in which they come to rest, but this is not
something we do together intentionally and it is not a social interaction. If we do this
together with the intention of damming the stream, however, then we are engaged in
a minimal form of social interaction. All other forms of social interaction, all social
and institutional life, are built upon this foundation, or out of the form of activity
exemplified in this sort of case. A foundational understanding of social reality
therefore depends upon understanding the nature of collective intentional behavior
and how it differs from individual intentional behavior. And as any form of life that is
recognizably human takes place in a social setting, understanding any distinctively
human form of life at a fundamental level requires understanding the nature of
collective intentional behavior.
Very many social interactions are informal, things we do together on the spur of
the moment or outside the context of any organized group. The group that acts, in
these cases, is individuated by its members. If you and I intentionally push a car to the
side of the road together, the group pushing the car consists of the two of us, and if a
third person should join us, or replace one of us, then it is a new group which is
     

engaged in pushing the car to the side of the road. However, we also participate in
collective action in the context of institutional groups, and this a pervasive feature of
social life. In this case, we often employ concepts to pick out the groups that allow for
change of membership and for their having had different members than they do.
A platoon, a brigade, a division, or an army may lose men and get replacements while
it continues to fight and could have been constituted by different soldiers. The
members of a university football team may change over the course of a season or
from season to season, while we still speak of the team as having a winning or losing
record. If recruiting decisions had gone differently, there would have been different
players on the team. Similarly, a corporation persists through changes in its share-
holders and its employees and managers, who could easily have been different. The
membership of the Senate changes though it continues its work on its legislative
agenda. If election results had differed, so would the membership of the Senate. The
government of which it is a part changes its membership completely over time, as
does the nation that it governs, and obviously it could have been different at any time
than it was. In these cases, the concept of membership we employ is tied to the
concept under which we bring the individuals who are members of the group, and it
is a socially constructed relation, for to be a member of an institutional group is to
have a certain social status, particular to the type of group in question. This holds the
key to understanding many of the differences between institutionally constituted
groups and informal groups.
Mobs and crowds are interesting intermediate cases. They are not institutional
groups. They have no formal or agreed upon organization, and membership is not a
matter of having a certain social status. The concept of a mob or crowd nonetheless
allows for change in membership over time and different counterfactual member-
ship. A particular mob or crowd can continue to act though people drop out and
others join it. It is probable that the crowd that gathered outside the Bastille on July
14, 1789, growing impatient as negotiations for the surrender of the prison dragged
on, gained and lost members while it waited through the morning. Joining or leaving
the crowd was a matter of individual choice. When the mob finally stormed the
Bastille, ninety-eight attackers were killed during the attack, and they were not part of
the mob when it seized the Bastille’s governor Bernard-René de Launay, and dragged
him through the streets towards the Hôtel de Ville where he was stabbed, and his
head was sawed off and placed on a pike.
A feature that both institutional groups and mobs share is that, in contrast to
informal groups, they are picked out using grammatically singular noun phrases.
‘The football team’, ‘The Senate’, ‘The Paris Mob’, ‘The Eighth Army’, ‘The govern-
ment’ are all grammatically singular. To pick out the group of the two us when we are
pushing a car together, however, we use a plural referring term. It will be convenient
to call the latter sort of group of agents, ‘plural agents’, and the former, ‘singular
group agents’, without, however, prejudice with respect to whether the groups per se,
in either case, are genuine agents, for that is one of the questions we wish to answer,
and without prejudice to the question whether it is the nature of the groups that differ
rather than the mode by which we pick them out.
Plural group agents are not restricted to having individuals as members. Several
institutional groups may join together informally in order to accomplish a joint goal.
      

For example, several countries may jointly manage the settlement of refugees from a
civil war in a nation with which they all share a border.
Institutional groups may be subdivided into other institutional groups. The div-
ision of an institutional group into subgroups allows for a division of labor among the
subgroups of the larger group analogous to the division of labor among individuals in
a group without further divisions. The United States First Army is organized into
divisions, which are in turn organized into brigades, that are organized into regi-
ments, further divided into companies, which are organized into platoons, which
contain squads as subunits, which are not further divided into organized groups. In
this case, the members of the squad are also members of the platoon, who are
members of the company, and so on. However, units are not themselves members
of the groups they are part of.
Institutions may also contain institutions as members. The United Nations, for
example, is a transnational institution whose members are nations. The American
Association of Universities is a consortium of universities. The American Association
of Advertising Agencies is an institutional group whose members are advertising
agencies. An institutional group that does not have institutions as members we can
call a first-order institutional group. An institution that does not have institutional
members other than first-order institutional groups, we can call second-order
groups, and so on. The United Nations has nations as members, but not the citizens
of its member nations or any other individuals. However, some institutions that have
institutions as members may also have individuals as members. A joint stock
company, for example, may have individuals as well as institutions as shareholders.
Understanding how institutional groups are formed, what is involved in member-
ship in them, how they differ from informal groups, on the one hand, and mobs on
the other, and how they act, is central to understanding social arrangements which
may be passed on from one group to another.
We noted earlier that some things we do are by their nature collective actions, and,
moreover, collective intentional actions. Very many of these, at least, involve social or
institutional practices. Carrying on a conversation presupposes the institution and
conventions of language, the conventions themselves being realized in dispositions to
engage in a social practice. Playing a game of chess likewise presupposes rules and
conventions. However, singing a duet or getting one’s hair cut do not in their nature,
as opposed to normal practice, involve preexisting conventions or institutional
practices. Thus, some action types that are by their nature collective intentional
actions are not by their nature institutional actions.2

1.2 Subject Matter of this Book

This book is the first of two volumes that are concerned with the analysis of collective
intentional behavior, from its most basic forms, as exemplified in two people pushing
a car together, to the behavior of mobs, to full blown institutional actions such as a

2
Throughout this introductory discussion I rely on an intuitive understanding of institution, conven-
tion, and social practice.
     

declaration of war by a nation state. The division of labor is this. The first volume,
From Individual to Plural Agency, takes up the analysis of discourse about collective
action and intention that uses plural noun phrases to pick out or quantify over the
groups which, as we say, act and intend. The second volume, From Plural to
Institutional Agency (henceforth Volume 2), takes up discourse about collective
action and intention that uses grammatically singular noun phrases to pick out or
quantify over groups which intend and act, namely, discourse about mob and crowd
action and discourse about institutional action, and collective action whose under-
standing is inseparable from its institutional context.
I will be concerned with the proper conceptual framework for thinking about
collective agency and the variety of forms that it can take, as well as the nature and
grounding of social reality more generally. My goal is to provide an account of the
basic conceptual structures that are involved in collective agency, both what struc-
tures are exemplified in collective agency and what concepts are deployed essentially
by those engaged in it. This will provide a set of conceptual tools for thinking about,
and thinking through, how social practices are constructed. Though the main aim is
conceptual illumination, conceptual clarity can also help to guide empirical research,
and avoid missteps that arise from mistaken theoretical views about it, as well as aid
the development of additional conceptual resources for understanding the social.
My approach is shaped by two principles. The first is that an account of collective
intentional behavior should be built on an understanding of individual intentional
behavior and that more complex forms of collective intentional behavior, including
institutional action, should be understood in terms of more basic forms of collective
intentional behavior. In this, I seek to understand the social in terms of its atomic
structure, how it is built up out of iterations and combinations of its most basic
elements. The second is that the account should be built around a proper under-
standing of the logical form3 of the sentences we use to express our thoughts about
collective action, shared intention, and collective intentional behavior.4

3
To give an account of the logical form of a sentence is to make clear the role of its semantically
primitive expressions in fixing the sentence’s interpretive truth conditions so as to account for all the
entailment relations the sentence stands in, in virtue of its logico-semantic form, toward other sentences
given their logico-semantic forms. To give a sentence’s interpretive truth conditions is to specify the
conditions under which a sentence, taken relative to a context of utterance, is true using a sentence that
expresses what the target sentences does in the context. The requirement that this be done so as to exhibit
logical form is the requirement that all the logical and semantic structure of the sentence relevant to formal
entailments be made explicit in giving the interpretive truth conditions. The standard procedure is to
provide a regimented paraphrase of the target sentence that makes clear the logico-semantic contribution
of each expression. For example, the logical form of ‘The red ball is under the bed’ may be represented as
‘[The x: x is red and x is a ball][the y: y is a bed](x is under y)’. Thus, the definite descriptions are
represented as functioning as restricted quantifiers, and the adjective ‘red’ which modifies ‘ball’ is
represented as contributing a predicate conjunct to the nominal restriction on the variable in the first
definite description, and ‘ball’ and ‘bed’ respectively are represented as contributing predicates to the
nominal restrictions on the quantificational determiners to which they are appended, both of which bind
the argument places in the relational predicate whose position they occupy in surface form. For a general
discussion of logical form, see (Lepore and Ludwig 2002; Ludwig 2012).
4
Some have suggested that focusing on the nature of the intentions agents have in engaging in collective
intentional behavior is the wrong place to look for what distinguishes collective intentional behavior from
non-intentional collective behavior, and that it is rather the etiology of the intentions that is essential
      

The second of these principles rests on the assumption that the logical and
conceptual resources of our discourse about the social are fitted to the phenomena
we use it to talk about. This is not to say that the conceptual resources of ordinary
language are explanatorily exhaustive or that they are suited to every explanatory
interest we have about the social. But it is to say that it does not fundamentally
mischaracterize its subject matter and that it captures something central to our
understanding of collective action that distinguishes it from individual action. If it
mischaracterized its subject in some fundamental way, then all theorizing about the
social using ordinary language, even as a starting point, would be impugned. How-
ever, we have no more reason to doubt the assumption of fit in the case of discourse
about collective intention and action than we do in the case of individual intention
and action. Given the assumption, a fundamental starting point for understanding
collective action should be an understanding of the logical form of our discourse
about it. The advantages are as follows. First, by focusing on the logical form of
discourse about collective action and intention, we are able to locate the subject
matter we are interested in, by way of the sentences we use to talk about it, in a theory
neutral way, that is, in way that does not at the outset beg the question against either
group agents, on the one hand, or individualism, on the other. Thus, for example, talk
of group agency or shared intention may be treated as short for whatever is the
subject matter of plural action sentences and plural attributions of intention (read
collectively). Second, analysis of logical form reveals our ontological commitments,
for it exposes quantificational structures that are not explicitly represented in the
surface grammar. Third, relative to our assumption, this tells us the fundamental
ontology of the domain we are interested in—at least as far as what is required for the
truth of what we say. Fourth, related to this, it helps us to avoid the traps that the
surface forms of expressions lay for our understanding. And, fifth, by starting with
the semantics of our discourse, which requires us to explain formal entailments on
the basis of an underlying structure that assigns intuitively appropriate truth condi-
tions throughout the domain, we bring to bear a large body of evidence that places a
significant constraint on an adequate account. A further justification for the principle
lies in the illumination that its pursuit provides of our subject matter, the proof of
which it is the burden of this project to establish. None of this should be taken to
suggest that every philosophical issue or question that arises about collective action
can be addressed by considerations of the logical form of our discourse about it. That
is not an assumption of this project, and the overall investigation, while grounded in
an investigation of logical form, is not limited to it.

(see Gold and Sugden 2007b). However, insofar as there is a collective reading of [4] below, and we hold to
the view that the logical form of collective action sentences must be projected from that of singular action
sentences, the suggestion that the history of the formation of the intention is essential looks implausible.
For there is no such historical component in the account of the form and content of sentences attributing
singular intentions, and it is puzzling how the move to a plural referring term in the argument place could
introduce into the analysis of the sentence about intention an historical component. As we will see in
developing our approach, there is in fact no need to appeal to how agents form their intentions to make
sense of what is distinctive of the intentions involved in collective intentional behavior. For more on this
point, see Chapter 16 }16.3, where I defend Bratman’s account against this objection, a defense that extends
to my account, which is similar in the relevant respects to Bratman’s.
     

To frame the various issues that we must address more precisely, we can begin by
contrasting sentences [1]–[3] with [4]–[6].

[1] I intend to sing the national [4] We intend to sing the national
anthem. anthem.
[2] I sang the national anthem. [5] We sang the national anthem.
[3] I sang the national anthem [6] We sang the national anthem
intentionally. intentionally.

[1]–[3] are about individual intention and action. [1] expresses the sort of intention
which one has in undertaking an individual intentional action. [2] attributes an
individual action, and [3] an individual intentional action of singing the national
anthem. [4]–[6] are ambiguous. There is a reading of each of [4]–[6] on which they
express merely that each member of the group picked out by ‘we’ intended to sing the
national anthem, sang it, and sang it intentionally, that is, on which each member of
the group could say truly [1]–[3]. But there is also another reading of each of [4]–[6]
which implies that what we intend, we so intend jointly, and what we did and did
intentionally, we did together and did together intentionally. The former reading of
[4]–[6] is the distributive reading, and the latter the collective reading. To take [5] as
an example, the distributive reading can be represented as in [5d].
[5d] Each of us sang the national anthem.
If [5] on its collective reading is true, then [5d] is true (in this case), but not vice versa.
To understand collective intentional behavior, we need to understand the difference
between what [1]–[3] express, on the one hand, and what [4]–[6] express, on their
collective reading, on the other. This can also be put as the problem of understanding
the difference between the distributive and collective readings of [4]–[6].
There are two main problems in the philosophy of collective action.
First, what is the ontology of collective intentional action? In particular, must we
admit the existence of irreducibly group or plural agents over and above individual
agents? A powerful argument for the existence of group agents derives from the
observation that the only difference between [1]–[3] and [4]–[6], on their collective
reading, appears to be the presence of a plural subject term in [4]–[6] in place of
the singular subject term in [1]–[3]. As the referent of the subject term in [1]–[3] is
the intender and agent of the action in the individual case, so it seems, by analogy of
form, we must accept that the referent of the subject term in [4]–[6] is the intender
and agent in the collective case. Some philosophers have embraced this conclusion
and sought to explain how we can make good sense of it (see, e.g., French 1984; Baier
1997; Stoutland 1997, 2008; Tollefsen 2002, 2006, 2015; Pettit 2003; Schmitt 2003;
Copp 2006; List and Pettit 2011).
Second, what is the psychology of collective intentional action? There are two
principal subquestions that arise here. The first subquestion is conditional. If there
are irreducibly group or plural agents, then it seems we must attribute to them
psychological states such as intention, and presumably belief and desire. How can we
make sense of this? The second subquestion arises even if we eschew collective
agents. It has to do with the difference between the intentions of individuals acting
      

alone and as members of a group. I will call the sort of intention that an individual
has in performing an action that is not (intended to be) participation in intentional
group action an I-intention. [1] expresses an I-intention, for example. Whatever is
involved in collective action, it involves among other things individuals doing things
with intentions. I will call the intention an individual has in virtue of which he counts
as participating in a group’s doing something intentionally, following (Tuomela and
Miller 1988), a we-intention. Thus, a we-intention is not an intention of a group, but
of an individual who is (or thinks of himself as) intentionally acting as a member of a
group (this is not course not an analysis of a we-intention but a way of locating the
sort of intention we are interested in). If [4] is true on its collective reading, then each
of the members of the group has a we-intention directed toward their singing the
national anthem. We need this notion even if we think there are group agents with
intentions, for even in that case the groups are constituted out of individuals, and
they must have intentions connected with their actions which contribute to what the
group does, and those intentions must in some way ground any truths that there are
about genuine group agents.5 Our second question then is: what is the difference
between I-intentions and we-intentions? This is, in my view, the central, and hardest
problem of the theory of collective action. Are we-intentions a distinctive, sui generis,
sort of intention? Do they involve (e.g., in their content) irreducible concepts
involving group intentional action? Or can we understand we-intentions in terms
of the concepts that we already deploy in understanding individual intentional
action? Finally, what has to be the case about the satisfaction of the we-intentions
of individuals who are members of a group for the group to have acted intentionally?
It will be part of the argument of this book that we can understand collective
intentional behavior, at least in the case of plural discourse about group agency,
without appeal to group agents and that we can understand the difference between
individual and collective action, on the one hand, and I-intentions and we-intentions,
on the other, on the basis of the concepts which are already in play in understanding
individual intentional behavior.

1.3 Method and Organization

The basic method of this book will be to start with an account of the logical form of
singular action sentences such as [2], and on that basis arrive at accounts of the
logical form of attributions of I-intentions as in [1] and of intentional actions as in [3]

5
Phillip Pettit (2003) has argued that there are genuine group agents on the basis of a functionalist
account of agency and the claim that certain groups of agents satisfy a functional description sufficient for
them to be agents. Pettit’s style of argument, however, makes the fact that the members of the groups are
agents engaging in intentional behavior merely contingently connected with their status as a group agent. It
could as well be that when we poison the environment together we are a genuine group agent on Pettit’s
account, though we do nothing together intentionally, in the ordinary sense. Thus, whatever else may be
said about Pettit’s argument, it is not addressing the subject of this book, which is what is involved in
groups doing things together intentionally, as that is expressed in our ordinary language about intentional
group behavior. This same function-theoretic view of group agency underlies discussion in (List and
Pettit 2011).
     

(Part I: Chapters 2–8).6 This account will be built around the classical event analysis
of singular action sentences, though there will be some modifications and extensions
which will prove important for the sequel. On the classical analysis, to put it roughly,
an utterance of a sentence such as [2] is understood as expressing that there is an
event of which I am the agent and it is a singing of the national anthem. Part I will
serve as a general introduction to the account of individual action and intention that
serves as the background for the account of collective intentional behavior developed
in Part II, and in Volume 2. Chapter 2 explains how the concepts of state and event
will be understood in the account developed in the book. Chapter 3 develops and
extends the event analysis of the logical form of singular action sentences. Chapter 4
discusses the relations between action, motivation, explanation, and intention.
Chapter 5 is an extended discussion of conditional intentions in particular, which
plays a crucial role in the sequel, and especially Volume 2. Chapter 6 presents an
account of what it is to be an agent of an event. Chapter 7 uses the materials
developed in Chapters 3–6 to give an account of the content of I-intentions, and
discusses the content of I-intentions in the light of the problem of deviant causal
chains (where one’s intention causes what one intends but not in the right way, so
that one fails to do what one intended intentionally). Chapter 8 uses the account of
singular action sentences and the content of I-intentions to provide an analysis of the
contribution of the adverb ‘intentionally’ to action sentences. This part serves as a
general introduction to the basic concepts of action theory and develops the tools that
will be employed later in the book. In Part II, the account of the logical form of
singular action sentences and the content of I-intentions will be projected to an
account of the logical form of plural action sentences, like [5], and to attributions of
intention and intentional action using plural subject terms, in light of the ambiguity
between the distributive and collective readings of plural action sentences (Chapters
9–11). A central conclusion will be that, in light of the fact that the distributive
reading requires us to treat plural referring terms in the subject position of action
sentences as introducing restricted quantifiers over members of a group, the ambi-
guity of plural action sentences between a distributive and collective reading is best
seen as resting on a scope ambiguity (with some other adjustments that have the
same source). Specifically, it is best accounted for as a matter of whether the event
quantifier introduced by the action verb takes wide or narrow scope with respect to
the quantifier associated with the plural subject term. On the distributive reading, the
idea is, roughly put, that an utterance of [5] expresses that each of us is such that
there is an event of which he is the sole agent and it is a singing of the national
anthem. Then for the collective reading, again, roughly put: there is an event such
that each of us is an agent of it and no others are and it is a singing of the national

6
I assume that the basic structures we uncover with the help of attention to the structure of English
reflect the basic structures that the language responds to in the world. While there is potential for
differences across languages, by and large one would expect the same underlying conceptual structures
for thinking about social reality to be expressed in all natural languages. We can, at any rate, describe
adequately the features of social reality in other cultures in English. This will show (if the account
developed here and in the next volume is correct) how we can understand that portion of the world
without need of a commitment to groups, how a language can mark all the distinctions that need to be
made, track all the underlying facts, without exotica like super agents, in informal or formal group agency.
Another random document with
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of men. It was as though they were back in the days of the old
Hebrew prophets when the hand of the Lord stretched out and laid
itself upon wicked men for their punishment when the measure of
their time was full.
“He tried to stand above the law in this valley,” Hollister told her. “He
wanted to stop progress—said there shouldn’t be any dam to reclaim
the Flat Tops for settlers. Merrick will rebuild it. The land will be
watered. Your ranch will be good as ever in three months. And he’ll
be buried and forgotten.”
“And poor Don Black?” she whispered. “Poor Don, who never had a
chance in this world, or, if he had one, muddled it so badly?”
He could only hope that Don had gone to a better-ordered world
where circumstances did not dominate good intentions.
Betty’s sense of tragedy lingered just now no longer than a cinema
picture. The life urge in her clamored for expression. No world could
be a sad one with her and Tug in it.
“Shall I go in and tell your father now?” the young man asked.
“Soon.” She made a rustling little motion toward him and found
herself in his arms. “Isn’t it splendid, boy? To-day’s the best ever, and
to-morrow will be better than to-day—oh, heaps better—and after
that all the years forever and ever.”
He looked into the deep lustrous eyes of his straight slim girl. What a
wife she would be! How eager and provocative, this white flame of
youth so simple and so complex! Her happiness now would be in his
hands. The responsibility awed him, filled him with a sense of
solemnity.
“Forever is a long time,” he said, smiling, and quoted a stanza of
magazine verse they had lately read together.
It began, “How far will you go with me, my love?” Close-held in his
arms, Betty answered without a moment of hesitation.
“She smiled at the stile with a sweet disdain;
She scoffed at the bridge and the great oak tree;
And looked me full in the eyes and said:
 ‘I will go to the end of the lane with thee.’”
The door of the inner room opened and Clint stood on the threshold.
“Hello!” he said, surprised.
Betty disengaged herself, blushing. “He’s decided to take me after
all, Dad,” she said demurely.
“Hmp! Has he? Kinda looks that way.” Clint gripped Hollister’s hand
till it hurt. It was the best he could do just now to show the gratitude
he felt for what this man had done.
“That’s not quite the way I put it, sir,” Tug said.
“Doesn’t matter how you put it, boy. It’ll be her say-so from now on.
Don’t I know her? Hasn’t she bossed me scandalous since she was
knee-high to a gosling?”
“Now, Dad, you’re giving me a bad name,” Betty protested, hugging
her father.
“If he ain’t man enough to stand some bossing, he’d better quit right
now before he says, ‘I do.’”
“He likes being bossed, Dad,” Betty announced, and the imps of
deviltry were kicking up their heels in her eyes. “Don’t you, Tug?”
Hollister looked at the girl and smiled. “I’ll say I do,” he admitted.
THE END
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KINDRED OF THE DUST
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THE VALLEY OF THE GIANTS
The fight of the Cardigans, father and son, to hold the
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CAPPY RICKS
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WEBSTER: MAN’S MAN
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CAPTAIN SCRAGGS
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DESERT VALLEY
A college professor sets out with his daughter to find gold.
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MAN TO MAN
Encircled with enemies, distrusted, Steve defends his
rights. How he won his game and the girl he loved is the
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THE BELLS OF SAN JUAN
Dr. Virginia Page is forced to go with the sheriff on a night
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JUDITH OF BLUE LAKE RANCH
Judith Sanford part owner of a cattle ranch realizes she is
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THE SHORT CUT
Wayne is suspected of killing his brother after a violent
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 beautiful Wanda, all go to make up a thrilling romance.
THE JOYOUS TROUBLE MAKER
A reporter sets up housekeeping close to Beatrice’s
Ranch much to her chagrin. There is “another man” who
complicates matters, but all turns out as it should in this
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SIX FEET FOUR
Beatrice Waverly is robbed of $5,000 and suspicion
fastens upon Buck Thornton, but she soon realizes he is
not guilty. Intensely exciting, here is a real story of the
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WOLF BREED
No Luck Drennan had grown hard through loss of faith in
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THE BONDBOY
Joe Newbolt, bound out by force of family conditions to
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cannot, as a gentleman, utter the words that would clear
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CLAIM NUMBER ONE
Dr. Warren Slavens drew claim number one, which entitled
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ownership he had a hard battle with crooks and politicians.
THE DUKE OF CHIMNEY BUTTE
When Jerry Lambert, “the Duke,” attempts to safeguard
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THE LAND OF LAST CHANCE
Jim Timberlake and Capt. David Scott waited with restless
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TRAIL’S END
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Morgan was not concerned with its wickedness until Seth
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 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
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