Joint action without and beyond planning
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Date
02/07/2013Author
Blomberg, Karl Johan Olof
Blomberg, Olle
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Abstract
Leading philosophical accounts of joint activity, such as Michael Bratman’s account
of ‘shared intentional activity’, take joint activity to be the outcome of two or more
agents having a ‘shared intention’, where this is a certain pattern of mutually known
prior intentions (plans) that are directed toward a common goal. With Bratman’s
account as a foil, I address two lacunas that are relatively unexplored in the
philosophical literature. The first lacuna concerns how to make sense of the
apparently joint cooperative activities of agents that lack the capacities for planning
and “mindreading” that one must have in order to be a party to a shared intention
(consider, for example, the social play of young children or the cooperative hunting
of non-human primates or social carnivores). The second lacuna concerns how
participants (including adult human agents) are able to coordinate their actions
“online”—that is, during action execution as a joint activity unfolds—without
recourse to plans that specify in advance what they should do (consider the
coordination involved when two friends meet and do a “high five”). Chapters 2 and 3
focus on the first lacuna, while chapters 4 and 5 focus on the second.
In chapter 2, I focus on why participants must have mutual or common knowledge of
each other’s intentions and beliefs in order to have a shared intention: Why must
these attitudes be “out in the open”? I argue that, if participants lack the concept of
belief, then one of the two main motivations for the common knowledge
requirement—to filter out certain cases that intuitively aren’t cases of genuine joint
activity—actually dissipates. Furthermore, a kind of “openness” that only requires of
participants that they have the concept of goal but not that of belief can satisfy the
other main motivation, to make sense of the idea that joint activities are non-accidentally
coordinated. In chapter 3, I offer an account of a kind of joint activity in
which agents such as young children and some non-human primates could
participate, given what we know about their socio-cognitive capacities.
In chapter 4, I argue that ‘shared intention’-accounts are unable to say much about
spontaneous or skilful joint action because of the following widely accepted
constraint on what one can intend: while an agent might intend—in the sense of commit to a plan—that “we” do something together, an agent cannot intend to
perform “our” joint action. I reject this constraint and argue that some joint actions
(such as a joint manoeuvre performed by two figure skaters) are joint in virtue of
each participant having what I call ‘socially extended intention-in-action’ that
overlap. In chapter 5, I review empirical work on subpersonal enabling mechanisms
for the coordination of joint action. The review provides clues to what it is that
enables participants to successfully coordinate their actions in the absence of plan-like
intentions or beyond what such intentions specify.
While what I address are lacunas rather than problems, an upshot of this thesis is that
leading philosophical accounts of joint activity may have less explanatory scope than
one might otherwise be led to believe. The accounts of joint activity and joint action
that are presented in this thesis are arguably applicable to many of the joint activities
and joint actions of adult human beings. The account also helps us avoid the false
dichotomy between a very robust form of joint activity and a mere concatenation of
purely individualistic actions—a dichotomy that accounts such as Bratman’s
arguably invite us to adopt.