Abstract
Enactivists claim that social cognition is constituted by interactive processes and even more radically that there is ‘no observation without interaction’. Nevertheless, the notion of interaction at the core of the account has not yet being characterized in a way that makes good the claim that interactions actually constitute social understanding rather than merely facilitating or causally contributing to it. This paper seeks to complement the enactivist approach by offering an account of basic joint action that involves and brings with it basic forms of mental understanding. The paper turns to theories of joint action rather than theories of perception as some enactivists have done (cfr. Gallagher in Conscious Cognit 17(2):535–543, 2008; Thompson in J Conscious Stud 8(5–7):1–32, 2001), to gain insight into the kind of interactions that underpin our understanding of other minds, and in that way, supplement the interactionist-enactive account. In line with Enactivism, the paper argues that this kind of social understanding is practical rather than theoretical and that it is cognitively more basic and developmentally prior when compared to other ways we come to understand other minds.
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Notes
I am referring here to the Interactionist Theory as developed by Gallagher (2001) according to which Primary and Secondary Intersubjectivity (Trevarthen and Hubley 1978; Trevarthen 1979) set the stage for the development of folk psychological understanding of oneself and others, an understanding that depends on exposure to narratives and the ability to elaborate them oneself (Gallagher and Hutto 2008). More on this in Sect. 3.
While the authors claim that empirical results ‘imply’ a shift to interaction rather than observation, at best those results suggest that interaction plays a key role in social cognition. As it is argued below the key question is how to substantiate the claim that interaction actually constitutes cognition rather than facilitate it.
A third approach is the radical enactive view or REC for short (Hutto and Myin 2013, 2017). This approach emphasizes interaction rather than perception in accounting for basic social cognition. Basic social cognition in this view is a matter of “sensitively and appropriately responding to each action-relevant, world-directed intentional attitudes without making any attributions and in wholly non-contentful ways” (Hutto 2017, p. 838). Basic interaction in this view is a matter of ‘being set up to be set off’ by others' actions and reactions. While, as we will see, the account of basic joint action [BJA] to be developed in this paper is friendly to this approach, and follows it in characterizing practical understanding in terms of goal-tracking and monitoring, it differs from it by adding an extra layer of complexity: the sharing of goals. The account provided by REC constitutes a platform and a prerequisite for the form of interaction that this paper puts forward as a key building block of mental understanding but the latter involves a form of jointness grounded in the sharing of goals that the former does not imply or presuppose. This last is key to meet the second aspect of the challenge, i.e. the applicability of mental understanding both to oneself and others.
The reason is that most accounts of joint action are not suited for the task. Only a few of them are in the business of explaining early forms of interaction (Butterfill 2012; Pacherie 2013; Tomasello 2014), but all of these are committed to different versions of the mindreading/observational account.
I talk of ‘goals’—shared or individual—rather than individual or shared ‘intentions’. Parlance of intentions is usually associated with cognitivist accounts of intentional action according to which intentions represent the outcomes and/or the subject of the action. To avoid a cognitivist understanding of intentional action that is at odds with enactivist accounts of intentional action, I talk of ‘goals’ rather than ‘intentions’, and of ‘enacted goals’ when intentions are ‘in action’ (see below).
I use (*) to convey that the expression makes successful reference to a form of experience of a subject from a first person perspective, something that is reasonably called a ‘self’.
This argument lines up with those offered by advocates of subject-accounts of collective intentionality (e.g. Gilbert 2013; Toumela 2013; Schmid 2014, see Schweikard and Schmid 2013, p. 3.3. Subject). They claim that a goal is shared by a collection of individuals when they are part of a group or a we-subject. Although the views grouped here are quite different from each other, they share the central idea that a goal is collectively shared when it is that of a first-person plural subject. This plural subject is usually characterized as a ‘pool of wills’ and not as a metaphysical entity that exists over and above the individuals (see e.g. Gilbert 2013).
Joint actions involve plural subjects but not mental contents in the we-mode on the part of the individuals (as originally presented by Searle 1990). Those contents the enactivist claims are not necessary nor sufficient for engaging in joint intentional activities (see e.g. Hutto and Myin 2013; Hutto and Satne 2015), see more on this below.
This form of joint action is to be contrasted to Butterfill’s account of joint actions in which distributive goals are shared (see Butterfill 2013, p. 849).
This is the line of argument that Overgaard and Michael (2015) use to criticize the idea that social understanding is constituted by interaction rather than by observation. This argument might fail if considerations about the nature of joint action make it the case that social interaction in general can be thought to be informed by practical reasons or social norms rather than observation and inference. I would not pursue this more ambitious argument in this paper. In this context, it is enough to show that this is actually not a plausible explanation for the basic case.
I would like to thank a reviewer for pointing me to these cases as potential counter-examples.
I would like to thank a reviewer for pressing this point.
Might Overgaard and Michael’s (2015) criticism that it is observation rather that interaction that carries the weight in social cognition apply to the account offered here, given the important role that the view grants to perception in basic social cognition? The fact that both interaction and perception play a role in this form of understanding is not a problem for the thesis that interaction constitutes social cognition if what explains social cognition in these cases, i.e. understanding of others as minded, as persons, is the sharing of a goal and not perception by itself.
These capacities are to be understood along the lines of REC (see above footnotes 3 and 10).
This is as far as REC gets in characterizing non-representational forms of social cognition. It falls short of meeting the generality requirement, a condition key to any account of social cognition that is thought to apply to minded creatures.
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Acknowledgements
A precursor of this paper was first presented in 2013 at the Institute of Philosophy, London. Since then I have presented related materials in meetings in Lisbon, Memphis, Warwick, Wollongong as well as at the 2017 ESSP Conference at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. I am grateful to the audiences at those events for their feedback as well as to Olle Blomberg, Bernardo Ainbinder and Soren Overgaard for useful comments on previous drafts.
Funding
Funding was provided by a VC Post doctoral Fellowship granted by the University of Wollongong, Australia, and a Research Grant from the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico, Fondecyt, Chile (Nr.1161667).
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Satne, G. Understanding others by doing things together: an enactive account. Synthese 198 (Suppl 1), 507–528 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02692-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02692-2