Intentional joint agency: shared intention lite

Philosophers have proposed accounts of shared intentions that aim at capturing what makes a joint action intentionally joint. On these accounts, having a shared intention typically presupposes cognitively and conceptually demanding theory of mind skills. Yet, young children engage in what appears to be intentional, cooperative joint action long before they master these skills. In this paper, I attempt to characterize a modest or ‘lite’ notion of shared intention, inspired by Michael Bacharach’s approach to team–agency theory in terms of framing, group identification and team reasoning. I argue that the account of shared intentions this approach yields is less cognitively and conceptually demanding than other accounts and is thus applicable to the intentional joint actions performed by young children. I also argue that it has limitations of its own and that considering what these limitations are may help us understand why we sometimes need to take other routes to shared intentions.     

Rhythmic ostensive gestures: How adults facilitate infants’ entrance into early triadic interactions

For decades, the literature on the emergence of triadic interactions considers the end of the first year of life as the time when children become able to communicate with others intentionally about a referent. Prior to that, children only relate in dyads, either with someone else or with an object. However, several researchers claim that referents are not naturally given in human communication and that they need to be established in interaction with others.In this study, we focus on earlier triadic interactions initiated by adults, when young babies still require an adult to bring the material world within their reach. In these early triadic interactions, ostensive gestures (with the object in the hand) are one of the first means of enabling the establishment of shared reference. Such gestures are easier to understand since sign (gesture) and referent (object) coincide. We conducted a longitudinal study with 6 babies filmed at 2, 3 and 4 months old in interaction with their mothers and a sounding object (a maraca). We analyzed different communicative initiatives by the adult and the child’s responses.The results show that children come to understand the adult’s communicative intention gradually through interaction. Adults include children in organized communicative “niches” based on ostensive actions, both through ostensive gestures and demonstrations of the use of the object. Consequently, the first shared understandings between adult and child take place around the object and its uses. Rhythm is a powerful tool used to structure the interaction. Eventually, adults provide space to children to actively interact with the sounding object themselves. These results highlight the importance of considering ostensive actions as a communicative tool that favors joint attention and action. They also bring some light to the interdependence between a child who actively perceives and acts, and the structured situation that the adult organizes for them.     

Normative predictions of collectivist‐individualist intentions and behaviour of Indians

Five hundred and thirty‐four college students, drawn from five distantly located cities in India that varied in affluence and infrastructural facilities, participated in a study designed to understand their normative predictions about people's responses to 20 situations. The responses consisted of five combinations: collectivist behaviour with collectivist intention (CC), individualist behaviour with individualist intention (II), collectivist behaviour with individualist intention to behave subsequently in an individualist way or to serve individualist intention (CI), individualist behaviour with collectivist intention to behave subsequently in a collectivist way or to serve a collectivist purpose (IC), and a mix of collectivist and individualist intention and behaviour (C&I). The findings indicated that the situations involving family members were reported to induce collectivism in behaviour as well as intentions. However, compelling personal needs were believed to lead to serve individualist interests, but by adopting collectivist behaviour. Further, collectives, compared to individuals, were reported to behave in collectivist way. Even when collectives behaved in individualist fashion, the ultimate aim was conjectured to serve a collectivist purpose. Females, like males, were perceived to meet compelling individual needs by resorting to collectivist behaviour. In less compelling matters that are less salient to their gender role, females were reported to remain collectivist in their behaviour as well as intentions. More affluent places with better infrastructure are believed to manifest either a mix of collectivist and individualist behaviour and intentions or a response pattern that enables individualist interests to be served through collectivist behaviour. A clear individualist pattern of behaviour and intention was rarely predicted to occur. The changing socioeconomic scenario has probably induced a shift towards cultivating individualist intentions that are still realized through collectivist behaviour. With the rate of change accelerating further, individualism is likely to get stronger, particularly in more affluent areas with better infrastructure. However, the combinations of collectivist and individualist behaviour and intentions are likely to remain complex.     

Making our ends meet: shared intention,goal adoption and the third-person perspective

Mind reading (i.e. the ability to infer the mental state of another agent) is taken to be the main cognitive ability required to share an intention and to collaborate. In this paper, I argue that another cognitive ability is also necessary to collaborate: representing others’ and ones’ own goals from a third-person perspective (other-centred or allocentric representation of goals). I argue that allocentric mind reading enables the cognitive ability of goal adoption, i.e. having the goal that another agent’s achieve p because and as long as another agent has that goal that p. Having clarified the relevance of mutual goal adoption for acting jointly, I argue that when an intention is shared between several agents, each individual has an intention in favour of the joint action and one in favour of a joint mode of reasoning. This mode of reasoning is allocentric reasoning. Finally, I elaborate on the consequences of this view for the scientific study of human collaboration.     

Shared minds: How mothers and infants co-construct early patterns of choice within intentional communication partnerships

The qualitative research method of case study inquiry is employed to investigate different patterns observed in early communicative interactions between two infants and their mothers. These mothers and babies were similar in significant ways: Both mothers were observed to be competent, well-functioning adults and reported no communicative or parenting dysfunction: both infants were evaluated as developing normally in terms of their cognitive level and acquisition of communication behaviors. However, a difference was observed between the dyads in their effectiveness in contributing to the infants' development as intentional communicators. The extent to which an infant and mother “share minds” is proposed as accounting for the observed difference. This phenomenon of “shared minds” is examined by observing the process of choice co-construction engaged in by mothers and infants during communication. It is concluded that characteristics of these early co-constructions influence the way in which the young child begins to act with intention and to interpret him- or herself and others as intentional communicative beings. © 1997 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

Conversation and Behavior Games in the Pragmatics of Dialogue

In this article we present the bases for a computational theory of the cognitive processes underlying human communication. The core of the article is devoted to the analysis of the phases in which the process of comprehension of a communicative act can be logically divided: (1) literal meaning, where the reconstruction of the mental states literally expressed by the actor takes place: (2) speaker's meaning, where the partner reconstructs the communicative intentions of the actor; (3) communicative effect, where the partner possibly modifies his own beliefs and intentions; (4) reaction, where the intentions for the generation of the response are produced; and (5) response, where an overt response is constructed. The model appears to be compatible with relevant facts about human behavior. Our hypothesis is that, through communication, an actor tries to exploit the motivational structures of a partner so that the desired goal is generated. A second point is that social behavior requires that cooperation be maintained at some level. In the case of communication, cooperation is, in general, pursued even when the partner does not adhere to the actor's goals, and therefore no cooperation occurs at the behavioral level. This important distinction is reflected in the two kinds of game we introduce to account for communication. The main concept implied in communication is that two agents overtly reach a situation of shared mental states. Our model deals with sharedness through two primitives: shared beliefs and communicative intentions.     

Communication before communicative intentions

This paper explores the significance of intelligent social behavior among non-human animals for philosophical theories of communication. Using the alarm call system of vervet monkeys as a case study, I argue that interpersonal communication (or what I call “minded communication”) can and does take place in the absence of the production and recognition of communicative intentions. More generally, I argue that evolutionary theory provides good reasons for maintaining that minded communication is both temporally and explanatorily prior to the use of communicative intentions. After developing these negative points about the place of communicative intentions in detail, I provide a novel alternative account according to which minded communication is characterized in terms of patterns of action and response that function to coordinate the representational mental states of agents. I show that an account which centers on patterns of representational coordination of this sort is well suited to capture the theoretical roles associated with minded communication and that it does so in a way that provides a good fit with comparative facts about the presence of minded communication among non-human animals.     

Is a naturalistic theory of communication possible?

This article presents a theoretical discussion of the relationship between language and communication. I discuss Chomsky’s position on this topic. Chomsky claims that if it is possible to construct a scientific theory of the language faculty, there is no possibility to construct a scientific theory of communication because in communication human intentionality is involved. This position is contrasted by philosophers of language considering that communication is to be studied as a form of rational action. I maintain that both these positions are not supported by the evidence coming from developmental research. Taking a cognitive point of view I contend that a communicative faculty can be defined that develops since infancy to adulthood, which has features independent of language and action. Different steps in the development of the communicative ability are linked to a parallel development of the theory of mind. I then argue in favor of a distinction between collective action and communication considering that while collective action is common to human and nonhuman primates, communication is typically human.     

Alfred Schutz’ Theory of Communicative Action

This paper addresses the notion of communicative action on the basis of Alfred Schutz’ writings. In Schutz’ work, communication is of particular significance and its importance is often neglected by phenomenologists. Communication plays a crucial role in his first major work, the Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt from 1932, yet communication is also a major feature in his unfinished works which were later completed posthumously by Thomas Luckmann: The Structures of the Life World (1973, 1989). In these texts, Schutz sometimes refers to “communicative action,” and he comes to ascribe a crucial role to communication within the domain of the life world he calls everyday life. Based on Schutz’ texts, I shall first attempt to critically reconstruct the defining features of his notion of communication and communicative action. As a result, it emerges that Schutz’ notion of communication, particularly in its early incarnation, seems to be, at first glance, characterized by a dichotomy between virtual communication, that is communicative action in a narrow sense, and non-virtual communication. As I want to show with respect to the seemingly established dichotomous distinction between “mediated” and “immediate social action,” Schutz himself started to overcome this dichotomy. Based on this thesis, I will try to sketch a basic outline of a theory of communicative action, a theory less formulated by Schutz’ than built on Schutz’ writings. As the idea of communicative action, and particularly the transgression of the distinction between mediated and immediate action, affects the very structures of the life-world described by Schutz and Luckmann, I will ultimately demonstrate that any mundane phenomenology of the life-world requires a triangulatory method.     

History and Intentions in the Experience of Artworks

The role of personal background knowledge—in particular knowledge about the context of production of an artwork—has been only marginally taken into account in cognitive approaches to art. Addressing this issue is crucial to enhancing these approaches’ explanatory power and framing their collaboration with the humanities (Bullot and Reber 2012). This paper sketches a model of the experience of artworks based on the mechanisms of intention attribution, and shows how this model makes it possible to address the issue of personal background knowledge empirically. I claim that the role of intention attribution in art experience has been incorrectly accounted in the literature because of an overly narrow definition of “intention.” I suggest that the observer can recover not only the artist’s abstract projects, but any kind of mental states that have played a causal role during the production of the work. In addition, I suggest that this recovery occurs in large part unconsciously and/or implicitly. I provide support for these claims by distinguishing three families of psychological mechanisms of intention attribution that are activated by artworks: one involved in the cognition of artifacts, one devoted to communication, and one involved in action perception.     

Towards defending a semantic theory of expression in art: revisiting Goodman

Abstract

Nelson Goodman’s attempt to analyse the expressiveness of artworks in semantic terms has been widely criticised. In this paper I try to show how the use of an adapted version of his concept of exemplification, as proposed by Mark Textor, can help to alleviate the worst problems with his theory of expression. More particularly I argue that the recognition of an intention, which is central to Textor’s account of exemplification, is also fundamental to our understanding of expressiveness in art. Moreover I propose that the recognition of this intention depends on our interpretation, of the artwork–an insight Goodman tried to capture with his assertion that our attributions of expressive properties to artworks function metaphorically. The realisation of the context-dependence of our expressive judgements about art and, hence, of the central role interpretation plays in these judgements, I contend, counts in favour of theories of expression like Goodman’s that focus on semantic concerns.     

Understanding Miscommunication: Speech Act Recognition in Digital Contexts

Successful language use requires accurate intention recognition. However, sometimes this can be undermined because communication occurs within an interpersonal context. In this research, I used a relatively large set of speech acts (n = 32) and explored how variability in their inherent face-threat influences the extent to which they are successfully recognized by a recipient, as well as the confidence of senders and receivers in their communicative success. Participants in two experiments either created text messages (senders) designed to perform a specific speech act (e.g., agree) or interpreted those text messages (receivers) in terms of the specific speech act being performed. The speech acts were scaled in terms of their degree of face threat. In both experiments, speech acts that were more threatening were less likely to be correctly recognized than those that were less threatening. Additionally, the messages of the more threatening speech acts were longer and lower in clout than the less threatening speech acts. Senders displayed greater confidence in communicative success than receivers, but judgments of communicative success (for both senders and receivers) were unrelated to actual communicative success. The implications of these results for our understanding of actual communicative episodes are discussed.     

Why metaphors make good insults: perspectives,presupposition, and pragmatics

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ‘framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ‘complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force.     

Enhancing theory of mind in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia with transcranial direct current stimulation

Behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is a form of frontotemporal degeneration characterized by early changes in personality, emotional blunting, and/or loss of empathy. Recent research has highlighted that these features may be at least partially explained by impairments in the theory of mind (ToM; i.e., the ability to understand and predict other people’s behaviour by attributing independent mental states to them). The aim of this randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study was to test the hypothesis that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the medial frontal cortex (MFC) selectively enhances communicative intention processing, a specific ToM ability. Using a single-session online design, we administered a ToM task that measures the ability to represent other people’s private and communicative intentions during active or sham tDCS to 16 bvFTD patients. To assess the impact of dementia on performance on the ToM task, we included 16 age-matched healthy volunteers who were asked to perform the entire experimental ToM task. BvFTD is characterized by an impairment in the comprehension of both communicative and private intentions relative to a healthy control group and by a disproportional impairment in communicative intention compared with private intention processing. Significant and selective accuracy improvement in the comprehension of communicative intentions after active stimulation was observed in patients with bvFTD. This is the first study that analyses ToM ability in patients with bvFTD using tDCS stimulation. Our findings could potentially contribute to the development of an effective, noninvasive brain stimulation treatment of ToM impairments in patients with bvFTD.     

Team adaptation to an unforeseen system failure: Limits of the potential aids of shared knowledge and standardized communication

The present study investigates the potential benefits of a team’s shared knowledge and standardized communication in adapting to an unforeseen change by combining literature on adaptation and team performance. Each of 20 teams performed a dynamic team task and was suddenly confronted with a simulated partial system breakdown. Results show that a methodological framework designed to describe performance adaptation to an unforeseen change in individuals can also be used to model performance adaptation in teams. The system failure was followed by a performance drop and a subsequent period of gradual performance recovery. Accuracy of teams’ shared knowledge correlated positively with performance before and after the change, confirming and extending the literature on shared mental models. However, the amount of knowledge similarity did not aid teams in adapting to the unforeseen system breakdown. In addition, improving teams’ standardized communication had no damping effect on the sudden performance drop and neither helped them during the subsequent recovery period. These results show that even though shared knowledge and efficient communication are of high value to team performance and success, these characteristics are limited in aiding adaptive team performance after unforeseen unique changes that force team members to update their strategies.     

Why We Did It: An Anscombian Account of Collective Action

Abstract

In this paper, I am concerned with persons’ capacity for joint action. I start by suggesting that approaches which seek to account for that capacity in terms of collective intentionality face a problem: there are actions that clearly seem to qualify as collective even though the involved persons cannot be said to entertain an overarching ‘We’‐intention (however one characterizes this notion). I then go on to develop an alternative account of action that loosely draws on Elizabeth Anscombe’s action theory and show how this alternative account can be applied to joint action. In so doing, I stress the importance of the phenomenal dimension of agency.     

Prediction,Authority, and Entitlement in Shared Activity

Shared activity is often simply willed into existence by individuals. This poses a problem. Philosophical reflection suggests that shared activity involves a distinctive, interlocking structure of intentions. But it is not obvious how one can form the intention necessary for shared activity without settling what fellow participants will do and thereby compromising their agency and autonomy. One response to this problem suggests that an individual can have the requisite intention if she makes the appropriate predictions about fellow participants. I argue that implementing this predictive strategy risks derailing practical reasoning and preventing one from forming the intention. My alternative proposal for reconciling shared activity with autonomy appeals to the idea of acting directly on another's intention. In particular, I appeal to the entitlement one sometimes has to another's practical judgment, and the corresponding authority the other sometimes has to settle what one is to do.     

理解私人意图与交际意图的ERP证据

已有的意图理解神经成像研究大多关注理解单一个体私人意图的脑功能定位, 而较少涉及两个或更多人的社会性交际意图, 大脑区分私人意图和交际意图的动态时间过程尚不清楚。本研究记录了16名健康被试理解三种不同意图任务时的脑电成分。三种意图分别为: 1)私人意图; 2)交际意图; 3)物理意图。电生理学结果表明在大脑顶区, 私人意图的N250的峰值显著大于交际意图和物理意图。在晚期阶段(300~600 ms), 交际意图的晚期正成分(LPC)的平均波幅要显著大于私人意图和物理意图。在400~600 ms时, 私人意图的LPC的平均波幅要显著大于物理意图。本研究为理解私人意图和交际意图的动态加工过程提供了神经电生理学的初步证据。     

语境、意向与意义——兼评塞尔的意向性意义理论

塞尔在其前期理论把语言的意义归之于言语行为,特别是交流意向,但在其后期理论则把意义归结为表征意向,而交流意向派生于表征意向,甚至割断了意义和交流之间的联系。笔者通过引入语境因素和指称意向的概念,澄清了语境、意向和意义之间的关系,使塞尔具有私人性的表征意向和交流意向具有一定的公共性,以此扭转塞尔理论中的心理主义趋向,回归到弗雷格的反心理主义的语义学进路。