Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states, arguing that it can be understood exhaustively in terms of the agency of individuals and concepts constructed out of materials that are already at play in our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism. The book provides a new account of the logical form of grammatically singular group action sentences (e.g. 'Company laid off 10,000 workers'), and features new analyses of the concepts of a constitutive rule, status function, status role, collective acceptance, and proxy agency. He also provides an analysis of the structure of corporate action, including the status of corporations as legal persons, and of the nature of state action in relation to its citizens. This is the companion volume to From Individual to Plural Agency (OUP 2016), extending the multiple-agents account of collective action set out in the earlier volume.

1. Introduction2. Plural Agency3. Singular Group Agents4. The Distributive/Collective Ambiguity in Singular Group Action Sentences5. The Apparent Autonomy of Singular Group Agents6. Essentially Intentional Action Types7. Constitutive Rules and Agency8. Status Functions as Agentive Functions9. Status Functions and Conventions10. Kinds of Status Functions11. Group Membership12. Declarations and Status Functions13. The Division of Labor and Proxy Agency14. Corporations15. Nation States16. Summary and Conclusion

Kirk Ludwig is a Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. He taught at the University of Florida from 1990 to 2010 and was the Colonel Alan R. and Margaret G. Crow CLAS Term Professor from 2008 to 2010, when he joined Indiana University, Bloomington. He works primarily in the Philosophy of Mind and Action, Philosophy of Language, and Epistemology. He is the editor of Donald Davidson (CUP, 2003), co-author with Ernie Lepore of Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality (OUP, 2005) and Donald Davidson's Truth-theoretic Semantics (OUP, 2007), and co-editor with Ernie Lepore of Companion to Donald Davidson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).