Practical Organization, Planning, and the Core Capacity Conjecture

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.

Speaker: Michael Bratman, Stanford University

Room 126