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.