SSP Forum: Michael Bratman on Practical Organization

The
Symbolic Systems Forum
presents

Practical Organization, Planning, and the Core Capacity Conjecture

Michael Bratman
Philosophy Department

Tuesday, April 25, 2023
4:30-5:20 pm
Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg. 460), Room 126

ABSTRACT:

Our human lives involve remarkable forms of practical organization: diachronic organization of individual activity; small-scale organization of shared action; and the organization of institutions. A theory of human action should help us understand these multiple forms of human practical organization and their inter-relations. I argue that a key is our capacity for planning agency. Drawing on earlier work on the roles of planning agency in the cross-temporal and small-scale social organization of our agency, I turn to the role of our planning agency in the structure of organized institutions. I draw on ideas from H.L.A. Hart that our organized institutions are rule-guided, and that to understand this we need a theory of social rules. I draw on the planning theory of shared intention to understand social rules. I understand an organized institution as involving authority-according social rules of procedure in a way that makes room for pluralistic divergence. This leads to a model of institutional intention and institutional intentional agency. And it supports the conjecture that our capacity for planning agency is a core capacity that underlies not only string quartets and informal social rules but also, thereby, the rule-guided structure of organized institutions.

BIO:

Michael E. Bratman is U. G. and Abbie Birch Durfee Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University.  His main research interests are in the philosophy of action, where this includes issues about both individual and social agency and about practical rationality. His main book publications are Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (1987); Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency (1999); Structures of Agency:  Essays (2007); Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together (2014); Planning, Time, and Self-Governance: Essays in Practical Rationality (2018); and most recently, Shared and Institutional Agency: Toward a Planning Theory of Human Practical Organization (2022).

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