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Putting Plural Self-Awareness into Practice: The Phenomenology of Expert Musicianship

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Abstract

Based on a qualitative study about expert musicianship, this paper distinguishes three ways of interacting by putting them in relation to the sense of agency. Following Pacherie (Phenomenology the Cognitive Sciences 13:25–46, 2014), it highlights that the phenomenology of shared agency undergoes a drastic transformation when musicians establish a sense of we-agency. In particular, the musicians conceive of the performance as one single action towards which they experience an epistemic privileged access. The implications of these results for a theory of collective intentionality are discussed by addressing two general questions: When several individuals share an intention, does this fact secure plural self-knowledge? And is it possible to have non-observational knowledge about a collective action? It is claimed that the results drawn from the study about expert musicianship supports negative answers to both questions.

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Notes

  1. The concept and label of “pre-reflective self-awareness” are of phenomenological provenance (cf. Zahavi 1999, 2005), but in this paper we are forced to leave significance and implications of the phenomenological concept for the topic at issue out of consideration.

  2. Some authors contend that an agent can have unconscious intentions as well as perhaps false beliefs about having (and maybe even acting upon) certain intentions (cf. Pacherie 2001; Bratman 2009), but we can bracket these complications for the purposes of this article.

  3. When we henceforth speak of “knowledge from within” or “knowing from within,” we refer to the non-observational knowledge the agent has about what she is doing.

  4. Another relevant issue—the treatment of which would exceed the scope of this paper - hinges on the relation between these two states of knowledge: some believe that the relation is inferential, cf. Paul (2009); while other deny this, cf. Setiya (2011).

  5. One can certainly find accounts of collective intentions in the literature that either do not conceptually require anything like PPSA (because they attempt to explain collective intentions without recurring to any notion of a plural subject, cf. Bratman (2014) or that simply do not operate with PPSA (because they employ other notions as explanans of collective intentionality, e.g., the we-mode—cf. Tuomela 2007). In addition, it may also be that PPSA itself comes in many forms: recently, Schmitz argued that there are forms of collective self-awareness in joint attention, perception and action, which are “below the level of rationality and reasoning and do not involve reasons and obligations.” (Schmitz 2016). The target of this article, however, is only the idea that PPSA is foundational for collective intentions. We are thankful to two anonymous reviewers for pushing us on this point.

  6. Schmid remarks that the four features of self-identification, self-commitment, self-authorization and self-validation works in PPSA differently than in PSA (cf. Schmid 2016). Still, he maintains that these two forms of awareness are species of the same genus or kind.

  7. For another approach to joint action inspired by Anscombe, but which does not appeal to the idea of PPSA, cf. Laurence (2011).

  8. And we are not alone, cf. Blomberg (2017) (forthcoming).

  9. Those, who emphasize the role of self-knowledge for practical knowledge, can well agree on the supporting, maintaining and perhaps even enabling role of perception and of other cognitive processes for intentional agency, but they would still deny that these processes justify or provide a reason for the agent’s belief of what she is doing (cf. Falvey 2000).

  10. To avoid confusion between the violinist and the cellist, we shall henceforth name the former, Frederik Ø.

  11. See: http://danishquartet.com/.

  12. Only the current cellist joined later in 2008.

  13. We have stated that motor-resonance is unconscious, but this claim can (and possibly should) be relaxed: although entrainment can occur without consciousness, such as when rocking chairs synchronize, and although implicit motor simulation is characterized as the activation of a sub-conscious brain-system, a minimal form of consciousness might accompany entrainment and motor-resonance. The point here, however, is that even if there is some subtle and vague form of pre-reflective consciousness at play in entrainment and motor-resonance, in the aforementioned DSQ case, it certainly does not penetrate into an awareness that consciously guides the joint performance. We are thankful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

  14. This term is taken from Behnke (2008).

  15. See He and Ravn (forthcoming) for an example from dance on the sense of shared intentionality in a joint project.

  16. It might even be that what Rune describes is an experience of a form of synesthesia between hearing and tactile perception.

  17. But it should not go unmentioned that, within empirical literature, there is some disagreement on the impact of others on peripersonal space (cf. Holmes et al. 2004, 2007).

  18. Importantly, as indicated by Fredrik, the change in the sense of agency is not merely from an “I” to a “we”. It is also a change from an “I do” to a “this happens to us”. You experience the music as an agential system whose “will” you must subject yourself to in order to deliver an authentic performance. It is of great interest, but beyond the scope of the paper, to flesh out the way in which some sense of agency is relinquished to the music, while another form of agency, experienced as “trust” or “freedom” is enhanced. Preliminarily this would support Salmela and Nagatsu’s point that individual agency and we-agency are not opposed but complimentary (2016).

  19. This is in line with the phenomenon of “boundary loss” in joint action described by Pacherie (Pacherie 2014, p. 40). Note, however, that one of the conditions Pacherie mentions for the emergence of this phenomenon, i.e., the similarity of the actions performed (her example is a military march) is not equally fulfilled in the DSQ’s case – here, the musicians’ actions are similar only on a coarse-grained scale.

  20. To reinforce our point, we believe that there is a clear difference between the notion of highly synchronized or coordinated actions and the idea of a joint or collective action (cf. Sánchez Guerrero 2016, p. 80 f) and we take the view for granted that the latter idea is to be explained by referring to shared intentions. Our argument only targets the view that there is a sense of sharing an intention which displays PPSA.

  21. Obviously, this does not mean that the musicians are ‘mistaken’ in any sense. Quite the contrary, it just means that a novel aspect has emerged within the interaction.

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Acknowledgements

Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at the “Whole Day Seminar” (Center for Subjectivity Research, Copenhagen, December 2015) and at the “Body Of Knowledge” conference (Los Angeles, December 2016), where we received much appreciated feedback. We are also very thankful to Olle Blomberg and Glenda Satne who have read and commented on the manuscript. The paper also profited from discussions had with Lilian O’Brien. Finally, our gratitude goes to two anonymous reviewers, who have helped us improve the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Alessandro Salice

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Simon Høffding

  3. Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, Memphis, USA

    Shaun Gallagher

  4. Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia

    Shaun Gallagher

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  1. Alessandro Salice
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  2. Simon Høffding
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  3. Shaun Gallagher
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Correspondence to Alessandro Salice.

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Salice, A., Høffding, S. & Gallagher, S. Putting Plural Self-Awareness into Practice: The Phenomenology of Expert Musicianship. Topoi 38, 197–209 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9451-2

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