On the Ontology of Massively Planned Social Action
- Cognitive Science Colloquium
- Wednesday, March 20. 2013, 14:00 – 16:00
On the Ontology of Massively Planned Social Action
Philosophers who study the phenomena of social agency have tended to base their theories on small-scale actions involving individuals who share common goals. In his “Massively Shared Agency” [1] the legal theorist Scott Shapiro shows how authorities are needed to bring about the meshing of shared plans of large numbers of individuals over time. Shapiro conceives the need for the meshing of plans as one important element in an understanding of the nature of law. Drawing our examples from musical performance, urban design, and organized warfare, we shall build on Shapiro’s ideas to explore the role of documents as vehicles, not merely for the communication of plans across different levels in an organizational hierarchy, but also for the correction and enhancement of such plans over time [2].
[1] http://www.lex.unict.it/tcrs/numero/2012/Shapiro.pdf
[2] http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/HowToDoThingsWithDocuments.pdf
