Until recently, philosophers and psychologists conceived of emotions as brain- and body-bound affairs. But researchers have started to challenge this internalist and individualist orthodoxy. A rapidly growing body of work suggests that some emotions incorporate external resources and thus extend beyond the neurophysiological confines of organisms; some even argue that emotions can be socially extended and shared by multiple agents. Call this the extended emotions thesis. In this article, we consider different ways of understanding ExE in philosophy, psychology, and the (...) cognitive sciences. First, we outline the background of the debate and discuss different argumentative strategies for ExE. In particular, we distinguish ExE from cognate but more moderate claims about the embodied and situated nature of cognition and emotion. We then dwell upon two dimensions of ExE: emotions extended by material culture and by the social factors. We conclude by defending ExE against some objections and point to desiderata for future research. (shrink)

During the Covid-19 pandemic we increasingly turned to technology to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. Even as lockdowns and restrictions ease many are encouraging us to embrace the replacement of face-to-face encounters with technologically mediated ones. Yet, as philosophers of technology have highlighted, technology can transform the situations we find ourselves in. Drawing insights from the phenomenology of sociality, we consider how digitally-enabled forms of communication and sociality impact our experience of one another. In particular, we (...) draw attention to the way in which our embodied experience of one another is altered when we meet in digital spaces, taking as our focus the themes of perceptual access, intercorporeality, shared space, transitional spaces, and self-presentation. In light of the way in which technological mediation alters various dimensions of our social encounters, we argue that digital encounters constitute their own forms of sociality requiring their own phenomenological analysis. We conclude our paper by raising some broader concerns about the very framework of thinking about digitally and non-digitally mediated social encounters simply in terms of replacement. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationship between emotional sharing and the extended mind thesis. We argue that shared emotions are socially extended emotions that involve a specific type of constitutive integration between the participating individuals’ emotional experiences. We start by distinguishing two claims, the Environmentally Extended Emotion Thesis and the Socially Extended Emotion Thesis. We then critically discuss some recent influential proposals about the nature of shared emotions. Finally, in Sect. 3, we motivate two conditions that an account of shared emotions (...) ought to accommodate: Reciprocal Other-awareness and Integration. Consideration of and discussion of relational accounts of joint attention lead us to the proposal that a construal of socially extended emotions in terms of a constitutive integration of the participating individuals’ experiences is more promising than proposals that simply appeal to various forms of social situatedness, embeddedness, or scaffolding. (shrink)

The internet provides us with a multitude of ways of interacting with one another. In discussions about how technological innovations impact and shape our interpersonal interactions, there is a tendency to assume that encountering people online is essentially different to encountering people offline. Yet, individuals report feeling a sense of togetherness with one another online that echoes offline descriptions. I consider how we can understand people’s experiences of being together with others online, at least in certain instances, as arising out (...) of their feeling together as a we. Using Walther’s phenomenological framework of communality, I explore whether the following might take place online: habitual communal experiences and actual we-experiences. While neither of these sketches amount to a full account of how we find ourselves with others online, I suggest that they reveal how insights from the phenomenology of sociality can be used to deepen our understanding of online communality. What is more, I suggest that the strength of this approach is that in some cases it allows us to circumvent tricky questions about embodiment online and, in others, prompts us to ask to what extent a fully-embodied interaction is really required for we-experiences. (shrink)

The article takes issue with the proposal that dominant accounts of collective intentionality suffer from an individualist bias and that one should instead reverse the order of explanation and give primacy to the we and the community. It discusses different versions of the community first view and argues that they fail because they operate with too simplistic a conception of what it means to be a self and misunderstand what it means to be (part of) a we. In presenting this (...) argument, the article seeks to demonstrate that a thorough investigation of collective intentionality has to address the status and nature of the we, and that doing so will require an analysis of the relation between the we and the I, which in turn will call for a more explicit engagement with the question of selfhood than is customary in contemporary discussions of collective intentionality. (shrink)

Research in phenomenology has benefitted from using exceptional cases from pathology and expertise. But exactly how are we to generate and apply knowledge from such cases to the phenomenological domain? As researchers of cerebral palsy and musical absorption, we together answer the how question by pointing to the resource of the qualitative interview. Using the qualitative interview is a direct response to Varela’s call for better pragmatics in the methodology of phenomenology and cognitive science and Gallagher’s suggestion for phenomenology to (...) develop its methodology and outsource its tasks. We agree with their proposals, but want to develop them further by discussing and proposing a general framework that can integrate research paradigms of the well-established disciplines of phenomenological philosophy and qualitative science. We give this the working title, a “phenomenological interview”. First we describe the what of the interview, that is the nature of the interview in which one encounters another subject and generates knowledge of a given experience together with this other subject. In the second part, we qualify why it is worthwhile making the time-consuming effort to engage in a phenomenological interview. In the third and fourth parts, we in general terms discuss how to conduct the interview and the subsequent phenomenological analysis, by discussing the pragmatics of Vermersch’s and Petitmengin’s “Explicitation Interview”. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) create an increasing similarity between the performance of AI systems or AI-based robots and human communication. They raise the questions: whether it is possible to communicate with, understand, and even empathically perceive artificial agents; whether we should ascribe actual subjectivity and thus quasi-personal status to them beyond a certain level of simulation; what will be the impact of an increasing dissolution of the distinction between simulated and real encounters. (1) To answer these questions, the paper (...) argues that the precondition for actually understanding others consists in the implicit assumption of the subjectivity of our counterpart, which makes shared feelings and a „we-intentionality” possible. This assumption is ultimately based on the presupposition of a shared form of life, conceived here as „conviviality.” (2) The possibility that future artificial agents could meet these preconditions is refuted on the basis of embodied and enactive cognition, which links subjectivity and consciousness to the aliveness of an organism. (3) Even if subjectivity is in principle impossible for artificial agents, the distinction between simulated and real subjectivity might nevertheless become increasingly blurred. Here, possible consequences are discussed, especially using the example of virtual psychotherapy. Finally, the paper makes case for a mindful appproach to the language we use to talk about artificial systems and pleads for preventing a systematic pretense of subjectivity. (shrink)

Recently, an increasing body of work from sociology, social psychology, and social ontology has been devoted to collective emotions. Rather curiously, however, pressing epistemological and especially normative issues have received almost no attention. In particular, there has been a strange silence on whether one can share emotions with individuals or groups who are not aware of such sharing, or how one may identify this, and eventually identify specific norms of emotional sharing. In this paper, I shall address this set of (...) issues head-on. I will do so by drawing on one of the most elaborate, but rather neglected phenomenological accounts of sociality, namely Edith Stein’s work on communal experiences and her theory of empathy. I wish to show that a suitably amended Steinian account affords us with an intriguing alternative to both phenomenalist and normativist construals of collective emotions. Moreover, I shall argue that it provides a more fine-grained account of the different types of emotional sharing than standard accounts, ranging from face-to-face, or shared, to more robust but less direct, or collective, emotions. Finally, I will propose a tentative answer to the above questions by pointing to non-dyadic or collective forms of empathy. (shrink)

Research on the phenomenology of agency for joint action has so far focused on the sense of agency and control in joint action, leaving aside questions on how it feels to act together. This paper tries to fill this gap in a way consistent with the existing theories of joint action and shared emotion. We first reconstruct Pacherie’s account on the phenomenology of agency for joint action, pointing out its two problems, namely the necessary trade-off between the sense of self- (...) and we-agency; and the lack of affective phenomenology of joint action in general. After elaborating on these criticisms based on our theory of shared emotion, we substantiate the second criticism by discussing different mechanisms of shared affect—feelings and emotions—that are present in typical joint actions. We show that our account improves on Pacherie’s, first by introducing our agentive model of we-agency to overcome her unnecessary dichotomy between a sense of self- and we-agency, and then by suggesting that the mechanisms of shared affect enhance not only the predictability of other agents’ actions as Pacherie highlights, but also an agentive sense of we-agency that emerges from shared emotions experienced in the course and consequence of joint action. (shrink)

In recent years, the social dimensions of selfhood have been discussed widely. Can you be a self on your own or only together with others? Is selfhood a built-in feature of experience or rather socially constructed? Does a strong emphasis on the first-personal character of consciousness prohibit a satisfactory account of intersubjectivity or is the former rather a necessary requirement for the latter? These questions are explored in the following contribution.

Drawing on recent phenomenological discussions of collective intentionality and existential phenomenological accounts of agency, this article proposes a novel interpretation of shared action. First, I argue that we should understand action on the basis of how an environment pre-reflectively solicits agents to behave based on (a) the affordances or goals inflected by their abilities and dispositions and (b) their self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances. Second, I show that this definition of action is sufficiently flexible (...) to account for not only individual action (in which both (a) and (b) refer only to an individual) but also several distinct subtypes of shared action. My thesis is that behaviour counts as shared action if and only if it is caused by a solicitation in which either (a) the goals, or (b) the commitments, or both (a) goals and (b) commitments are joint, i.e., depend on several individuals. We thereby get three distinct subtypes of shared actions: (i) jointly coordinated individually committed action, (ii) individually coordinated jointly committed action, and (iii) jointly coordinated jointly committed action. (shrink)

Many accounts of collective intentionality target rather sophisticated types of cooperative activities, i.e., activities with complex goals that require prior planning and various coordinating and organizing roles. But although joint action is of obvious importance, an investigation of collective intentionality should not merely focus on the question of how we can share agentive intentions. We can act and do things together, but it is not obvious that the awe felt and shared by a group of Egyptologists when they gain entry (...) to a newly discovered pharaonic tomb can or should be analyzed in the same way as, say, a heist that a group of criminals carefully plan and execute together. The aim of the article is to better understand the kind of emotional sharing that can occur between two individuals who are perceptually co-present. Does the sharing involve a kind of phenomenal fusion? Is it a matter of sharing one and the same token experience? It will be argued that both of these recent suggestions must be rejected as misleading in favor of an account that sees emotional sharing as a form of emotional integration that involves constitutively interdependent processes of empathy, second-personal address, and identification. (shrink)

Within social psychology, group identification refers to a mental process that leads an individual to conceive of herself as a group member. This phenomenon has recently attracted a great deal of attention in the debate about shared agency. In this debate, group identification is appealing to many because it appears to explain important forms of intentionally shared actions in a cognitively unsophisticated way. This paper argues that, unless important issues about group identification are not illuminated, the heuristic function ascribed to (...) this notion for an understanding of shared agency remains dubious at best and unfulfilled at worst. This paper offers such a clarification by distinguishing and describing two different mental processes that constitute group identification: adoption of the group perspective and transformation in self-understanding. It is claimed that the latter process consists in the production of what Ruth Millikan labels “Pushmi-Pullyu representations” and that it is developmentally prior with respect to the ability of adopting the group perspective. (shrink)

Theories of collective intentionality and theories of relational autonomy share a common interest in analyzing the social dynamics of agency. However, whereas theories of collective intentionality conceive of social groups primarily as intentional and voluntarily willed, theories of relational autonomy claim that autonomous agency is both scaffolded and constrained by social forces and structures, including the constraints imposed by nonvoluntary group membership. The question raised by this difference in view is whether social theorizing that overlooks the effects of nonvoluntary social (...) group membership on individual and joint agency overlooks crucial aspects of the social dynamics of agency. To explore this question, this article first evaluates Michael Bratman's planning analysis of individual agency from the perspective of relational autonomy theory and compares it with a narrative self‐constitution account of temporally extended agency. It then evaluates Bratman's analysis of shared agency and discusses Shaun Gallagher and Deborah Tollefsen's concept of we‐narratives, which extends the notion of narrative construction to shared agency. Overall, the argument aims to show that if we are interested in understanding the social dynamics of agency, it is critical to attend to the way that agents exercise their intentional agency in relation to internalized and external social constraints. (shrink)

When you and I share an experience, each of us lives through a we-experience. The paper claims that we-experiences have unique phenomenality and structure. First, we-experiences’ phenomenality is characterised by the fact that they feel like ours to their subject. This specific phenomenality is contended to derive from the way these experiences self-represent: a we-experience exemplifies us-ness or togetherness because it self-represents as mine qua ours. Second, living through a we-experience together with somebody else is not to have this experience (...) in parallel with the experience of the other. Rather, the paper argues that a we-experience is partly co-constituted by the experience of the other. After offering an account of the phenomenality and constitution of we-experiences, which traces these two elements back to the subject’s self-understanding as a group member, the paper argues for the claim that an experience’s for-us-ness is committal to this experience being co-constituted by another we-experience. (shrink)

In his recent works on daily face-to-face encounters, Zahavi claims that the phenomenon of sharing involves reciprocity. Following Zahavi’s line of thought, we wonder what exactly reciprocity amounts to and how the shared experience emerges from the dynamic process of interaction. By turning to the highly specialized field of elite sports dance, we aim at exploring the way in which reciprocity unfolds in intensive deliberate practices of movement. In our analysis, we specifically argue that the ongoing dynamics of two separate (...) flows of movement constitute a shared experience of dancing together. In this sense, moving together, in sports dance, is a practical way of understanding each other. In agreement with Zahavi, our analysis emphasizes the bi-directed nature of sharing. However, at the same time, we contribute to Zahavi’s ongoing endeavour as the special case of sports dance reveals how reciprocity can be deliberately shaped through the mutual coordination and affective bound dynamics of movement. Our article thus both pursues the methodological point that qualitative research of expert competences can constructively enrich phenomenological analysis and indicates how movement can be fundamental to the reciprocity of shared experience. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the affective experience that permeates the employment of Assistive Technology (AT) in special needs education is crucial for the integration of AT. “AT integration” generally means the fluid and automatic employment of AT for fulfilling certain tasks. Pritchard et al. ( 2021 ) have proposed a more specific conceptualisation of AT integration by saying that AT is integrated when it is part of the user’s cognitive character. By discussing their proposal, we argue that the (...) user’s affective experience is crucial for AT integration. To better appreciate the relevance of the affective experience in AT integration, we suggest shifting the perspective from the functionalist extended cognition framework, as Pritchard et al. ( 2021 ) propose, to affective scaffoldings. In doing so we focus on the feeling of agency as the key experience to consider for understanding what AT does to the agent. We will put forth the hermeneutical tool of “phenomenal transformation” to explain how and why AT as an affective scaffolding can support the fundamental “I can” of the experience. (shrink)

This paper sets out from the hypothesis that the embodied competences and expertise which characterise dance and sports activities have the potential to constructively challenge and inform phenomenological thinking. While pathological cases present experiences connected to tangible bodily deviations, the specialised movement practices of dancers and athletes present experiences which put our everyday experiences of being a moving body into perspective in a slightly different sense. These specialised experiences present factual variations of how moving, sensing and interacting can be like (...) for us as body-subjects. To use of these sources inevitably demands that qualitative research methodologies – especially short-term ethnographical fieldwork – form part of the research strategy and qualify the way the researcher involves a second-person perspective when interviewing dancers and athletes about their experiences. In the subsequent phases analysing the data generated, I argue that researchers first strive to achieve internal consistency of empirical themes identified in the case of movement practices in question thus keeping to a contextualised and lived perspective, also denoted as an emic perspective. In subsequent phases phenomenological insights are then actively engaged in the exploration and discussion of the possible transcendental structures making the described subjective experiences possible. The specialised and context-defined experiences of ‘what a moving body can be like’ are accordingly involved as factual variations to constructively add to and potentially challenge phenomenological descriptions. Lastly, I exemplify how actual research strategies have been enacted in a variety of projects involving professional dancers’, golfers’ and sports dancers’ practices and experiences, respectively. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 31-42, January 2022. This paper distinguishes collective emotions from other phenomena pertaining to the social and interactive nature of emotion and proposes a taxonomy of different types of collective emotion. First, it emphasizes the distinction between collective emotions as affective experiences and underpinning mechanisms. Second, it elaborates on other types of affective experience, namely the social sharing of emotion, group-based emotions, and joint emotions. Then, it proposes a working definition of collective emotion via (...) a minimal threshold and four structural features. Finally, it develops a taxonomy of five types of collective emotion: emotional sharing, emotional contagion, emotional matching, emotional segregation, and emotional fusion. (shrink)

Through a discussion of the socially extended mind, this paper advances the “not possible without principle” as an alternative to the social parity principle. By charging the social parity principle with reductionism about the social dimension of socially extended processes, the paper offers a new argumentative strategy for the socially extended mind that stresses its existential significance. The “not possible without principle” shows that not only is something _more_ achieved through socially located processes of knowledge building, but also that, and (...) more importantly, what is achieved is something that _would not have been possible without_ social interaction_._ The social parity principle states that the result of an activity achieved via social interaction should be assumed functionally equivalent to a solitary investigation and is characterized by multiple realisability. Contrary to the social parity principle, the “not possible without principle” holds that the result would not have been achieved without the social interaction between (at least) two agents with specific existential needs. The socially extended mind never happens in a void. This means that the "not possible without" principle should be located in real-life, affectively charged, embodied experiences of skilful interactions between agents. This fundamental conceptual change via reference to the “existential necessity” that regulates socially extended processes is necessary in order to effectively lead the socially extended mind to a truly embedded and embodied account. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an increasing focus on a crucial aspect of the ‘meeting of minds’ problem :160–165, 2013), namely the ability that human beings have for sharing different types of mental states such as emotions, intentions, and perceptual experiences. In this paper I examine what counts as basic forms of ‘shared experiences’ and focus on a relatively overlooked aspect of human embodiment, namely the fact that we start our journey into our experiential life within the experiencing body (...) of a second person, i.e. our mothers. For example, Zahavi and Rochat recently draw on phenomenological insights and developmental studies in order to support the idea that empathy must be considered a central precondition for experiential sharing. Here I suggest that the defence of the primacy of empathy over experiential sharing might reveal how we are often mislead in our understanding of more basic forms of shared experiences. I argue that while previous approaches mainly defined experiential sharing by using the case of visual experience as a paradigmatic example of ‘togetherness’, it is fruitful to consider the case of pregnancy and intersubjective touch in early infancy as a more basic model of experiential sharing in general. I conclude that shared experiences are phenomena emerging first and foremost from a ‘meeting of bodies’ rather than of minds and as such they precede rather than presuppose empathetic abilities. (shrink)

Depression is an affective disorder involving a significant change in an individual’s emotional and affective experiences. While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition mentions that social impairment may occur in depression, first-person reports of depression consistently name isolation from others as a key feature of depression. I present a phenomenological analysis of how certain interpersonal relations are experienced in depression. In particular, I consider whether depressed individuals are able to enter into “we-experiences” with other people. We-experiences (...) are experiences had with two or more people as a we, experiences that allow one to enter into robustly shared experiences with others. I claim that the ability to enter into we-experiences is eroded in depression due to an overwhelming feeling of being different to and misunderstood by others. As such, I suggest that depression should be conceived of as fixing an individual in their first-person singular perspective, thus inhibiting their ability to experience in the first-person plural and to feel a sense of connectedness or togetherness with others as part of a we. By attending to on-going impacts of a diminished ability to enter into we-experiences, we can provide a situated and more nuanced account of the changes of interpersonal relations in depression that captures the progressive nature of the disorder. In turn, this analysis furthers our understanding of the emergence, frustration, and erosion of actual and habitual we-experiences. (shrink)

There is a conspicuous tendency of humans to experience empathy and sympathy preferentially towards members of their own group, whereas empathetic feelings towards outgroup members or strangers are often reduced or even missing. This may culminate in a “dissociation of empathy”: a historical example are the cases of Nazi perpetrators who behaved as compassionate family men on the one hand, yet committed crimes of utter cruelty against Jews on the other. The paper aims at explaining such phenomena and at determining (...) the limits of empathy. To this purpose, it first distinguishes between two levels of empathy, namely primary or intercorporeal and extended or higher-level empathy. It then investigates the mutual interconnection of empathy and recognition, which may be regarded as a principle of extending empathy to others regardless of whether they belong to one’s own group or not. However, this principle is in conflict with ingroup conformism and outgroup biases that hamper the universal extension of empathy. Thus, a denial of recognition and exclusion of others from one’s ingroup usually results in a withdrawal or lack of extended empathy which then influences primary empathy as well. On this basis, and using the historical example of mass executions during the Holocaust, the paper investigates the mechanisms of exclusion which may lead to a withdrawal of recognition and finally to a dissociation of empathy. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 31-42, January 2022. This paper distinguishes collective emotions from other phenomena pertaining to the social and interactive nature of emotion and proposes a taxonomy of different types of collective emotion. First, it emphasizes the distinction between collective emotions as affective experiences and underpinning mechanisms. Second, it elaborates on other types of affective experience, namely the social sharing of emotion, group-based emotions, and joint emotions. Then, it proposes a working definition of collective emotion via (...) a minimal threshold and four structural features. Finally, it develops a taxonomy of five types of collective emotion: emotional sharing, emotional contagion, emotional matching, emotional segregation, and emotional fusion. (shrink)

In the available psychological literature, affect regulation is fundamentally considered in terms of self-regulation, and according to this standard picture, the contribution of other people in our affect regulation has been viewed in terms of socially assisted selfregulation. The present article challenges this standard picture. By focusing on affect regulation as it unfolds in early infancy, it will be argued that instead of being something original and fundamental, self-regulation developmentally emerges from the basis of a further type of affect regulation. (...) While infants’ capacities in recognizing, understanding, and modifying their own affective states are initially immature and undeveloped, affect regulation is initially managed by the other: it is initially the self, and not the other, that plays the role of an assistant in affect regulation. To capture this phenomenon, the concepts of “auto-matic,” “hetero-matic,” and “altero-matic” affect regulation will be introduced and their interrelations elaborated. By showing how the capacity of affective self-regulation, which is characteristic to maturity, is developmentally achieved by internalizing regulative functions that, at the outset of development, are managed by the caregiver, it will be argued that altero-matic affect regulation is an autonomous type of affect regulation and the developmental basis for self-regulation. (shrink)

What enables everyday collective attitudes such as the intention of two persons to go for a walk together? Most current approaches are concerned with full-fledged col- lective attitudes and focus on the content, the mode or the subject of such attitudes. It will be argued that these approaches miss out an important explanatory enabling feature of collective attitudes: an experiential state, called a “sense of us”, in which a we-perspective is grounded. As will be shown, the sense of us pre-structures (...) collective intentional states and is thus relevant to an adequate understanding of collective atti- tudes. The argument receives indirect support by insights into distortions of interaction due to implicit stereotypes. (shrink)

What enables everyday collective attitudes such as the intention of two persons to go for a walk together? Most current approaches are concerned with full-fledged collective attitudes and focus on the content, the mode or the subject of such attitudes. It will be argued that these approaches miss out an important explanatory enabling feature of collective attitudes: an experiential state, called a “sense of us”, in which a we-perspective is grounded. As will be shown, the sense of us pre-structures collective (...) intentional states and is thus relevant to an adequate understanding of collective attitudes. The argument receives indirect support by insights into distortions of interaction due to implicit stereotypes. (shrink)

Research on collective emotion spans social sciences, psychology and philosophy. There are detailed case studies and diverse theories of collective emotion. However, experimental evidence regarding the universal characteristics, antecedents and consequences of collective emotion remains sparse. Moreover, current research mainly relies on emotion self-reports, accounting for the subjective experience of collective emotion and ignoring their cognitive and physiological bases. In response to these challenges, we argue for experimental research on collective emotion. We start with an overview of theoretical frameworks to (...) identify a set of three characteristics of collective emotion. Based on research in cognitive and affective sciences, we then examine the corresponding candidate mechanisms. Finally, we highlight outstanding questions, review experimental evidence, and suggest ideas for future experimental research. (shrink)

This article offers a critique and reformulation of the concept of empathy as it is currently used in the context of medicine and medical care. My argument is three pronged. First, that the instrumentalised notion of empathy that has been common within medicine erases the term’s rich epistemological history as a special form of understanding, even a vehicle of social inquiry, and has instead substituted an account unsustainably structured according to the polarisations of modernity. I suggest that understanding empathy by (...) examining its origins within the phenomenological tradition, as a mode of intersubjective understanding, offers a different and profitable approach. Secondly, I argue that the appropriation of empathy in medicine means that, ironically, empathy can function as a technique of pastoral power, in which virtue, knowledge and authority remain with the doctor. And thirdly, empathy is in danger of being resourced as a substitute for equity and funding within health systems. I conclude however with hope for the productive possibilities for empathy. (shrink)

Self-conscious emotions such as shame and pride are emotions that typically focus on the self of the person who feels them. In other words, the intentional object of these emotions is assumed to be the subject that experiences them. Many reasons speak in its favor and yet this account seems to leave a question open: how to cash out those cases in which one genuinely feels ashamed or proud of what someone else does? This paper contends that such cases do (...) not necessarily challenge the idea that shame and pride are about the emoting subject. Rather, we claim that some of the most paradigmatic scenarios of shame and pride induced by others can be accommodated by taking seriously the consideration that, in such cases, the subject “group-identifies” with the other. This is the idea that, in feeling these forms of shame or pride, the subject is conceiving of herself as a member of the same group as the subject acting shamefully or in an admirable way. In other words, these peculiar emotive responses are elicited in the subject insofar as, and to the extent that, she is (or sees herself as being) a member of a group – the group to which those who act shamefully or admirably also belong. By looking into the way in which the notion of group identification can allow for an account of hetero-induced shame and pride, this paper attempts to achieve a sort of mutual enlightenment that brings to light not only an important and generally neglected form of self-conscious emotions, but also relevant features of group identification. In particular, it generates evidence for the idea that group identification is a psychological process that the subject does not have to carry out intentionally in the sense that it is not necessarily triggered by the subject’s conative states like desires or intentions. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on possible boosting factors for the sense of we-agency in joint actions. My aim is to shed light on a factor that, until now, has received little or no consideration at all, and that I call _vitality attunement_. I argue that vitality attunement stands between two other boosting factors for the sense of we-agency—i.e., rhythmic alignment and emotional attunement. Investigating two examples of joint action, i.e., dancing and joint musical performances, I show that vitality attunement (...) is not reducible to either of the other two boosting factors and that it deserves to be studied on its own as a distinctive boosting factor for the sense of we-agency. In order to argue for my thesis, I first introduce some of the most crucial aspects of the sense of we-agency in joint actions, then I analyze how rhythmic alignment and emotional attunement have been argued to foster such an experience, and finally I introduce vitality attunement, describing how it too can be a boosting factor for the sense of we and of we-agency. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationship between for-me-ness and sociality. I start by pointing out some ambiguities in claims pursued by critics that have recently pressed on the relationship between the two notions. I next articulate a question concerning for-me-ness and sociality that builds on the idea that, occasionally at least, there is something it is like ‘for us’ to have an experience. This idea has been explored in recent literature on shared experiences and collective intentionality, and it gestures towards the (...) question of the extent to which some social interactions make a difference in the phenomenal character of their participants’ experiences. Finally, I present a construal of for-us-ness that complements the received understanding of for-me-ness, by drawing on Alfred Schutz’ concept of the we-relationship, and on the idea of second-personal awareness, i.e. awareness of a ‘you’. The current proposal provides a suitable account of some basic forms of phenomenally manifest social connectedness, in a way that is cognitively undemanding and without incurring the costs of a sui generis plural pre-reflective self-awareness. (shrink)

Skepticism about the limits of online learning is as old as online learning itself. As with other technologically-driven innovations in pedagogy, there are deep-seated worries that important educational goods might be effaced or obscured by the ways of teaching and learning that online methods allow. One family of such worries is inspired by reflections on the bodily basis of an important kind of understanding, and skepticism over whether this bodily basis can be inculcated in the absence of actual, flesh-and-blood, classroom (...) interactions. This paper focuses on the ways in which such worries arise in the influential work of Hubert Dreyfus. The negative conclusion for which I argue is that endorsing Dreyfus's Merleau-Pontian picture of the relationship between bodily skill and understanding does not commit us to his general pessimism concerning online learning—bodily, emotional, and interactive dimensions might be essential to learning, but we lack reasons to think that online learning necessarily lacks these dimensions. The negative argument motivates a positive claim: rather than giving up on online learning we should focus on designing courses and pedagogies that scaffold the bodily, affective and interactive dynamics constitutive of understanding in a particular domain. (shrink)

The tendency for people to remember less as members of a group than they would be capable of were they to remember alone is a phenomenon known as collaborative inhibition. The article offers a phenomenological account of this highly counterintuitive effect of group remembering. It argues that the mutual failure to live up to one’s potential does not warrant the standard, strongly negative views about the role of others in recall. Rather, the phenomenon may imply that sharedness itself becomes constitutive (...) of the process in the sense that interaction partners co-determine what and how to remember. Drawing on phenomenological approaches to remembering and second-person engagement, the article argues that individuals participating in shared remembering co-construct their memories by reciprocally and dynamically incorporating each other’s perspectives, attitudes, and emotions about their shared past. (shrink)

It has been claimed that a sense of us is presupposed for shared intentions to be possible. Searle introduced this notion together with the notion of the sense of the other. in joint action. It argues that the sense of the other is a necessary condition for a sense of us. Whereas thisarticle distinguishes between the “sense of the other” and the “sense of us” and elaborates on their role the sense of the other is immediate and automatic, the sense (...) of us can (but need not) arise between people and can (a) develop over time, (b) depend on the situation, and (c) involves several sufficient but not necessary processes. The article relies on research on core knowledge to better understand the sense of the other. It elaborates the sense of us using insights from cognitive science and social psychology. The article shows that the sense of the other and the sense of us can contribute to our understanding of the perception of possibilities for joint action and how individuals can come to experience actions and intentions as shared, even if the participants lack common knowledge. This leads to the conclusion that people are ordinarily socially oriented rather than individually. (shrink)

The paper offers a systematic reconstruction of the relations that, in Husserl’s work, bind together our shared social world (“the spiritual world”) with shared intentionality. It is claimed that, by sharing experiences, persons create social reasons and that these reasons impose a normative structure on the social world. Because there are two ways in which persons can share experiences (depending on whether these experiences rest on mutual communication or on group’s identity), social normativity comes in two kinds. It is either (...) directed (it has an addressee) or it is collective or absolute (it applies to all group members). Social normativity should be distinguished from axiological normativity: The first is grounded in shared intentionality, the second in values. (shrink)

Being in the bodily presence of others facilitates important perceptual, social, and informational advantages. For example, it enables direct access to other subjects’ embodied perspectives, motivates intersubjective engagements, and is involved in the construction of shared experiences and joint actions. These advantages are based on and gained through attending to and with others, i.e. they rely on social attention. It is no surprise, therefore, that a growing body of empirical data indicates that social attention is a special attentional state that (...) involves specific behavioral and neural-cognitive properties. Another important feature of the human capacity for social attention, which is highlighted in this article is that in everyday environments social attention considerably extends and enriches the subject’s attentional field. This idea draws on phenomenological considerations and on findings from cognitive science research that suggest that subjects can attend to more than in the center of their attention and that under normal conditions we can gain more features and more situations when attending to the movements, gestures, and facial expressions of others. The influence of others on the structure of our attentional field is evident from situations where others are absent from our daily surroundings. In these circumstances our attentional field narrows and the world transforms into an unfamiliar and sometimes uncanny place. Intriguingly, the same most likely occurs in social pathologies such as BPD and SAD, in which the bodily presence of others does not generate the emotional response we see in healthy humans even though the subject’s basic capacity for social attention is intact. (shrink)

Society is a composite of interacting people and groups. These groups play a significant role in maintaining social status, establishing group identity and social identity, and enforcing norms. As such, groups are essential for understanding human behavior. Nevertheless, the study of groups in everyday group life yields many diverse and sometimes contradicting theories of group behavior, and researchers tend to agree that we have yet to understand the emergence of groups out of aggregates of individuals. The current paper aims to (...) shed new light on the convoluted interrelation between groups and individuals by focusing on individuals’ social identities and group categorization. It does so by exploring the dynamic nature of the self and its implications on identity and group membership, and introducing a framework recognizing the fluidity of groups and group categorization. Incorporating historical insights with contemporary theories, this paper argues for a flexible understanding of group dynamics that surpasses rigid in-group and out-group classifications, proposing instead that group affiliations exist along a continuum that reflects the ever-changing social landscape. (shrink)

In recent years, work in cognitive science on human subjectivity as 4E has found a significant precedent in, connection with and enrichment from phenomenological understandings of the human person. Correspondingly, both disciplines have shed light on the nature of intersubjectivity in a complementary way. In this paper I highlight an underexplored aspect of phenomenological and 4E understandings of intersubjectivity, namely that these approaches make space for the possibility of properly intersubjective interactions with more than one other person at once. This (...) insight is important, I argue, because the philosophy of intersubjectivity has tended to focus on the self-other dyad as the primary unit of intersubjectivity from which all other forms of intersubjectivity can be extrapolated. Against this, I will argue that multi-person intersubjectivity is possible because of, and not in spite of, the nature and structure of individual subjectivity itself. We find our intersubjective capacity has the possibility of simultaneous engagement with multiple others built in ‘all the way through’, in virtue of being 4E. Despite the emphasis on subjectivity as embodied and worlded in the phenomenological tradition, we find that this ‘dyadic paradigm’ has been prevalent in some of the work of the classic phenomenologists. In this paper I look at the accounts of intersubjectivity offered by Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas. I outline how – in different ways, with different emphases and to different extents – both Sartre and Levinas embody something of this dyadic paradigm. This, in turn, I argue, highlights an incongruity in each of their accounts on the issue of the other’s existence in the world as 4E. This tension is most stark in Sartre’s case. I will argue that his account of the-other-as-subject explicitly fails to appreciate the other’s subjectivity as 4E. His definitionally dyadic account of ‘the look’ is indicative of this. In Levinas’ case, the issue is more subtle, as he explicitly acknowledges ‘the face’ of the other in materially worlded and embodied terms. Nevertheless, I will argue, Levinas’ account of intersubjectivity, including his account of ‘the Third’, also indicates a version of a dyadic paradigm which runs counter to the logic of a fully 4E appreciation of intersubjectivity. I will argue that minimally there is tension or ambiguity in Levinas’ account on this issue. (shrink)

To be more than a meta-ethical stance, moral phenomenology must provide an account of moral norms. This paper unites two sorts of phenomenological considerations. The first considers the teleological character of intentional experiences as ordered toward "truthfulness" in all the spheres of reason and toward a notion of self-responsibility for our beliefs, attitudes, and actions as the flourishing of rational agents. The second considers the phenomenological tradition's identification of empathy as the experience in which we encounter others as conscious agents (...) like me but irreducibly different from me and that grounds the emotions of respect and sympathy. Respect grasps the other conscious agent as an irreducibly different cognizing, rational, reflection-capable being, as making articulated judgments of value, and as making articulated choices about what activities conduce to what ends. Respect for others cannot be separated from a sympathetic care for others, a sympathy that inclines one toward caring for and aiding the other person in developing her own rational capacities. Sympathy, in brief, complements respect. At the same time, respect complements sympathy insofar as sympathy runs the risk of transmuting into paternalism. This is why, just as we need sympathy in relation to respect, we need respect in relation to sympathy. The paper introduces a distinction between first-order goods for an agent and the second-order goods associated with truthfulness. The second-order goods, the paper argues, necessarily override first-order goods when they prevent the attainment of the second-order goods for anyone. (shrink)

While Martin Buber is best known for his conception of the so-called I-Thou relation, many of his philosophical writings are concerned with the wider realities of communal being together. The aim of this paper is to examine this largely neglected aspect of Buber’s work by focusing on the concept of the “essential We”. As I will argue in this paper, this concept did not develop in a philosophical vacuum, but in critical dialogue with pre-eminent thinkers of the phenomenological tradition. Contra (...) Heidegger, Buber defends the claim that the We must be explored via an investigation of dyadic I-Thou relations. As I further demonstrate, this idea coincides in many respects with Husserl’s approach towards the We, although both conceptualize the I-Thou relation in different ways. While Husserl conceives of the relation between an I and a you as one that foregrounds the similarities between self and other and thereby allows one to adopt a common we-perspective, Buber celebrates the I-Thou relation’s ability to make visible the other person’s particularity and otherness. However, instead of putting these different accounts into competition, I argue that both highlight important features of two distinct forms of group alignment considered in recent social psychology. (shrink)

Dichotomous thinking about mental phenomena is abundant in philosophy. One particularly tenacious dichotomy is between “automatic” and “controlled” processes. In this characterization automatic and unintelligent go hand in hand, as do non-automatic and intelligent. Accounts of skillful action have problematized this dichotomous conceptualization and moved towards a more nuanced understanding of human agency. This binary thinking is, however, still abundant in the philosophy of joint action. Habits and skills allow us agentic ways of guiding complex action routines that would otherwise (...) overwhelm our reflective capacities. In this paper, I look at how theories of skill, habit, and know-how in individual action can inform a non-dichotomous account of joint action. I argue that a fuller understanding of joint agency has to understand not only group know-how, but also the role of attention and the highly integrated types of control that allow agents to act together. (shrink)

This article seeks to clarify the way in which phenomenology is conceptualized and applied in empirical research in psychiatry and psychology, emphasizing the suitability of qualitative research. It will address the What, Why, and How of phenomenological interviews, providing not only preliminary answers but also a critical analysis, and pointing to future directions for research. The questions it asks are: First, what makes an interview phenomenological? What are phenomenological interviews used for in empirical research in psychiatry and psychology? Second, why (...) do we carry out phenomenological interviews with patients? Is merely contrasting phenomenological hypotheses or concepts enough to do justice to the patients’ involvement? Third, how should we conduct phenomenological interviews with patients? How can we properly perform analysis in empirical phenomenological research in psychiatry and psychology? In its conclusion, the article attempts to go a step beyond these methodological questions, highlighting the “bigger picture”: namely, the phenomenological scientific paradigm and its core philosophical claim of reality as mind-dependent. (shrink)

According to we-mode accounts of collective intentionality, an experience is a "we-experience"—that is, part of a jointly attentional episode—in virtue of the way or mode in which the content of the experience is given to the subject of experience. These accounts are supposed to explain how a we-experience can have the phenomenal character of being given to the subject "as ours" rather than merely "as my experience" (Zahavi 2015), and do so in a relatively conceptually and cognitively undemanding way. Galotti (...) and Frith (2013) and Schmitz (2017) present we-mode accounts that are supposed to, in particular, avoid the need for the subjects of experience to have common knowledge of each other’s perceptual beliefs. In this paper, drawing in part on Schutz’s (1932/1967; 1953) writings on "the pure We-relationship", I argue that appeal to a we-mode does not render common knowledge unnecessary. To explain when we-experiences are veridical, we-mode accounts must (i) explain how a we-experience can enable rational interpersonal coordination in some high-risk situations and (ii) explain why what is experienced is "out in the open" between the subjects of the we-experience. To do this, proponents of we-mode accounts need an account of common knowledge. In addition, they must explain why certain inferences hold between we-mode and I-mode attitudes. In light of this, we-mode accounts fare no better than content accounts in illuminating how basic forms of collective intentionality are possible. (shrink)