Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems

This volume brings together approaches from philosophy, engineering, computer science and AI. The aim of this introductory article is to provide a conceptual framework in order to facilitate the dialogue between the different approaches and to situate the contributions to this volume with respect to it. The first step is to carefully distinguish different types of agents and their capacities. Then the different kinds of collective agency and cooperation in natural and artificial systems will be investigated. Of particular interest is the point at which a group of agents starts to engage in some form of collective agency. As will become apparent, different kinds of collective agency involve agents with different kinds of capacities. Finally, the relevance of the proposed framework for practice and research will be discussed with a focus on social simulations. It will be suggested that the operationalization and modeling of social simulations can be improved with the help of philosophical approaches, whereas philosophical hypotheses about cooperation and collective agency might be tested with the help of social simulations.