Randall Harp

Associate Professor of Philosophy

The University of Vermont

Biography

I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Vermont. My main research interests are in the philosophy of action (particularly collective action, free will, and decision theory) and in the philosophy of social science. My research engages with questions of the proper way to characterize individual versus collective goals, and of the proper way for a model of deliberation to incorporate these goals such that we can account for collective action. I am also interested in the explanatory powers of collective entities (including questions of how much reduction can be had of those collective entities, and of the form that the reduction takes). My other research interests include the explanatory adequacy of rational choice models of human agency, and of the nature of explanation in the behavioral sciences.

Interests

Philosophy of Action
Philosophy of Social and Behavioral Science

Education

PhD in Philosophy and Humanities, 2009

Stanford University
BA in Philosophy and Music, 1999

Columbia University

Selected Publications

Collective Action and Rational Choice Explanations

In order for traditional rational choice theory to explain the production of collective action, it must be able to distinguish between two behaviorally identical possibilities: one, that all of the agents in a group are each performing behaviors in pursuit of a set of individual actions; and two, that all of those agents are performing those behaviors in pursuit of a collective action. I argue that RCT does not have the resources necessary to distinguish between these two possibilities. RCT could distinguish between these possibilities if it were able to account for commitments. I argue that successful rational choice explanations of collective action appeal to commitments, and distinguish this way of explaining collective action from a general class of explanations called plural subject theories.

Randall Harp

Journal of Philosophical Research,2017

Preprint