In this paper, I explore the relationship between joint epistemic action and collective moral responsibility. Here, we need to distinguish between the genus, joint action, and an important species of joint action which I introduced in some earlier work, namely, joint epistemic action. In the case of the latter, but not necessarily the former, participating agents have epistemic goals, e.g. the acquisition of knowledge. The notion of joint (...) class='Hi'>action per se is a familiar one in the philosophical literature, albeit I have provided, and defended, a particular analysis of it. However, the notion of joint epistemic action is a novel one. Nevertheless, I argue that it can be given the same kind of analysis as joint action which is not epistemic in character. The other key notion in play in this paper is that of collective moral responsibility. Over the last decade or two this notion has been receiving a good deal of attention in the philosophical literature. Two influential kinds of theory are non-individualist cor.. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a theory of the speech act of assertion according to which assertion is a species of joint action. In doing so I rely on a theory of joint action developed in more detail elsewhere. Here we need to distinguish between the genus, joint action, and an important species of joint action, namely, what I call joint epistemic action. In the case of the latter, but (...) not necessarily the former, participating agents have epistemic goals, e.g., the acquisition of knowledge. It is joint epistemic action that assertion is a species of. (shrink)

The notion of a joint action is a familiar one in the philosophical literature. Moreover, the notion of epistemic action has recently been discussed in the literature. Elsewhere I have suggested that these two notions can be brought together to yield the notion of joint epistemic action and provided a relational individualist analysis of joint epistemic actions. In this article I extend this analysis and show how this extended analysis applies to (...) different kinds of important epistemic institutional phenomena: voting in a democracy; financial benchmarks, e.g. LIBOR rate) and; profiling using computer databases. Each of these institutional mechanisms is important in its own right. Moreover, each is a species of a more widespread generic social form that I refer to as joint institutional mechanisms which, I suggest, are ubiquitous yet somewhat diverse in character. Accordingly, there is a need to distinguish them from the more basic phenomenon of joint action but also to taxonomise them. The latter is a large task to which this article is a first step. (shrink)

We consider the ways humans engage in social epistemic actions, to guide each other's attention, prediction, and learning processes towards salient information, at the timescale of online social interaction and joint action. This parallels the active guidance of other's attention, prediction, and learning processes at the longer timescale of niche construction and cultural practices, as discussed in the target article.

Over the last three decades, joint action has received various definitions, which for all their differences share many features. However, they cannot fit some perplexing cases of weak joint action, such as demonstrations, where agents rely on distinct epistemic sources, and as a result, have no first-hand knowledge about each other. I argue that one major reason why the definition of such collective actions is akin to the classical ones is that it crucially relies on (...) the concept of common knowledge. To this end, I first argue for the necessity of common knowledge for joint action in general due to the increased reliability of success it entails. I then defend the relevance of common knowledge against several criticisms, point at an adequate weakening, and discuss alternative approaches. Although structurally weaker, the common knowledge has a richer content in weak joint actions. As a result, even if the links between individuals are seriously stretched, much is still shared among them. Weak joint actions still require considerable cognitive abilities indeed. (shrink)

Two questions guide this article. First, according to Fischer and Ravizza (jointly and otherwise), what epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for performing an action A are not also requirements for freely performing A? Second, how much progress have they made on this front? The article's main moral is for philosophers who believe that there are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing that are not requirements for freely A-ing because they assume that Fischer (on his (...) own or otherwise) has shown that this is so. In showing that this assumption is false, I reopen an important question for these philosophers: How are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing related to requirements for freely A-ing? This is an interesting question in its own right, of course. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce and analyze the notion of joint abilities; a species of ability possessed by agents who perform joint actions of a certain kind. Joint abilities are abilitie...

This paper examines the relatively underexplored relationship between epistemic wrongs and epistemic harms in the context of epistemic injustice. Does the presence of one always imply the presence of the other? Or, is it possible to have one without the other? Here we aim to establish a prima facie case that epistemic wrongs do not always produce epistemic harms. We argue that the epistemic wrongness of an action should never be evaluated solely based (...) on the action's consequences, viz. the epistemic and practical harms suffered by the wronged party. Instead – as we shall show – epistemic harms necessarily follow from epistemic wrongs. To conclude, we suggest ways in which extant accounts of epistemic wrongs and epistemic harms as they cash out in epistemic injustice contexts might be refined in light of our argument. (shrink)

Joint attention is an everyday phenomenon in which two or more individuals attend to an object, event process or property in the presence of each other, such that their attention to that object is to some degree intertwined with the other’s attention to it. This paper argues that joint attention has the normative role of enabling subjects to coordinate their actions in a way that would contribute to the rational execution of a joint action in accordance (...) with a prior shared plan or shared intention. This understanding of the normative function of joint attention underpins a particular understanding of the nature of joint attention: what I shall call Rich Relationalism. Rich Relationalism argues for the view that joint attention acts as an epistemically significant interface between the world, other people, and their background plans and concepts. It understands joint attention as an object-dependent, conceptually structured, token experiential state that is shared by two (or more) people. It can be contrasted with non-relational (i.e., Representational or Enactivist) accounts of joint attention on the one hand, and Lean Relationalist accounts on the other (such as John Campbell’s influential account). (shrink)

Shared intention normally leads to joint action. It does this, it is commonly said, only because it is a characteristically stable phenomenon, a phenomenon that tends to persist from the time it is formed until the time it is fulfilled. However, the issue of what the stability of shared intention comes down to remains largely undertheorized. My aim in this paper is to remedy this shortcoming. I argue that shared intention is a source of moral and epistemic (...) reasons, that responsiveness to such reasons on the part of each individual reinforces her own relevant attitudes, and that this enhances the stability of the shared intention as a whole. We thus discover an important self-reinforcing and stability-enhancing mechanism at the heart of shared intention and action. It follows from this proposal that the psychological commitment that an individual exhibits in joint action is normally a function not only of her own participatory intention, as often maintained, but also of her endorsement of the reasons created by her group’s shared intention to so act. (shrink)

We defend the claim that there can be testimonial transfer of reasons against Steinig’s recent objections. In addition, we argue that the literature on testimony about moral reasons misunderstands what is at stake in the possibility of second-hand orientation towards moral reasons. A moral community faces two different but related tasks: one theoretical (working out what things are of genuine value and how to rank goods and ends) and one practical (engaging in joint action and social coordination). In (...) between, simultaneously theoretical and practical, lies the activity of co-deliberation. Virtuous participation in co-deliberation can require limited moral deference. Refusal to recognize this, combined with excess self-trust, can derail co-deliberation. (shrink)

The question of what it means to be aware of others as subjects of mental states is often construed as the question of how we are epistemically justified in attributing mental states to others. The dominant answer to this latter question is that we are so justified in virtue of grasping the role of mental states in explaining observed behaviour. This chapter challenges this picture and formulates an alternative by reflecting on the interpretation of early joint attention interactions. It (...) argues that the standard picture is committed to an implausible account of children's awareness of the co-attender's focus of attention. On a more natural interpretation, children engaged in joint attention perceptually recognize the co-attender's attitude to some object, as something like the (correct) answer to the question of what the object is like. The developmentally basic case is not that of attributing mental states as the causes of observed behaviour but of understanding perceived attitudes and actions as appropriate responses to the shared world. The chapter concludes by exploring how this developmental claim bears on mature adult knowledge of other minds. (shrink)

Humans are prone to producing morally suboptimal and even disastrous outcomes out of ignorance. Ignorance is generally thought to excuse agents from wrongdoing, but little attention has been paid to group-based ignorance as the reason for some of our collective failings. I distinguish between different types of first-order and higher order group-based ignorance and examine how these can variously lead to problematic inaction. I will make two suggestions regarding our epistemic obligations vis-a-vis collective (in)action problems: (1) that our (...) epistemic obligations concern not just our own knowledge and beliefs but those of others, too and (2) that our epistemic obligations can be held collectively where the epistemic tasks cannot be performed by individuals acting in isolation, for example, when we are required to produce joint epistemic goods. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that individual moral obligations and responsibility entail shared (or joint) moral obligations and responsibility. However, whether individual epistemic obligations and responsibility entail shared epistemic obligations and responsibility is rarely discussed. Instead, most discussions of doxastic responsibility focus on individuals considered in isolation. In contrast to this standard approach, I maintain that focusing exclusively on individuals in isolation leads to a profoundly incomplete picture of what we're epistemically obligated to do and when we deserve (...) epistemic blame. First, I argue that we have epistemic obligations to perform actions of the sort that can be performed in conjunction with other people, and that consequently, we are often jointly blameworthy when we violate shared epistemic obligations. Second, I argue that shared responsibility is especially important to doxastic responsibility thanks to the fact that we don't have the same kind of direct control over our beliefs that we have over our actions. In particular, I argue that there are many cases in which a particular individual who holds some problematic belief only deserves epistemic blame in virtue of belonging to a group all the members of which are jointly blameworthy for violating some shared epistemic obligation. (shrink)

In the past couple of decades, there were a few major attempts to establish the thesis of pragmatic infringement – that a significant pragmatic ingredient figures significantly in the truth-conditions for knowledge-ascriptions. As candidates, epistemic contextualism and Relativism flaunted conversational standards, and Stanley's SSI promoted stakes. These conceptions were propelled first and foremost by obviously pragmatic examples of knowledge ascriptions that seem to require a pragmatic component in the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions in order to be accounted for. However, (...) if such examples can be adequately explained purely pragmatically, the need that such examples seem to invoke in such a pragmatic component is undermined. Here I lay out a new pragmatic account – of action-directed pragmatics, offering a different account of such examples and their pragmatic flavor. If adequate, it obviates the above need for pragmatic enrichment. Specifically, I develop and I argue for a well-entrenched pragmatic feature – that of a steering role. The assertions of knowledge ascriptions and their denials as well as of simple assertions (that don't invoke knowledge) play a pragmatic role of steering audiences in joint deliberational setups toward, or away from, the speaker's preferred action (as well as in assertions of 'I am sure', of epistemic modals, taste assertions, causal assertions, and more.) Various features and consequences of this account are drawn. Specifically, I explain why in the bank example (and related ones) the husband, in denying the knowledge ascription, neither lies nor misleads. (shrink)

Testimony is of epistemic and practical significance. It is of epistemic significance because majority of what we know and believe comes from being told. It is of practical significance because our agency can be undermined, bypassed, or overridden owing to systemic prejudices sustained by oppressive social or cultural practices and subsequently our routes to knowledge are either hindered or distorted. Things get more complicated when we introduce and examine how groups and other collectives testify and are recipients of (...) testimony. For instance, group speakers are typically said to represent and reflect the view of the group they are speaking on behalf of. But sometimes because of these oppressive practices, a group speaker’s assertion may deprive or impair its members’ ability to perform certain actions through speech. This dissertation examines the intersection between testimony, collective phenomena, and epistemic harms. One aim is to argue for a view on the nature of testimony that can accommodate various ways collectives testify and are recipients of testimony. In particular, I argue and present a view of testimony as a norm-governed joint activity involving individual or collective participants that commit themselves to a common aim of collaboration. Another aim is to present an epistemology of testimony that tracks our ordinary testimonial practices. In this regard, I argue for a norm view where we have reason to believe what we’re told because of the rules or norms that govern our communicative exchanges. A final aim is to explore the mechanism by which collective speech ensues in an epistemic harm driven by social identity prejudices. I argue for a form of silencing that is distinctive of groups insofar as the silencing occurs because of group dynamics. I call the mechanism underlying this form of silencing “representational impairment”. This dissertation, I hope, will motivate and inspire others to pursue philosophical projects at these intersections and in this spirit, I end by offering suggestions on areas of further development and future direction. (shrink)

Classical Athens provides a historical case study of effective joint action by a democratic community, at scale, over time, and across a socially and epistemically diverse population. Athens was concerned both with aggregating diverse knowledge for decision-making and with building common knowledge for coordinated joint action. A preserved prosecution speech delivered in an Athenian treason trial reveals how common knowledge was generated by democratic institutions and employed in legal arguments. Common knowledge facilitated eff ective coordination among (...) citizens through productive alignment cascades. Yet Athenian lawcourt procedures rendered cascading difficult, pointing to an institutionalized awareness that coordination among jurors might violate fairness as equality before the law; such violations threatened democratic values and the equilibrium between elite and non-elite citizens. Common knowledge was promoted by repeated public rituals, public monuments, and public architecture that allowed for the interpresence of large numbers of deliberative and intervisible citizens. (shrink)

In the paper, we study the dynamics of coalitional ability by proposing an extension of coalition logic (CL). CL allows one to reason about what a coalition of agents is able to achieve through a joint action, no matter what agents outside of the coalition do. The proposed dynamic extension is inspired by dynamic epistemic logic, and, in particular, by action models. We call the resulting logic coalition action model logic (CAML), which, compared to CL, (...) includes additional modalities for coalitional action models. We investigate the expressivity of CAML, and provide a complexity characterisation of its model checking problem. (shrink)

The present study investigated whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them. We examined a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment, typically involving the elaboration of “conceptual pacts,” or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we manipulated lexical entrainment in a referential communication task and measured the effect of this manipulation on epistemic and practical trust. Our results showed that participants were more likely to trust a coordinated partner than (...) an uncoordinated one, but only when the latter broke previously established conceptual pacts. (shrink)

It is a commonplace belief that many beliefs, e.g. religious convictions, are a purely private matter, and this is meant in some way to serve as a defense against certain forms of criticism. In this paper it is argued that this thesis is false, and that belief is really often a public matter. This argument, the publicity of belief argument, depends on one of the most compelling and central thesis of Peircean pragmatism. This crucial thesis is that bona fide belief (...) cannot be separated from action. It is then also suggested that we should accept a form of W. K. Clifford's evidentialism. When these theses are jointly accepted in conjunction with the basic principle of ethics that it is prima facie wrong to act in such a way that may subject others to serious but unnecessary and avoidable harm, it follows that many beliefs are morally wrong. (shrink)

The question of what is shared in joint action has been discussed mainly with reference to the notion of collective intentionality. The problem of how to account for intentional states that are shared between two or more jointly engaged creatures is particularly relevant for actions that involve distal intentions. Yet there is another important kind of joint action, which so far has received less interest, at least by philosophers. This kind of action can be described (...) in terms of a shared motor engagement of two or more creatures with their surroundings. In this paper, I address the question of what is shared in such motor engagements. I suggest that joint motor actions come off through sharing particular kinds of feelings. In order to flesh out what it means to share feelings, I introduce the notion of ‘cross-creature embodiment’—the idea that a certain type of embodied mental event is constitutively tied to the body state of another, perceptually present creature in broadly the same way in which it is tied to the experiencing creature’s own. I end by suggesting that this notion makes available a new, albeit tentative, interpretation of recent neuroscientific evidence. (shrink)

How should one attribute epistemic credit to an agent, and hence, knowledge, when cognitive processes include an extensive use of human or mechanical enhancers, informational tools, and devices which allow one to complement or modify one's own cognitive system? The concept of integration of a cognitive system has been used to address this question. For true belief to be creditable to a person's ability, it is claimed, the relevant informational processes must be or become part of the cognitive character (...) of the agent, as a result of a process of enculturation. We argue that this view does not capture the role of sensitivity to epistemic norms in forming true beliefs. An analysis of epistemic actions, basic and extended, is proposed as offering an appropriate framework for crediting an agent with knowledge. (shrink)

Many actions have instrumental aims, in which we move our bodies to achieve a physical outcome in the environment. However, we also perform actions with epistemic aims, in which we move our bodies to acquire information and learn about the world. A large literature on action recognition investigates how observers represent and understand the former class of actions; but what about the latter class? Can one person tell, just by observing another person’s movements, what they are trying to (...) learn? Here, 5 experiments explore epistemic action understanding. We filmed volunteers playing a ‘physics game’ consisting of two rounds: Players shook an opaque box and attempted to determine (i) the number of objects hidden inside, or (ii) the shape of the objects inside. Then, independent subjects watched these videos and were asked to determine which videos came from which round: Who was shaking for number and who was shaking for shape? Across several variations, observers successfully determined what an actor was trying to learn, based only on their actions (i.e., how they shook the box)—even when the box’s contents were identical across rounds. These results demonstrate that humans can infer epistemic intent from physical behaviors, adding a new dimension to research on action understanding. (shrink)

Recent experimental evidence from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience indicates that humans are equipped with unlearned elementary mathematical skills. However, formal mathematics has properties that cannot be reduced to these elementary cognitive capacities. The question then arises how human beings cognitively deal with more advanced mathematical ideas. This paper draws on the extended mind thesis to suggest that mathematical symbols enable us to delegate some mathematical operations to the external environment. In this view, mathematical symbols are not only used to (...) express mathematical concepts—they are constitutive of the mathematical concepts themselves. Mathematical symbols are epistemic actions, because they enable us to represent concepts that are literally unthinkable with our bare brains. Using case-studies from the history of mathematics and from educational psychology, we argue for an intimate relationship between mathematical symbols and mathematical cognition. (shrink)

in UndeterminedInterrogative belief revision is a relatively recent framework for belief revision theory, in which the epistemic state of an agent includes a representation of that agent's research agenda, i.e. the set of questions the agent wants to have answers to. This added structure opens new possibilites for various types of epistemic change that cannot be distinguished in traditional belief revision. In this article I use the so-called 'action model' approach known from the literature on dynamic (...) class='Hi'>epistemic logic to provide a unified framework in which we can reason about these various types of epistemic changes. I show how to model some natural examples of epistemic changes involving change of the research agenda in this framework. The action models give rise to a dynamic logic which is proven to be decidable. (shrink)

Through a series of examples, we illustrate some important drawbacks that the action model logic framework suffers from in its ability to represent the dynamics of information updates. We argue that these problems stem from the fact that the action model, a central construct designed to encode agents’ uncertainty about actions, is itself effectively common knowledge amongst the agents. In response to these difficulties, we motivate and propose an alternative semantics that avoids them by endogenizing the action (...) model. We discuss the relationship between this new framework and action model logic, and provide a sound and complete axiomatization of several new logics that naturally arise. (shrink)

Current dynamic epistemic logics often become cumbersome and opaque when common knowledge is added. In this paper we propose new versions that extend the underlying static epistemic language in such a way that dynamic completeness proofs can be obtained by perspicuous reduction axioms.

We present Dynamic Epistemic Temporal Logic, a framework for reasoning about operations on multi-agent Kripke models that contain a designated temporal relation. These operations are natural extensions of the well-known “action models” from Dynamic Epistemic Logic. Our “temporal action models” may be used to define a number of informational actions that can modify the “objective” temporal structure of a model along with the agents’ basic and higher-order knowledge and beliefs about this structure, including their beliefs about (...) the time. In essence, this approach provides one way to extend the domain of action model-style operations from atemporal Kripke models to temporal Kripke models in a manner that allows actions to control the flow of time. We present a number of examples to illustrate the subtleties involved in interpreting the effects of our extended action models on temporal Kripke models. We also study preservation of important epistemic-temporal properties of temporal Kripke models under temporal action model-induced operations, provide complete axiomatizations for two theories of temporal action models, and connect our approach with previous work on time in DEL. (shrink)

Current dynamic epistemic logics often become cumbersome and opaque when common knowledge is added. In this paper we propose new versions that extend the underlying static epistemic language in such a way that dynamic completeness proofs can be obtained by perspicuous reduction axioms.

Baltag, Moss, and Solecki proposed an expansion of classical modal logic, called logic of epistemic actions and knowledge (EAK), in which one can reason about knowledge and change of knowledge. Kurz and Palmigiano showed how duality theory provides a flexible framework for modeling such epistemic changes, allowing one to develop dynamic epistemic logics on a weaker propositional basis than classical logic (for example an intuitionistic basis). In this paper we show how the techniques of Kurz and Palmigiano (...) can be further extended to define and axiomatize a bilattice logic of epistemic actions and knowledge (BEAK). Our propositional basis is a modal expansion of the well-known four-valued logic of Belnap and Dunn, which is a system designed for handling inconsistent as well as potentially conflicting information. These features, we believe, make our framework particularly promising from a computer science perspective. (shrink)

In this paper we present an executable approach to model interactions between agents that involve sensitive, privacy-related information. The approach is formal and based on deontic, epistemic and action logic. It is conceptually related to the Belief-Desire-Intention model of Bratman. Our approach uses the concept of sphere as developed by Waltzer to capture the notion that information is provided mostly with restrictions regarding its application. We use software agent technology to create an executable approach. Our agents hold beliefs (...) about the world, have goals and commitment to the goals. They have the capacity to reason about different courses of action, and communicate with one another. The main new ingredient of our approach is the idea to model information itself as an intentional agent whose main goal it is to preserve the integrity of the information and regulate its dissemination. We demonstrate our approach by applying it to an important process in the insurance industry: applying for a life insurance. In this paper we will: (1) describe the challenge organizational complexity poses in moral reasoning about informational relationships; (2) propose an executable approach, using software agents with reasoning capacities grounded in modal logic, in which moral constraints on informational relatio nships can be modeled and investigated; (3) describe the details of our approach, in which information itself is modeled as an intentional agent in its own right; (4) test and validate it by applying it to a concrete ‘hard case’ from the insurance industry; and (5) conclude that our approach upholds and offers potential for both research and practical application. (shrink)

In this paper we present an executable approach to model interactions between agents that involve sensitive, privacy-related information. The approach is formal and based on deontic, epistemic and action logic. It is conceptually related to the Belief-Desire-Intention model of Bratman. Our approach uses the concept of sphere as developed by Waltzer to capture the notion that information is provided mostly with restrictions regarding its application. We use software agent technology to create an executable approach. Our agents hold beliefs (...) about the world, have goals and commitment to the goals. They have the capacity to reason about different courses of action, and communicate with one another. The main new ingredient of our approach is the idea to model information itself as an intentional agent whose main goal it is to preserve the integrity of the information and regulate its dissemination. We demonstrate our approach by applying it to an important process in the insurance industry: applying for a life insurance.In this paper we will: (1) describe the challenge organizational complexity poses in moral reasoning about informational relationships; (2) propose an executable approach, using software agents with reasoning capacities grounded in modal logic, in which moral constraints on informational relatio nships can be modeled and investigated; (3) describe the details of our approach, in which information itself is modeled as an intentional agent in its own right; (4) test and validate it by applying it to a concrete ‘hard case’ from the insurance industry; and (5) conclude that our approach upholds and offers potential for both research and practical application. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophical developments of the notion of distributed and/or scaffolded cognition have given rise to the “extended mind” thesis. Against the popular belief that the mind resides solely in the brain, advocates of the extended mind thesis defend the claim that a significant portion of human cognition literally extends beyond the brain into the body and a heterogeneous array of physical props, tools, and cultural techniques that are reliably present in the environment in which people grow, think, and (...) act (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 1997, 2003, 2008; Wilson 2004; Rowlands 1999, 2012; Menary 2007; Theiner 2011). However, as commentators who are friendly to the idea of distributed cognition have pointed out, the philosophical debate over extended cognition has predominantly focused on the impact of tools on our thinking while somewhat neglecting the distinctively social and cultural dimensions of cognitive scaffolding (Sterelny 2004, 2010; Caporael 1997a, 1997b; Smith and Semin 2004; Wilson 2005; Barnier et al. 2008; Sutton et al. 2010; Theiner, Allen, and Goldstone 2010). -/- To reorient the reigning paradigm, Hutchins (2010, 445) has recently proposed the “hypothesis of enculturated cognition” (HEnC) as an alternative to Clark’s (2003, 2008) largely individualistic vision of the extended mind. According to the HEnC, the “ecological assemblies of human cognition make pervasive use of cultural products” and are typically “assembled … in ongoing cultural practices” (ibid.). Cultural practices, for Hutchins, are essentially “the things people do in interaction with one another” (ibid., 440). My goal in this chapter is to follow up on Hutchins’s call to “spur the program forward” (ibid., 445), by generalizing Kirsh and Maglio’s (1994) distinction between pragmatic and epistemic actions from the level of individuals to the level of groups. The concept of a collective epistemic action refers to the ways in which groups of people actively change the structure of their social organization, with the epistemic goal of reshaping and augmenting their cognitive performance as integrated collectivities. By placing a renewed emphasis on the interactions between people, rather than between people and their tools, I hope to reconnect the cognitive-scientifically-driven “extended mind” thesis with complementary areas of social-scientific research in which groups are analyzed as the seats of action and cognition in their own right. In particular, the literature to which I aim to build a bridge in this paper is, on the one hand, certain segments of social and organizational psychology (Larson and Christensen 1993; Hinsz et al. 1997; Mohammed and Dumville 2001), and, on the other hand, theories of collective and institutional action (Ostrom 1990; List and Pettit 2011). (shrink)

Joint actions often require agents to track others’ actions while planning and executing physically incongruent actions of their own. Previous research has indicated that this can lead to visuomotor interference effects when it occurs outside of joint action. How is this avoided or overcome in joint actions? We hypothesized that when joint action partners represent their actions as interrelated components of a plan to bring about a joint action goal, each partner’s movements (...) need not be represented in relation to distinct, incongruent proximal goals. Instead they can be represented in relation to a single proximal goal – especially if the movements are, or appear to be, mechanically linked to a more distal joint action goal. To test this, we implemented a paradigm in which participants produced finger movements that were either congruent or incongruent with those of a virtual partner, and either with or without a joint action goal (the joint flipping of a switch, which turned on two light bulbs). Our findings provide partial support for the hypothesis that visuomotor interference effects can be reduced when two physically incongruent actions are represented as mechanically interdependent contributions to a joint action goal. (shrink)

Numerous philosophical theories of joint agency and its intentional structure have been developed in the past few decades. These theories have offered accounts of joint agency that appeal to higher-level states that are?shared? in some way. These accounts have enhanced our understanding of joint agency, yet there are a number of lower-level cognitive phenomena involved in joint action that philosophers rarely acknowledge. In particular, empirical research in cognitive science has revealed that when individuals engage in (...) a joint activity such as conversation or joint problem solving, they become aligned at multiple levels. We argue that this phenomenon of alignment is crucial to understanding joint actions and should be integrated with philosophical approaches. In this paper, we sketch a possible integration, and draw out its implications for understanding of joint agency and collective intentionality. The result is a process-based, dynamic account of joint action that integrates both low-level and high-level states, and seeks to capture the separate processes of how a joint action is initiated and sustained. (shrink)

Dialog is a joint action at different levels. At the highest level, the goal of interlocutors is to align their mental representations. This emerges from joint activity at lower levels, both concerned with linguistic decisions (e.g., choice of words) and nonlinguistic processes (e.g., alignment of posture or speech rate). Because of the high‐level goal, the interlocutors are particularly concerned with close coupling at these lower levels. As we illustrate with examples, this means that imitation and entrainment are (...) particularly pronounced during interactive communication. We then argue that the mechanisms underlying such processes involve covert imitation of interlocutors’ communicative behavior, leading to emulation of their expected behavior. In other words, communication provides a very good example of predictive emulation, in a way that leads to successful joint activity. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that joint action permits a certain degree of luck. The cases I have in mind exhibit the following structure: each participant believes that the intended ends of each robustly support the joint action. This belief turns out to be false. Due to lucky circumstances, the discordance in intention never becomes common knowledge. However, common knowledge of the relevant intentions would have undermined the joint action altogether. The analysis of such (...) cases shows the extent to which common knowledge of the participants’ intentions can be harmful to joint action. This extends a recent line of research that has questioned the necessity of common knowledge in joint action. (shrink)

We propose a separation logic where resources are histories (sequences) of epistemic actions so that resource update means concatenation of histories and resource decomposition means splitting of histories. This separation logic, called AMHSL, allows us to reason about the past: does what is true now depend on what was true in the past, before certain actions were executed? We show that the multiplicative connectives can be eliminated from a logical language with also epistemic and action model modalities, (...) if the horizon of epistemic actions is bounded. (shrink)

Given the premise that joint action plays some role in explaining how humans come to understand minds, what could joint action be? Not what a leading account, Michael Bratman's, says it is. For on that account engaging in joint action involves sharing intentions and sharing intentions requires much of the understanding of minds whose development is supposed to be explained by appeal to joint action. This paper therefore offers an account of a (...) different kind of joint action, an account compatible with the premise about development. The new account is no replacement for the leading account; rather the accounts characterise two kinds of joint action. Where the kind of joint characterised by the leading account involves shared intentions, the new account characterises a kind of joint action involving shared goals. (shrink)

University of Cologne, Germany Joint action and group agency have emerged as focuses of attention in recent social theory and philosophy but they have rarely been connected with one another. The argument of this article is that whereas joint action involves people acting together to achieve any sort of result, group agency requires them to act together for the achievement of one result in particular: the construction of a centre of attitude and agency that satisfies the (...) usual constraints of consistency and rationality in adequate measure. The main discovery in the recent theory of group agency is that this result is not easily achieved; no regular voting procedure will ensure, for example, that a group of individually consistent agents will display consistency in group judgments. Key Words: groups • group agents • collective agents • joint action • joint intention. (shrink)

This paper introduces freely improvised joint actions, a class of joint actions characterized by highly unspecific goals and the unavailability of shared plans. For example, walking together just for the sake of walking together with no specific destination or path in mind provides an ordinary example of FIJAs, along with examples in the arts, e.g., collective free improvisation in music, improv theater, or contact improvisation in dance. We argue that classic philosophical accounts of joint action such (...) as Bratman’s rule them out because the latter require a capacity for planning that is idle in the case of FIJAs. This argument is structurally similar to arguments for minimalist accounts of joint action, and this invites a parallel minimalist account, which we provide in terms of a specific kind of shared intentions that do not require plan states. We further argue that the resulting minimalist account is different in kind from the sort of minimalism suggested by developmental considerations and conclude in favor of a pluralistic minimalism, according to which there are several ways for an account of joint action to be minimal. (shrink)

Dialog is a joint action at different levels. At the highest level, the goal of interlocutors is to align their mental representations. This emerges from joint activity at lower levels, both concerned with linguistic decisions (e.g., choice of words) and nonlinguistic processes (e.g., alignment of posture or speech rate). Because of the high‐level goal, the interlocutors are particularly concerned with close coupling at these lower levels. As we illustrate with examples, this means that imitation and entrainment are (...) particularly pronounced during interactive communication. We then argue that the mechanisms underlying such processes involve covert imitation of interlocutors’ communicative behavior, leading to emulation of their expected behavior. In other words, communication provides a very good example of predictive emulation, in a way that leads to successful joint activity. (shrink)