Plural Agents Export

@article{citeulike:526158, abstract = {Genuine agents are able to engage in activity because they nd it worth pursuing  because they care about it. In this respect, they dier from what might be called mere intentional systems: systems like chess playing computers that exhibit merely goaldirected behavior mediated by instrumental rationality, without caring. A parallel distinction can be made in the domain of social activity: plural agents must be distinguished from plural intentional systems in that plural agents have cares and engage in activity because of those cares. In this paper, I sketch an account of what it is for an individual to care about things in terms of her exhibiting a certain pattern of emotions. After extending this account to make sense of an individual's caring about other agents, I then provide an account of how a certain sort of emotional connectedness among a group of people can make intelligible the group's having cares and thereby constitute that group as a plural agent. Alternative accounts of social action, by ignoring the dierence between mere intentional systems and genuine agents, and so by leaving out these emotional entanglements from their accounts of social action, thereby fail to capture a whole range of social phenomena involving plural agents.}, author = {Helm, Bennett W.}, citeulike-article-id = {526158}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://server1.fandm.edu/departments/Philosophy/staticpages/Helm/Helm-Plural_Agents.pdf}, keywords = {agents, sociology}, posted-at = {2006-03-02 04:34:29}, priority = {2}, title = {Plural Agents}, url = {http://server1.fandm.edu/departments/Philosophy/staticpages/Helm/Helm-Plural_Agents.pdf} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:526158 L3 - citeulike-article-id:526158 N2 - Genuine agents are able to engage in activity because they nd it worth pursuing  because they care about it. In this respect, they dier from what might be called mere intentional systems: systems like chess playing computers that exhibit merely goaldirected behavior mediated by instrumental rationality, without caring. A parallel distinction can be made in the domain of social activity: plural agents must be distinguished from plural intentional systems in that plural agents have cares and engage in activity because of those cares. In this paper, I sketch an account of what it is for an individual to care about things in terms of her exhibiting a certain pattern of emotions. After extending this account to make sense of an individual’s caring about other agents, I then provide an account of how a certain sort of emotional connectedness among a group of people can make intelligible the group’s having cares and thereby constitute that group as a plural agent. Alternative accounts of social action, by ignoring the dierence between mere intentional systems and genuine agents, and so by leaving out these emotional entanglements from their accounts of social action, thereby fail to capture a whole range of social phenomena involving plural agents. TI - Plural Agents KW - agents KW - sociology AU - Helm, Bennett UR - http://server1.fandm.edu/departments/Philosophy/staticpages/Helm/Helm-Plural_Agents.pdf ER -