Abstract
One of the best known approaches to the logic of agency are the ‘stit’ (‘seeing to it that’) logics. Often, it is not the actions of an individual agent that bring about a certain outcome but the joint actions of a set of agents, collectively. Collective agency has received comparatively little attention in ‘stit’. The paper maps out several different forms, several different senses in which a particular set of agents, collectively, can be said to bring about a certain outcome, and examines how these forms can be expressed in ‘stit’ and stit-like logics. The outcome that is brought about may be unintentional, and perhaps even accidental; the account deliberately ignores aspects such as joint intention, communication between agents, awareness of other agents’ intentions and capabilities, even the awareness of another agent’s existence. The aim is to investigate what can be said about collective agency when all such considerations are ignored, besides mere consequences of joint actions. The account will be related to the ‘strictly stit’ of Belnap and Perloff (Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 9(1–2), 25–48 1993) and their suggestions concerning ‘inessential members’ and ‘mere bystanders’. We will adjust some of those conjectures and distinguish further between ‘potentially contributing bystanders’ and ‘impotent bystanders’.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Balbiani, P., Herzig, A., & Troquard, N. (2008). Alternative axiomatics and complexity of deliberative stit theories. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 37(4), 387–406.
Belnap, N., & Perloff, M. (1988). Seeing to it that: A canonical form for agentives. Theoria, 54, 175–199. Corrected version in: H.E. Kyburg Jr., R.P. Loui, G.N. Carlson (eds.) Knowledge Representation and Defeasible Reasoning, Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol. 5, pp. 167–190. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer (1990).
Belnap, N., & Perloff, M. (1992). The way of the agent. Studia Logica, 51, 463–484.
Belnap, N., & Perloff, M. (1993). In the realm of agents. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 9(1–2), 25–48.
Belnap, N., Perloff, M., & Xu, M. (2001). Facing the future: Agents and choices in our indeterminist world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boudou, J., & Lorini, E. (2018). Concurrent game structures for temporal STIT logic. In Dastani, M., Sukthankar, G., André, E., & Koenig, S. (Eds.) Proceedings 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2018), Stockholm (381–389). ACM Press.
Broersen, J. (2011). Deontic epistemic stit logic distinguishing modes of mens rea. Journal of Applied Logic, 9(2), 127–152.
Broersen, J., Herzig, A., & Troquard, N. (2006). Embedding ATL in strategic STIT logic of agency. Journal of Logic and Computation, 16 (5), 559–578.
Broersen, J., Herzig, A., & Troquard, N. (2006). From Coalition Logic to STIT. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 157, 23–35.
Broersen, J., Herzig, A., & Troquard, N. (2009). What groups do, can do, and know they can do: an analysis in normal modal logics. Journal of Applied Non-classical Logics, 19(3), 261–291.
Carmo, J. (2010). Collective agency, direct action and dynamic operators. Logic Journal of IGPL, 18(1), 66–98.
Ciuni, R., & Lorini, E. (2018). Comparing semantics for temporal STIT logic. Logique et Analyse, 61(243), 299–339.
Demolombe, R. (2012). Causality in the context of multiple agents. In Ågotnes, T., Broersen, J.M., & Elgesem, D. (Eds.) Proceedings 11th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science (DEON 2012), Bergen (pp. 1–15). LNAI 7393, Bergen: Springer.
Fagin, R., Halpern, J. Y., Moses, Y., & Vardi, M. Y. (1995). Reasoning about knowledge. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Herzig, A., & Schwarzentruber, F. (2008). Properties of logics of individual and group agency. In Areces, C., & Goldblatt, R. (Eds.) Advances in modal logic, (Vol. 7 pp. 133–149). London: College Publications.
Horty, J. F. (2001). Agency and deontic logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horty, J. F., & Belnap, N. (1995). The deliberative stit: a study of action, omission, ability, and obligation. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 24(6), 583–644.
Lorini, E. (2013). Temporal STIT logic and its application to normative reasoning. Journal of Applied Non-classical Logics, 23(4), 372–399.
Pauly, M. (2002). A modal logic for coalitional power in games. Journal of Logic and Computation, 12, 146–166.
Pörn, I. (1977). Action theory and social science: Some formal models. Synthese Library No 120, Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Sergot, M. (2008). Action and agency in norm-governed multi-agent systems. In Artikis, A., O’Hare, G., Stathis, K., & Vouros, G. (Eds.) Engineering Societies in the Agents World VIII, Athens, October 2007, Revised Selected Papers, LNCS 4995, pp. 1–54. Berlin: Springer.
Sergot, M. (2014). Some examples formulated in a ‘seeing to it that’ logic: Illustrations, observations, problems. In Müller, T. (Ed.) Nuel Belnap on Indeterminism and Free Action, pp. 223–256. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, Vol. 2. Berlin: Springer Open.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Sergot, M. Some Forms of Collectively Bringing About or ‘Seeing to it that’. J Philos Logic 50, 249–283 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-020-09554-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-020-09554-9