We propose a view of identity beyond the individual in what we call interpersonal interidentities (IIIs). Within this approach, IIIs comprise collections of entangled stabilities that emerge in recurrent social interaction and manifest for those who instantiate them as relatively invariant though ever-evolving patterns of being (or more accurately, becoming) together. Herein, we consider the processes responsible for the emergence of these IIIs from the perspective of an enactive cognitive science. Our proposal hinges primarily on the development of two related (...) notions: enhabiting and coenhabiting. First, we introduce the notion of enhabiting, a set of processes at the individual level whereby structural interdependencies stabilise and thereafter undergird the habits, networks of habits, and personal identities through which we make sense of our experience. Articulating this position we lean on the notion of a tendency towards an optimal grip, though offering it a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realise relatively stable autonomous personal identities with their own norms of self-regulation. We then extend many of the notions found applicable here to an account of social coenhabiting, in particular, we introduce the notion of tending towards a co-optimal grip as central to the development of social habits, networks of habits, and ultimately IIIs. Such structures, we propose, also emerge as autonomous structures with their own norms of self-regulation. We wind down our account with some reflections on the implications of these structures outside of the interactions wherein they come into being and offer some thoughts about the complex animations of the individual embodied subjects that instantiate them. (shrink)

A phenomenological insight in the debate on empathy is that it is possible to directly perceive other people’s emotions in their expressive bodily behaviour. Contrary to what is suggested by many phenomenologists, namely that this perceptual skill is immediately available if one has vision, this paper argues that the perceptual skill for empathy is acquired. Such a skill requires that we have undergone certain emotional experiences ourselves and that we have had the experience of seeing the world differently, which is (...) a form of pretence. By investigating how we retain knowledge of what is real while pretending, that is, how we anchor the experience of pretence in something that is not pretended, the paper argues that we split our experiential perspective into a double perspective, which differs from the cognitive act of understanding what a perspective is. With this notion in hand, we can return to the debate on empathy. It is argued that in order to have the capacity for direct empathic perception, one must have undergone experiences involving a double perspective. (shrink)

Human beings, even very young infants, and members of several other species, exhibit remarkable capacities for attending to and engaging with others. These basic capacities have been the subject of intense research in developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, comparative psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind over the last several decades. Appropriately characterizing the exact level and nature of these abilities and what lies at their basis continues to prove a tricky business. The contributions to this special issue investigate whether and to (...) what extent the exercise of such capacities count as, or are best explained by, a genuine understanding of minds, where such understanding depends on the creatures in question possessing capacities for attributing a range of mental states and their contents in systematic ways. The question that takes center stage is: Do the capacities for attending to and engaging with others in question involve mindreading or is this achieved by other means? In this editorial we will review the state of the debate between mindreading and alternative accounts of social cognition. The issue is organized as follows: the first two papers review the experimental literature on mindreading in primates (Bermúdez) and children (Low & Wang), and the kinds of arguments made for mindreading and alternative accounts of social cognition. The next set of papers (Hedger & Fabricius, Lurz & Krachun, Zawidzki, and de Bruin et al.) further critique the existing experimental data and defend various mindreading and non-mindreading accounts. The final set of papers address further issues raised by phenomenological (Jacob, Zahavi), enactive (Michael), and embodied (Spaulding) accounts of social cognition. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that recent research on episodic memory supports a limited defense of the phenomena that Daniel Wegner has termed transactive memory. Building on psychological and neurological research, targeting both individual and shared memory, I argue that individuals can collaboratively work to construct shared episodic memories. In some cases, this yields memories that are distributed across multiple individuals instead of being housed in individual brains.

In a recent paper, Kyselo argues that an enactive approach to selfhood can overcome ‘the body-social problem’: “the question for philosophy of cognitive science about how bodily and social aspects figure in the individuation of the human individual self” ). Kyselo’s claim is that we should conceive of the human self as a socially enacted phenomenon that is bodily mediated. Whilst there is much to be praised about this claim, I will demonstrate in this paper that such a conception of (...) self ultimately leads to a strained interpretation of how bodily and social processes are related. To this end, I will begin the paper by elucidating the body-social problem as it appears in modern cognitive science and then expounding Kyselo’s solution, which relies on a novel interpretation of Jonas’s concept of needful freedom. In response to this solution, I will highlight two problems which Kyselo’s account cannot overcome in its current state. I will argue that a more satisfactory solution to the body-social problem involves a re-conception of the human body as irrevocably socially constituted and the human social world as irrevocably bodily constituted. On this view, even the most minimal sense of selfhood cannot privilege either bodily or social processes; instead, the two are ontologically entwined such that humans are biosocial selves. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Kyselo argues that an enactive approach to selfhood can overcome ‘the body-social problem’: “the question for philosophy of cognitive science about how bodily and social aspects figure in the individuation of the human individual self” ). Kyselo’s claim is that we should conceive of the human self as a socially enacted phenomenon that is bodily mediated. Whilst there is much to be praised about this claim, I will demonstrate in this paper that such a conception of (...) self ultimately leads to a strained interpretation of how bodily and social processes are related. To this end, I will begin the paper by elucidating the body-social problem as it appears in modern cognitive science and then expounding Kyselo’s solution, which relies on a novel interpretation of Jonas’s concept of needful freedom. In response to this solution, I will highlight two problems which Kyselo’s account cannot overcome in its current state. I will argue that a more satisfactory solution to the body-social problem involves a re-conception of the human body as irrevocably socially constituted and the human social world as irrevocably bodily constituted. On this view, even the most minimal sense of selfhood cannot privilege either bodily or social processes; instead, the two are ontologically entwined such that humans are biosocial selves. (shrink)

In recent years, many studies have shown that perceiving other individuals’ direct gaze has robust effects on various attentional and cognitive processes. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to investigating the affective effects triggered by eye contact. This article reviews research concerning the effects of others’ gaze direction on observers’ affective responses. The review focuses on studies in which affective reactions have been investigated in well-controlled laboratory experiments, and in which contextual factors possibly influencing perceivers’ affects have been controlled. (...) Two important themes emerged from this review. First, explicit affective evaluations of seeing another’s direct versus averted gaze have resulted in rather inconsistent findings; some studies report more positive subjective feelings to direct compared to averted gaze, whereas others report the opposite pattern. These contradictory findings may be related, for example, to differences between studies in terms of the capability of direct-gaze stimuli to elicit feelings of self-involvement. Second, studies relying on various implicit measures have reported more consistent results; they indicate that direct gaze increases affective arousal, and more importantly, that eye contact automatically evokes a positively valenced affective reaction. Based on the review, possible psychological mechanisms for the positive affective reactions elicited by eye contact are described. (shrink)

Researchers in the enactivist tradition have recently argued that social interaction can constitute social cognition, rather than simply serve as the context for social cognition. They contend that a focus on social interaction corrects the overemphasis on mechanisms inside the individual in the explanation of social cognition. I critically assess enactivism’s claims about the explanatory role of social interaction in social cognition. After sketching the enactivist approach to cognition in general and social cognition in particular, I identify problems with an (...) enactivist taxonomy of roles for social interaction in the explanation of social cognition (contextual, enabling, and constitutive). In particular, I show that this enactivist taxonomy does not clearly distinguish between enabling conditions and constitutive elements, which would make them in danger of committing the coupling-constitution fallacy found in some attempts to extend cognition. I explore resources enactivism has to more clearly demarcate constitutive parts of a cognitive system, but identify problems in applying them to some of the main cases of social cognition enactivists characterize as being constituted by social interaction. I offer the mechanistic approach to explanation as an alternative that captures much of what enactivists want to say about the relations between social and individual levels, but views social interactions from the perspective of embedded cognition rather than as being constitutive of social cognition. (shrink)

This manuscript explores intersubjectivity through a conceptual construct for meaning-making that emphasizes three major interrelated elements–meaning making in interaction, making meaning with the body as well as the mind, and meaning making within an open dynamic system. These three elements are present in the literature on intersubjectivity with a wide range of terms used to describe various theoretical formulations. One objective of this manuscript is to illustrate how such a construct can be useful to understand the meaning-making observed in psychoanalysis, (...) such as in the treatment of a young child on the autistic spectrum. The challenges in establishing an intersubjective state with a child on the autistic spectrum serve to highlight important features of intersubjectivity. As an important background to this clinical illustration, we illustrate the construct with the scientific paradigm of the well-known face-to-face still-face. (shrink)

Advancing second-person neuroscience will need strong theories, as well as the new methods detailed by Schilbach et al. I assess computational theories, enactive theories, and cognitive/information processing theories, and argue that information processing approaches have an important role to play in second-person neuroscience. They provide the closest link to brain imaging and can give important insights into social behaviour.

The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical and formal framework to understand how the proprioceptive and kinesthetic system learns about body position and possibilities for movement in ongoing action and interaction. Whereas most weak embodiment accounts of proprioception focus on positionalist descriptions or on its role as a source of parameters for internal motor control, we argue that these aspects are insufficient to understand how proprioception is integrated into an active organized system in continuous and dynamic interaction (...) with the environment. Our strong embodiment thesis is that one of the main theoretical principles to understand proprioception, as a perceptual experience within concrete situations, is the coupling with kinesthesia and its relational constitution—self, ecological, and social. In our view, these aspects are underdeveloped in current accounts, and an enactive sensorimotor theory enriched with phenomenological descriptions may provide an alternative path toward explaining this skilled experience. Following O'Regan and Noë sensorimotor contingencies conceptualization, we introduce three distinct notions of proprioceptive kinesthetic-sensorimotor contingencies, which we describe conceptually and formally considering three varieties of perceptual experience in action: PK-SMCs-self, PK-SMCs-self-environment, and PK-SMC-self-other. As a proof of concept of our proposal, we developed a minimal PK model to discuss these elements in detail and show their explanatory value as important guides to understand the proprioceptive/kinesthetic system. Finally, we also highlight that there is an opportunity to develop enactive sensorimotor theory in new directions, creating a bridge between the varieties of experiences of oneself and learning skills. (shrink)

The extended mind hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers in Analysis 58(1):7–19, 1998; Clark 2008) is an influential hypothesis in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I argue that the extended mind hypothesis is born to be wild. It has undeniable and irrepressible tendencies of flouting grounding assumptions of the traditional information-processing paradigm. I present case-studies from social cognition which not only support the extended mind proposal but also bring out its inherent wildness. In particular, I focus on cases of action-understanding and (...) discuss the role of embodied intentionality in the extended mind project. I discuss two theories of action-understanding for exploring the support for the extended mind hypothesis in embodied intersubjective interaction, namely, simulation theory and a non-simulationist perceptual account. I argue that, if the extended mind adopts a simulation theory of action-understanding, it rejects representationalism. If it adopts a non-simulationist perceptual account of action-understanding, it rejects the classical sandwich view of the mind. (shrink)

Since the publication of Premack and Woodruff’s classic paper introducing the notion of a ‘theory of mind’ :515–526, 1978), interdisciplinary research in social cognition has witnessed the development of theory–theory, simulation theory, hybrid approaches, and most recently interactionist and perceptual accounts of other minds. The challenges that these various approaches present for each other and for research in social cognition range from adequately defining central concepts to designing experimental paradigms for testing empirical hypotheses. But is there any approach that promises (...) to dominate future interdisciplinary research in social cognition? Is social cognition witnessing a gradual paradigm shift where hitherto grounding notions such as theory of mind are no longer viewed as explanatorily necessary? Or have we simply lost our way in attempting to devise adequate experimental setups that could sway the debate in favour of one of the contending accounts? This special issue addresses these questions in an attempt to discover what the future holds for interdisciplinary research in social cognition. (shrink)

In opposition to mainstream theory of mind approaches, some contemporary perceptual accounts of social cognition do not consider the central question of social cognition to be the problem of access to other minds. These perceptual accounts draw heavily on phenomenological philosophy and propose that others' mental states are “directly” given in the perception of the others' expressive behavior. Furthermore, these accounts contend that phenomenological insights into the nature of social perception lead to the dissolution of the access problem. We argue, (...) on the contrary, that the access problem is a genuine problem that must be addressed by any account of social cognition, perceptual or non-perceptual, because we cannot cast the access problem as a false problem without violating certain fundamental intuitions about other minds. We elaborate the fundamental intuitions as three constraints on any theory of social perception: the Immediacy constraint; the Transcendence constraint; and the Accessibility constraint. We conclude with an outline of an account of perceiving other minds that meets the three constraints. (shrink)

This special issue targets two topics in social cognition that appear to increasingly structure the nature of interdisciplinary discourse but are themselves not very well understood. These are the notions of empathy and embodiment. Both have a history rooted in phenomenological philosophy and both have found extensive application in contemporary interdisciplinary theories of social cognition, at times to establish claims that are arguably contrary to the ones made by the phenomenologists credited with giving us these notions. But this special issue (...) is not about defending any philosophical tradition or theoretical stance against all others. It is about understanding some central aspects of the nature of our experience of other people. (shrink)

I address a number of issues related to building an autonomous social robot. I review different approaches to social cognition and ask how these different approaches may inform the design of social robots. I argue that regardless of which theoretical approach to social cognition one favors, instantiating that approach in a workable robot will involve designing that robot on enactive principles.

In this paper, I review recent contributions of phenomenology to a variety of disciplines, including the cognitive sciences and psychiatry, and explore (1) controversies about phenomenological methods and naturalization; (2) relations between phenomenology and the enactive and extended mind approaches; and (3) the promise of phenomenology for addressing a number of controversial philosophical issues.

In this paper we consider the importance of trust, in the context of economic institutions, and specifically with respect to questions about market mechanisms and the role of social interactions. We review recent advances in institutional economics closely tied to developments in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, involving extended and enactive cognition. We argue that the analysis of different conceptions of institutional mind extension, in Denzau and North’s shared mental models, Clark’s extended mind, and a more enactive approach that (...) emphasizes the importance of social interaction and personal relationships, can benefit from Kathrine Hawley’s distinction between reliability and trust. Institutional arrangements based solely on the reliability of impersonal mechanisms can lead to a variety of social pathologies and, at the extreme, a form of cognitive atrophy, all of which can undermine the sustainability of institutions. Even if trust comes with risks and some degree of unpredictability, it turns out to be a necessary glue-like ingredient in the constitution of social institutions. (shrink)

On the premise that people achieve knowledge of things by sharing mental resources, what are the scope and philosophical significance of acts of shared intentionality in social discourse? Some philosophers and scientists of social cognition, most notably Jane Heal and Michael Tomasello, have drawn upon insights about the capacity of individual people to share mental resources and contents to argue for the importance of sociality in shaping mental activity. In this paper, I synthetize these strands of research with the aim (...) of comparing different claims about shared intentionality, and facilitate an assessment in the debate on the social aspects of self and mentality. (shrink)

On the premise that people achieve knowledge of things by sharing mental resources, what are the scope and philosophical significance of acts of shared intentionality in social discourse? Some philosophers and scientists of social cognition, most notably Jane Heal and Michael Tomasello, have drawn upon insights about the capacity of individual people to share mental resources and contents to argue for the importance of sociality in shaping mental activity. In this paper, I synthetize these strands of research with the aim (...) of comparing different claims about shared intentionality, and facilitate an assessment in the debate on the social aspects of self and mentality. (shrink)

In this paper, we first review recent arguments about the direct perception of the intentions and emotions of others, emphasizing the role of embodied interaction. We then consider a possible objection to the direct perception hypothesis from social psychology, related to phenomena like ‘dehumanization’ and ‘implicit racial bias’, which manifest themselves on a basic bodily level. On the background of such data, one might object that social perception cannot be direct since it depends on and can in fact be interrupted (...) by a set of cultural beliefs. We argue, however, that far from threatening the idea of direct perception, these findings clearly contradict the idea of hardwired theory of mind modules. More generally, we suggest that in order to further the understanding of social cognition we must take seriously insights about in-group and out-group distinctions and related phenomena, all of which are currently neglected in the mainstream social cognition literature. (shrink)

In this essay, I respond to the critical remarks of Louise Barrett, Amanda Corris and Anthony Chemero, and Daniel Hutto on my book Enactivist Interventions. In doing so, I consider whether behaviorism can make a contribution to enactivist theory, whether synergies are the same as dynamical gestalts, and whether the brain can add anything to mathematical reasoning.

The full scope of enactivist approaches to cognition includes not only a focus on sensory-motor contingencies and physical affordances for action, but also an emphasis on affective factors of embodiment and intersubjective affordances for social interaction. This strong conception of embodied cognition calls for a new way to think about the role of the brain in the larger system of brain-body-environment. We ask whether recent work on predictive coding offers a way to think about brain function in an enactive system, (...) and we suggest that a positive answer is possible if we interpret predictive coding in a more enactive way, i.e., as involved in the organism’s dynamic adjustments to its environment. (shrink)

This essay introduces the 40th Annual Spindel Conference special issue on relational autonomy and collective intentionality. Autonomy is often discussed in contexts of individual intention formation and moral decision making. When we consider collective intention formation and the decision-making practices of institutions, a number of questions can be raised: How does the individual autonomy of participants affect the collective process? How do such collective processes modulate the autonomy of the individuals involved? How do institutional decisions and practices affect individual autonomy (...) more generally—in what way do they enhance or undermine autonomy? Is there a significant difference in how we answer these questions if we already think of autonomy as relational rather than in a traditional individualistic way? (shrink)

Developmentally, joint attention is located at the intersection of a complex set of capacities that serve our cognitive, emotional and action-oriented relations with others. It forms a bridge between primary intersubjectivity and secondary intersubjectivity (Trevarthan 1978, 1998; Trevarthan and Hubley 1979). Primary intersubjectivity consists in a set of sensory-motor abilities that allow us to understand the meaning of another person’s movements, gestures, facial expressions, eye direction,...

An important part of what it means for agents to be situated in the everyday world of human affairs includes their engagement with economic practices. In this paper we employ the concept of cognitive institutions in order to provide an enactive and interactive interpretation of market and economic reasoning. We challenge traditional views that understand markets in terms of market structures or as processors of distributed information. The alternative conception builds upon the notion of the market as a ‘scaffolding institution’. (...) Introducing the concept of market as a ‘socially extended’ cognitive institution we go beyond the notion of scaffolding to provide an enactive view of economic reasoning that understands the market participant in terms of social interactive processes and relational autonomy. Markets are more than inert devices for information processing; they can be viewed as ‘highly scaffolded’, where strong constraints and incentives predictably direct agents’ behavior. Building on this idea we argue that markets emerge from (a) the economic interaction of both supply and demand sides, in continual and mutual interplay, and (b) more basic social interactions. Consumer behavior in the marketplace is complex, not only determining the market price, but also extending the consumer’s cognitive processes to reliably attain a correct evaluation of the good. Moreover, this economic reasoning is socially situated and not something done in isolation from other consumers From a socially situated, interactive point of view buying or not buying a good is something that enacts the market. This shifts the status of markets from external institutions that merely causally affect participants’ cognitive processes to social institutions that constitutively extend these cognitive processes. On this view the constraints imposed by social interactions, as well as the possibilities enabled by such interactions, are such that economic reasoning is never just an individual process carried out by an autonomous individual, classically understood. In this regard, understanding the concept of relational autonomy allows us to see how economic reasoning is always embodied, embedded in, and scaffolded by intersubjective interactions, and how such interactions make the market what it is. (shrink)

ArgumentA number of theorists have proposed simulation theories of empathy. A review of these theories shows that, despite the fact that one version of the simulation theory can avoid a number of problems associated with such approaches, there are further reasons to doubt whether simulation actually explains empathy. A high-level simulation account of empathy, distinguished from the simulation theory of mindreading, can avoid problems associated with low-level (neural) simulationist accounts; but it fails to adequately address two other problems: the diversity (...) problem and the starting problem. It is argued that a narrative approach to empathy obviates all these problems and offers a more parsimonious account. (shrink)

We argue against theory-of-mind interpretation of recent false-belief experiments with young infants and explore two other interpretations: enactive and behavioral abstraction approaches. We then discuss the differences between these alternatives.

Questions about the nature of self and self-consciousness are closely aligned with questions about the nature of autonomy. These concepts have deep roots in traditional philosophical discussions that concern metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. They also have direct relevance to practical considerations about informed consent in medical contexts. In this paper, with reference to understanding specific side effects of deep brain stimulation treatment in cases of, for example, Parkinson’s Disease, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Major Depressive Disorder, I’ll argue that it is (...) best to frame discussions of informed consent in terms of relational autonomy and a pattern theory of self. (shrink)

We distinguish between three philosophical views on the neuroscience of predictive models: predictive coding, predictive processing and predictive engagement. We examine the concept of active inference under each model and then ask how this concept informs discussions of social cognition. In this context we consider Frith and Friston’s proposal for a neural hermeneutics, and we explore the alternative model of enactivist hermeneutics.

This study investigates interpersonal processes underlying dialog by comparing two approaches, interactive alignment and interpersonal synergy, and assesses how they predict collective performance in a joint task. While the interactive alignment approach highlights imitative patterns between interlocutors, the synergy approach points to structural organization at the level of the interaction—such as complementary patterns straddling speech turns and interlocutors. We develop a general, quantitative method to assess lexical, prosodic, and speech/pause patterns related to the two approaches and their impact on collective (...) performance in a corpus of task-oriented conversations. The results show statistical presence of patterns relevant for both approaches. However, synergetic aspects of dialog provide the best statistical predictors of collective performance and adding aspects of the alignment approach does not improve the model. This suggests that structural organization at the level of the interaction plays a crucial role in task-oriented conversations, possibly constraining and integrating processes related to alignment. (shrink)

The paper first gives a conceptual distinction of the first, second and third person perspectives in social cognition research and connects them to the major present theories of understanding others (simulation, interaction and theory theory). It then argues for a foundational role of second person interactions for the development of social perspectives. To support this thesis, the paper analyzes in detail how infants, in particular through triangular interactions with persons and objects, expand their understanding of perspectives and arrive at a (...) self–other metaperspective. This allows them to grasp the other’s as well as their own perspective as such, which is equivalent to an explicit third person perspective and to an explicit first person perspective or self-consciousness. The paper describes the major steps towards these perspectives, pointing to a close interdependence of both developments. It argues that embodied second person interactions are not only an enabling, but the constitutive condition for the development of an explicit first and third person perspective. (shrink)

There is a growing realization in cognitive science that a theory of embodied intersubjectivity is needed to better account for social cognition. We highlight some challenges that must be addressed by attempts to interpret ‘simulation theory’ in terms of embodiment, and argue for an alternative approach that integrates phenomenology and dynamical systems theory in a mutually informing manner. Instead of ‘simulation’ we put forward the concept of the ‘extended body’, an enactive and phenomenological notion that emphasizes the socially mediated nature (...) of embodiment. To illustrate the explanatory potential of this approach, we replicate an agent-based model of embodied social interaction. An analysis of the model demonstrates that the extended body can be explained in terms of mutual dynamical entanglement: inter-bodily resonance between individuals can give rise to self-sustaining interaction patterns that go beyond the behavioral capacities of isolated individuals by modulating their intra-bodily conditions of behavior generation. (shrink)

Synthetic approaches to social interaction support the development of a second-person neuroscience. Agent-based models and psychological experiments can be related in a mutually informing manner. Models have the advantage of making the nonlinear brainenvironmentbrain system as a whole accessible to analysis by dynamical systems theory. We highlight some general principles of how social interaction can partially constitute an individual's behavior.

We argue that progress in our scientific understanding of the `social mind' is hampered by a number of unfounded assumptions. We single out the widely shared assumption that social behavior depends solely on the capacities of an individual agent. In contrast, both developmental and phenomenological studies suggest that the personal-level capacity for detached `social cognition' (conceived as a process of theorizing about and/or simulating another mind) is a secondary achievement that is dependent on more immediate processes of embodied social interaction. (...) We draw on the enactive approach to cognitive science to further clarify this strong notion of `social interaction' in theoretical terms. In addition, we indicate how this interaction theory (IT) could eventually be formalized with the help of a dynamical systems perspective on the interaction process, especially by making use of evolutionary robotics modeling. We conclude that bringing together the methods and insights of developmental, phenomenological, enactive and dynamical approaches to social interaction can provide a promising framework for future research. Keywords: theory of mind; cognitive science; phenomenology; embodied cognition; dynamical systems theory; enactive approach; social cognition; interaction theory; evolutionary robotics. (shrink)

Pessoa'sThe Cognitive-Emotional Brain(2013) is an integrative approach to neuroscience that complements other developments in cognitive science, especially enactivism. Both accept complexity as essential to mind; both tightly integrate perception, cognition, and emotion, which enactivism unifies in its foundational concept of sense-making; and both emphasize that the spatial extension of mental processes is not reducible to specific brain regions and neuroanatomical connectivity. An enactive neuroscience is emerging.

In this paper, we investigate the role of intention and joint attention in joint actions. Depending on the shared intentions the agents have, we distinguish between joint path-goal actions and joint final-goal actions. We propose an instrumental account of basic joint action analogous to a concept of basic action and argue that intentional joint attention is a basic joint action. Furthermore, we discuss the functional role of intentional joint attention for successful cooperation in complex joint actions. Anika Fiebich is PhD (...) student in Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Shaun Gallagher is Lilian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. (shrink)

In this article I defend pluralist theory against various objections. First, I argue that although traditional theories may also account for multiple ways to achieve social understanding, they still put some emphasis on one particular epistemic strategy. Pluralist theory, in contrast, rejects the so-called ‘default assumption’ that there is any primary or default method in social understanding. Second, I illustrate that pluralist theory needs to be distinguished from integration theory. On one hand, integration theory faces the difficulty of trying to (...) combine traditional theories of social understanding that have contradictory background assumptions. On the other hand, pluralist theory goes beyond integrating traditional theories by accounting for a variety of factors that may play a role in social understanding but have been neglected in such theories, including stereotype activation, social and personal relationships, contextual features, individual moods, perceptions, and so on. Third, I argue that if the default assumption is rejected, pluralist theorists need to provide another positive account of why particular cognitive processes are more likely to come into play in a specific instance of social understanding than others in order to provide a genuine alternative to traditional theories. I discuss three versions of pluralist theory that meet this challenge by pointing to normativity, fluency, and interaction. (shrink)