Sociomaterial Agency Beyond Group Agency

The debate on collective/group/shared agency and intentionality within the philosophy of action is long-running and multifaceted. A central concern has been the relation between collective and individual intention/agency, and whether the former is in any sense reducible to the latter. In this paper, we add another facet to this discussion, by considering that, in discussions of collective intentionality and agency, the collectives in question have generally been assumed to contain only human beings. The claim we want to advance is that an account of collective agency, especially one that can be applied to the kind of technologically dense societies we live in, cannot just focus on groups solely composed by humans.We will introduce the notion of sociomaterial agency, borrowed from disciplines outside philosophy, which can be attributed to hybrid collectives formed both by humans and artificial entities. We will then consider how theories of collective intentionality can make room for sociomaterial agency and intentionality, and we sketch an account in the spirit of Lewisian interpretationism. This will be a broadly functionalist way of understanding the ascription of intentionality and agency to hybrid collectives. We will then show how to operationalise this account through the use of social choice and judgment aggregation theories.