Quite a few influential accounts of group agency (Searle, 1992; List and Pettit, 2011; Tuomela, 2013; Bratman, 2014; Gilbert, 2014) share the view that agency can only be attributed to real individual subjects, while groups can only metaphorically be considered as agents, because only individuals have the capability to really act. This view relies on an unproblematizing conception of the individual subject as a singular, self-identical, and continuous entity among other such entities of various kinds. On the other hand, it is customary to think of meanings as shared, supraindividual items that do not paradigmatically exist solely in the consciousness of one individual, but appear in their interaction. This leaves the semiotic aspect of any kind of action with a curious structural hiatus; on the one hand, the action belongs to the individual, on the other, however, any meaning that is involved in it does not. The goal of the present chapter is to have a closer look at this conceptual knot.

Let me state at the outset that I do not believe the problem can be efficiently solved in the framework of the received view of what agency is, nor in the terms of the object-centered ontology on which this view relies. The standard account of agency could be summarized as something like this: an individual mind regularly entertains a variety of identifiable mental states, such as beliefs, thoughts, ideas, and intents. In interaction with its environment, it is capable of forming particular intents to carry out particular actions. When circumstances allow, the individual whose mind it is will undertake the said action as a result of the intent that has been formed (Schlosser, 2019). Mental states behave in this scheme as distinct “things” of their own right: they can be entertained and formed by different people at different times and still be, for all purposes, identical to themselves. The mind, in turn, is seen ambiguously as both the master entity that “has” these states and the container that “holds” them. In sum, this standard account treats the whole domain where events take place as an empty space populated with different kinds of “things,” some agentic, others not, some abstract (such as mental states), others not.