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Socially Extended Intentions-in-Action

  • Joint Action: What is Shared?
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Abstract

According to a widely accepted constraint on the content of intentions, here called the exclusivity constraint, one cannot intend to perform another agent’s action, even if one might be able to intend that she performs it. For example, while one can intend that one’s guest leaves before midnight, one cannot intend to perform her act of leaving. However, Deborah Tollefsen’s (2005) account of joint activity requires participants to have intentions-in-action (in John Searle’s (1983) sense) that violate this constraint. I argue that the exclusivity constraint should not be accepted as an unconditional constraint on the contents of intentions-in-action: one may intend to perform a basic action that belongs both to oneself and to another agent. Based on the phenomenology of tool use, I first argue that intentions-in-action of one’s basic actions may be technologically extended, meaning that their contents are not restricted to concern the agent’s bodily movements. In analogy with this, I then argue that the phenomenology of some skillful joint activities supports the idea that one’s basic intentions-in-action may be socially extended, in violation of the widely accepted exclusivity constraint. Tollefsen’s account is specifically constructed to account for the joint activities of infants and toddlers who lack the capacity to think of others as planning agents and grasp their plan-like intentions (a capacity required by Michael Bratman’s (1992, 1993, 2009a, b) influential account of joint activity). At the end of the paper, I raise some doubts regarding the extent to which infants and toddlers have socially extended intentions-in-action.

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Notes

  1. Bratman (1997) suggests that shared intention may be multiply realisable, so perhaps not all forms of shared intention have group-intentions among their building blocks. Kutz (2000) writes: “Group-intentions are ordinary, instrumental individual intentions whose subject is the individual agent and whose object is a collective act or outcome: I intend that we will dance the tango. Clearly some paradigmatic forms collective action incorporate our action as the direct aim.” (p. 21) Kutz’ main point, however, is that there is a wide range of activities where not all participants have such intentions but which nevertheless qualify as joint activities. A discussion of this point is beyond the scope of this paper.

  2. Bratman (2009a, p.150; also 1999, p.130) takes “our having a conversation together” as an example of the kind of “small scale shared intentional agency” that he is interested in. Kutz (2000) also mentions “conversing” as an example of a joint activity (p. 2).

  3. I will follow John Searle (1983) in writing ‘Intentional’ with a capital ‘I’ when I refer to Intentional content in the technical philosophical sense of the satisfaction conditions of mental states. In other words, not only intentions or actions have Intentional content, but so do beliefs, desires, hopes, etc. The Intentional content of a belief is the conditions under which the belief is true. The Intentional content of an intention is the conditions under which the action counts as having been successfully performed.

  4. Searle (1990) has an account of what he calls “collective intentions-in-action” that is very different from Tollefsen’s account. I will not discuss his account in this paper (but see footnote 17).

  5. Bratman elsewhere suggests that shared intention may be multiply realisable (see 1997). In effect, the fulfilment of some other package of conditions may also result in two or more people having a shared intention. Each of the conditions in Bratman’s account is an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient package of conditions that realises a shared intention.

  6. When Bratman uses locutions such as “We intend to J” or “They have a shared intention to J”, these should not be taken as attributions of ordinary intentions to perform an action to a collective. Hence, attributing a shared intention “to go on vacation together” to two individuals does not violate the exclusivity constraint.

  7. Following Tollefsen (2005, p. 81), I assume that a robust theory of mind includes the following: (i) an understanding of other persons in terms of their thoughts, intentions, and beliefs; (ii) an understanding that other persons’ thoughts, beliefs, and intentions may differ from one’s own; and (iii) an understanding that others have thoughts and beliefs that may not match with the current state of affairs (false beliefs).

  8. Tollefsen points out that Bratman’s common knowledge condition also gives rise to a problem, since having common knowledge arguably also requires having a robust theory of mind. However, a discussion of this problem and Tollefsen’s proposed solution is beyond the scope of this paper.

  9. This may not be a problem for Bratman himself since he is primarily interested in the shared agency of planning agents, such as “adult humans in a broadly modern world” (2009b, p. 153). However, others have adopted his account to understand what is involved in children’s participation in joint activity (e.g. Tomasello et al. 2005, p. 680; Carpenter 2009, p. 381).

  10. Malinda Carpenter (2009) states that 12-month-olds “arguably show evidence of understanding something about others’ intentions or plans for action—the means others have chosen to use to achieve their goals.” (p. 382) She interprets this as showing that they understand something about Bratmanian plan-intentions and that, thus, the mutual responsiveness problem does not really arise. But Carpenter seems to use the notion of a ‘plan for action’ in a very broad sense that encompasses low-level control of movement sequences during action. Bratman’s notion of planning is much more narrow.

  11. Searle simply writes “intention in action”, without the dashes. I have added the dashes to emphasise that this is a technical concept of Searle’s. Note that I have also inserted dashes wherever Searle is quoted using this concept, so that it always reads “intention-in-action” in this paper.

  12. Searle writes that “in any real-life situation the intention-in-action will be much more determinate than the prior intention, it will include not only that the arm goes up but that it goes up in a certain way and at a certain speed, etc.” (1983, p. 93).

  13. Insofar as one closely links Searlean intentions-in-action with mechanisms of “motor imagery”, then Elizabeth Pacherie’s proposed account of joint action in (2007) seems to be very similar to Tollefsen’s. Pacherie (2000) herself argues that empirical work on motor imagery throws light on Searle’s notion of intention-in-action.

  14. There is one brief reference on to the possibility that such contents may be problematic: “Aside from the difficulties with the notion of an individual intending that we J […].” (Tollefsen 2005, p. 93) She does not spell out what these difficulties are though, let alone how they could be overcome.

  15. Perhaps this is why Tollefsen qualifies the content specification with “something like”.

  16. It is clear from the context that Bardsley is primarily referring to “intention-in-action” here.

  17. Searle thinks that individuals can have a special kind of mental attitude, which he calls “collective intention”, which has the form “We intend to A” or “We are A-ing” (1990). But he embraces the exclusivity constraint as a constraint on the contents of personal intentions-in-action of the form “I am A-ing”.

  18. The contralesional hand is the left (right) hand if the lesion is in the right (left) hemisphere. The other hand is the ipsilesional hand.

  19. For example, Holmes et al. (2007) studied the effect of tool use on subjects’ perception and action capabilities by comparing under what conditions and to what degree a visual distractor stimulus induced so-called “visual-tactile interaction”. Visual-tactile interaction was measured by the effect that the visual distractor (one or two flashes) had on a subject’s ability to discriminate between two tactile target stimuli (one or two vibrations felt through a stick). They found that visual-tactile interaction was more marked when (i) subjects held a single stick in their right hand to discriminate target stimuli presented on the same (right) side, compared to when (ii) the subjects held the stick in their right hand to discriminate target stimuli presented on the other (left) side (so that the axis of the stick crossed the body’s midline), and compared to when (iii) subjects either held a single stick in their right hand or held one stick in each hand to alternate between discriminating target stimuli presented on their right side and on their left side. Holmes et al. (2007) suggest that these results can be explained by appeal to a general effect that maintained spatial attention toward one side of the body has on visual-tactile interaction on that side (it becomes more likely). If the body schema encodes an extended peri-personal or peri-had space after tool use, then it is not clear why the degree of visual-tactile interaction should vary between these experimental conditions.

  20. For a much more thorough discussion about basic actions and the use of tools, see Pols (forthcoming, especially ch. 3).

  21. Indeed, in circumstances where proprioceptive and visual information about our own actions are in conflict, our conscious reports about our own bodily movements seem to rely more on vision than proprioception, as for example the ‘rubber hand illusion’ demonstrates (Botvinick and Cohen 1998).

  22. In a recent paper, Sterelny (2010) comments on his earlier argument against the extended cognition hypothesis. He submits that his “initial contrast [between the internal and external environment] was overdrawn” and that his “earlier ideas on the importance of contested space were overinfluenced by Machiavellian models of social interaction.” (p. 474).

  23. One of the reviewers suggested that breastfeeding might be an example of a joint activity where a child and a care taker have meshing socially extended intentions-in-action. This, I agree, looks like a plausible case. Breastfeeding will often occur before the child meets the requirements that are implied by conditions (2) and (3) in Tollefsen’s account, but in many cultures, breastfeeding continues well beyond the child’s first year, in which case all three conditions may indeed be met.

  24. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

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Acknowledgements

For critical comments, helpful suggestions and encouragement in response to earlier paper drafts and talks, I want to thank Natalie Gold, Steve Butterfill, Georg Theiner, Auke Pols, Andy Clark, Matt Nudds, Richard Harper, Ashley Taylor, and my audiences at the Collective Intentionality VII and European Society of Philosophy of Psychology 2010 conferences. I also want to thank two anonymous reviewers and the Edinburgh reading group on group agency (Orestis Palermos, Jonas Christensen, Eric Kerr, and Andy McKinlay) for helpful input, and Liz Irvine for proof-reading this paper. Finally, I am grateful to Microsoft Research for funding my PhD research.

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Blomberg, O. Socially Extended Intentions-in-Action. Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 335–353 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0054-3

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