Shared Agency and Motor Representation

Abstract

Shared agency is paradigmatically involved when two or more people paint a house together, tidy the toys away together, or lift a two-handled basket together. To characterise shared agency, some philosophers have appealed to a special kind of intention or structure of intention, knowledge or commitment often called `shared intention’. In this paper we argue that there are forms of shared agency characterising which requires appeal to motor representation. Shared agency is not only a matter of what we intend: sometimes it constitutively involves interlocking structures of motor representation. This may have consequences for some metaphysical, normative and phenomenological questions about shared agency.