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The challenge is to explain the emergence, in evolution or development, of sophisticated forms of human activity including, referential communication and mindreading.

 

A number of researchers have suggested that meeting this challenge requires us to invoke some kind of social interaction ...

 

According to what Moll and Tomasello call the Vygotskian Intelligence Hypothesis,

 

 

 

 

I'm going to assume that they are right.

 

If we take these ideas seriously, the first question we need to ask is, What kinds of social interaction matters for the emergence of sophisticated human activities?

 

There seems to be some consensus on the idea that joint action is particularly important.

 

So the challenge was to explain the emergence of sophisticated human activities including referential communication and mindreading.

 

The conjecture I want to consider, borrowed from a variety of researchers, is that joint action plays a role in explaining how sophisticated human activities emerge. There is a compelling objection to this conjecture. It will take me a while to explain what the objection is. The objection arises when we ask ask what joint action is.

 

 

 

Minimally, an account of joint action should explain what distingiushes joint action from parallel but merely individual action.

 

A paradigm case of joint action would be two sisters cycling to school together.

 

By contrast, two strangers cycling side-by-side are performing parallel but merely individual actions.

 

Or, to take another paradigm case,

 

when members of a flash mob in the Central Cafe respond to a pre-arranged cue by noisily opening their newspapers, they perform a joint action.

 

But when someone not part of the mob just happens to noisily open her newspaper in response to the same cue, her action is not part of any joint action.%

 

\footnote{

 

See \citet{Searle:1990em}; in his example park visitors simultaneously run to a shelter, in once case as part of dancing together and in another case because of a storm.

 

Compare \citet{Pears:1971fk} who uses contrast cases to argue that whether something is an ordinary, individual action depends on its antecedents.

 

}

 

Lots of philosophers and some psychologists think that all joint actions involve shared intention, and even that characterising joint action is fundamentally a matter of characterising shared intention.

 

 

 

 

 

It is helpful to draw a parallel with individual action ... Consider Davidson’s question is, Which events are actions?

 

Suppose we ask, Which events are actions? (This is Davidson’s question.) Here the contrast is with things that merely happen to an agent. To illustrate, we might be struck by the contrast between your arm being caused to go up by forces beyond your control, and the action you perform when you raise your arm. Or we might be struck by the contrast between mere reflexes, such as the eyeblink reflex, and the action of blinking your eyes (perhaps to greet someone).

 

One quite natural and certainly influential way to answer this question is by appeal to intention. The idea is that events are actions in virtue of being appropriately related to an intention of yours.

 

Note that I’m not confidently endorsing this answer; in fact I’m not even confident that the question is ultimately the right question to ask. I’m just suggesting this is a reasonably straightforward starting point for us.

 

This question about ordinary, individual action is parallel to our current working question about joint action, which we might phrase as ‘Which events are *joint* actions’ ...

 

Now we can see one attraction of appealing to shared intention. It allows us to give a parallel answer to the question about joint action: a joint action is an event which is appropriately related to a shared intention.

 

So to the extent that we are persuaded by the standard account of which events are actions, it is natural to aim for a structurally parallel account of which events are joint actions. To do this we merely have to characterise shared intentions.

 

As we shall see, there are long running, deep conflicts over the nature of shared intention. The range of different approaches can be quite daunting. This parallel between intention and shared intention is important because it is a rare point on wihch almost everyone will agree. \textbf{Despite the disagreement on details, I think one thing almost everyone agrees about is this: shared intention is to joint action at least approximately what ordinary individual intention is to ordinary, individual action.}

 

It’s important to acknowledge that we haven’t yet said anything very informative about what shared intention is. The question was, Which events are joint actions? The answer was, those which stand in an appropriate relation to a shared intention. Then we ask what a shared intention is. And the answer is, it’s something in virtue of which events are joint actions. I don’t think the circle makes this completely useless; but I’m mentioning the circularity to stress that we don’t yet have an account of what shared intention is. An account of shared intention should to provide deep insight into the nature of shared agency.

 

 

In making this idea more precise, Bratman proposes sufficient conditions for us to have a shared intention that we J ...

 

... the idea is then that an intentional joint action is an action that is appropriately related to a shared intention.

 

Note that the conditions require not just that we intend the joint action, but that we intend it because of each other's intentions, where this is common knowledge.

 

So we need not just intentions about intentions ...

 

... also you need to know things about my knowledge of your intentions concerning my intentions.

 

This indicates that, in general, having shared intentions requires mindreading at close to (or perhaps just beyond) the limits of most adult humans' abilities. Bratman's account of shared intention is an example where reciprocity is modeled as higher-order escalation.

 

 

And this is a problem for us ...

 

This is a problem because our conjecture was that joint action plays a role in explaining how sophisticated human activities emerge.

 

But if joint action presupposes mindreading at close to the limits of human abilities, and if mindreading abilities are a paradigm case of humans' cognitive sophistication, then we must reject the conjecture. For in appealing to joint action we would be presupposing what was supposed to be explained. In what follows I want to defend the conjecture by identifying a way around the objection.

 

But before I do this, I want to mention a problem with the objection ...

 

Note that these conditions are offered as sufficient but not necessary. (Bratman originally claimed that they were necessary and sufficient, but nothing in the construction rules out alternative realisations of the functional characterisation of shared intention.)

 

As it stands, then, this objection does not establish much. It concerns conditions imposed by the substantial account of shared intention which are sufficient but not necessary conditions. The substantial account is supposed to characterise one—perhaps one among many—ways in which the functional role of shared intentions can be realised. So the objection serves only to raise a question.

 

\textbf{Are there in fact alternative sufficient conditions for shared intention, conditions that can be met without already having abilities to use psychological concepts whose development was supposed to be explained by joint action?}

 

The answer to this question is not entirely straightforward. We must begin with the functional roles of shared intention, for these provide necessary conditions. One of the roles of shared intentions is to coordinate planning. What does coordinating planning involve? Intuitively the idea is that just as individual intentions serve to coordinate an individual’s planning over time, so shared intentions coordinate planning between agents. (I use the terms ‘individual intention’ and ‘individual goal’ to refer to intentions and goals explanatory of individual actions; an ‘individual action’ is an action performed by just one agent such as that described by the sentence ‘Ayesha repaired the puncture all by herself’.) A second role for shared intentions is to structure bargaining concerning plans. To understand these roles it is essential to understand what ‘planning’ means in this context. The term ‘planning’ is sometimes used quite broadly to encompass processes involved in low-level control over the execution of sequences of movements, as is often required for manipulating objects manually \citep[e.g.][]{en_1535}, as well as processes controlling the movements of a limb on a single trajectory \citep[e.g.][]{en_1681}. In Bratman’s account and this paper, the term ‘planning’ is used in a narrower sense. Planning in this narrow sense exists to coordinate an agent’s various activities over relatively long intervals of time; it involves practical reasoning and forming intentions which may themselves require further planning, generating a hierachy of plans and subplans. Paradigm cases include planning a birthday party or planning to move house.

 

Given the functional roles of shared intention, when (if ever) must the states which realise shared intentions include intentions about others’ intentions? Coordinating plans with others does not seem always or in principle to require specific intentions about others’ intentions. It is plausible that in everyday life some of our plans are coordinated largely thanks to a background of shared preferences, habits and conventions. Consider, for example, people who often meet in a set place at a fixed time of day to discuss research over lunch. These people can coordinate their lunch plans merely by setting a date and following established routine; providing nothing unexpected happens, they seem not to need intentions about each other’s intentions. Within limits, then, coordinating plans may not always require intentions about intentions. The same may hold for structuring bargaining. But when the background of shared preferences, habits and conventions is not sufficient to ensure that our plans will be coordinated, it is necessary to monitor or manipulate others’ plans. And since intentions are the basic elements of plans (in the special sense of ‘plan’ in terms of which Bratman defined shared intention), this means monitoring or manipulating others’ intentions. The background which makes for effortlessly coordinated planning is absent when our aims are sufficiently novel, when the circumstances sufficiently unusual (as in many emergencies), and when our co-actors are sufficiently unfamiliar. In all of these cases, coordinating plans and structuring bargaining will involve monitoring or manipulating others’ intentions. Now this does not necessarily involve forming intentions about their intentions because, in principle, monitoring and manipulating others’ intentions could (within limits) be achieved by representing states which serve as proxies for intentions rather than by representing intentions as such, much as one can (within limits) monitor and manipulate others’ visual perceptions by representing their lines of sight. But possession of general abilities to monitor and manipulate others’ intentions does require being able to form intentions about others’ intentions.

 

The question was whether there are sufficient conditions for shared intention which do not presuppose abilities to use psychological concepts whose development is supposed to be explained by joint action. As promised, the answer is not straightforward. In a limited range of cases, coordinating plans and perhaps structuring bargaining does not appear to require insights into other minds. But in other cases, particularly cases involving novel aims or agents unfamiliar with each other, intentions about others’ intentions are generally required.

 

The main question for this section was whether Bratman’s account captures a notion of joint action suitable for explaining the early development of children’s abilities to think about minds. Some of the joint actions which young children engage in involve novel aims, and some involve unfamiliar partners. So if these joint actions did involve coordinating planning and structuring bargaining, they could not rest on a shared background but would require abilities to form intentions about others’ intentions. It follows that joint action would presuppose much of the sophistication in the use of psychological concepts whose development it was supposed to explain. So given the premise that joint action plays a role in explaining early developments in understanding minds, it cannot be the case that the joint actions children engage in as soon as they engage in any joint actions involve shared intentions as characterised by Bratman.

 

How to get around the objection?

 

 

 

This is a bad option; it either involves rejecting claims about intention that amount to saying there is no such thing as intention, or else it involves breaking the parallel between intention and shared intention. But that parallel is pretty much all we have to anchor or understanding of shared intention.

 

This is the claim I will eventually reject. But first let us examine children’s capacities.

 

 

Carpenter conflates goals and intentions, so ignores the key difference between actions and plans.

 

 

So: the objection I just offered to taking Bratman’s account of shared intention and joint action to characterise the notion of joint action of interest in explaining development was narrowly theoretical.

 

The objection was that you can’t explain the developmental emergence of mindreading by invoking joint action if your account of joint action implies that abilities to perform joint actions presuppose sophisticated mindreading.

 

Accepting this theoretical objection would be consistent with accepting Carpenter’s claim. The only consequence is that we would have to reject the conjecture that you can explain the developmental emergence of mindreading by invoking joint action.

 

So I think Carpenter is saying: the objection is correct, and we should reject the conjecture.

 

Task: give the tool to another person, who needs to put the spherical end into the box. (Tip: you need to grasp it by the spherical end and pass it so that the other takes the cube-end; they can then insert it optimally.)

 

 

‘One child had to insert the turn-tool on the right of the apparatus and then turn so that the metal rod stretching across moved the panel out of the way of the ball. The other person could then insert the push tool on the left, pushing the silver ball into the hole similar to a billiard cue.’ \citep{warneken:2014_young}

 

Unidirectional : child A has to select the tool that B doesn’t have.

 

Bidirectional : child A can select either tool.

 

‘(a) Unidirectional: The left box will be opened first. Only the left child has a choice. For success, this child has to choose the push tool (lower left: thick handle, long thin top). The partner child has to retrieve the only available turn tool (upper right: thick handle, short thin top).’ \citep{warneken:2014_young}

 

BU - first bidirectional then unidirectional.

 

The three year olds are hopeless in all conditions except the bidirectional condition when they have first had the unimanual condition. So there is no forward planning, but there is some evidence that three-year-olds can take into account what another has done.

 

 

Note that the conditions require not just that we intend the joint action, but that we intend it because of each other's intentions, where this is common knowledge.

 

All the evidence has suggests that there is a mismatch between Bratman’s account of joint action and 1- to 3-year-olds’ joint action abilities.

 

Let’s consider two more studies on this ...

 

I started with Carpenter’s objection ...

 

 

Carpenter conflates goals and intentions, so ignores the key difference between actions and plans.

 

 

It turns out, I think, that Carpenter is wrong to this extent. Whatever exactly one-year-olds mindreading abilities, they do not seem to be making much use of information about others’ intentions in performing joint actions. And so it is wrong to think of their abilities in terms of Bratman’s account of joint actions.

 

So with respect to our overall line of enquiry, it may still be possible to hold on to the conjecture if we can overcome the objection.

 

Methods: still face; replay (infants detect whether caregiver reacts, so are less satisifed with a replay).

 

\citet[p.~196]{brownell:2011_early} comment: ‘infants become progressively tuned to the timing and structure of dyadic exchange’

 

\citet[p.~197]{brownell:2011_early} comment: ‘adult-infant dyadic interactions expand to include objects, events, and individuals outside of the dyad (Moore and Dunham 1995)’

 

\citet[p.~197]{brownell:2011_early} comment: ‘Eventually, infants begin themselves to initiate joint action with adults and to respond in unique ways when adults violate their expectations for participation in the joint activity. For example, if a parent becomes distracted during peek-a-boo and fails to take her turn, 12-month olds may try to re-start the game by vocalizing to the adult or by re- enacting a well-rehearsed part of the game such as placing the cloth over their own face and waiting. One-year olds also begin to point to interesting sights and events to share their interest and affect and they expect adults to respond appropriately by looking (Liszkowski, et al 2006).’

 

 

‘Without the structure and scaffolding provided by the expert adult partner, 1-year-old children are unable to generate and sustain joint action with each other in the service of an external goal. By age two, however, they can do so readily, even with unfamiliar agemates and on novel, unfamiliar tasks’ \citep[p.~204]{brownell:2011_early}.

 

Ages: 14, 18 and 24 months.

 

Elevator task: free an object from a cylinder. Two roles. Role A: position yourself in the right location to retrieve the target object. Role B: push up the cylinder and hold it in place while another retrieves it.

 

 

\citet[p.~200]{brownell:2011_early} comment: ‘Across these non-routine tasks, 18-month olds’ behavior with the adult partner was rated as predominantly “uncoordinated” (vs. “coordinated” or “very coordinated”) and the children exhibited “low” cooperative engagement (vs. “medium” or “high”). On those tasks requiring children to anticipate the partner’s actions and to adjust their behavior accordingly, 18-month olds’ performance did not differ from chance. By age two, children operated at “medium” levels of cooperative engagement and were above chance in anticipating and coordinating their behavior with the adult.’

 

‘social coordinations show a marked improvement between children at 14 and 18 months of age’ \citep{warneken:2007_helping}.

 

How to get around the objection? Maybe we have to construct an alternative notion of joint action?

 

 

Let me first explain something about this notion of a collective goal ...

 

Ayesha takes a glass and holds it up while Beatrice pours prosecco; unfortunately the prosecco misses the glass and soak Zachs’s trousers.

 

Here are two sentences, both true:

 

 

 

The first sentence is naturally read *distributively*; that is, as specifying something that each drop did individually. Perhaps first drop one fell, then another fell.

 

But the second sentence is naturally read *collectively*. No one drop soaked Zach’s trousers; rather the soaking was something that the drops accomplised together.

 

If the sentence is true on this reading, the tiny drops' soaking Zach’s trousers is not a matter of each drop soaking Zach’s trousers.

 

Now consider an example involving actions and their outcomes:

 

 

This sentence can be read in two ways, distributively or collectively. We can imagine that we are talking about a sequence of actions done over a period of time, each of which soaked Zach’s trousers. In this case the outcome, soaking Zach’s trousers, is an outcome of each action.

 

Alternatively we can imagine several actions which have this outcome collectively---as in our illustration where Ayesha holds a glass while Beatrice pours. In this case the outcome, soaking Zach’s trousers, is not necessarily an outcome of any of the individual actions but it is an outcome of all of them taken together. That is, it is a collective outcome.

 

(Here I'm ignoring complications associated with the possibility that some of the actions collectively soaked Zach’s trousers while others did so distributively.)

 

Note that there is a genuine ambiguity here. To see this, ask yourself how many times Zach’s trousers were soaked. On the distributive reading they were soaked at least as many times as there are actions. On the collective reading they were not necessarily soaked more than once. (On the distributive reading there are several outcomes of the same type and each action has a different token outcome of this type; on the collective reading there is a single token outcome which is the outcome of two or more actions.)

 

Conclusion so far: two or more actions involving multiple agents can have outcomes distributively or collectively. This is not just a matter of words; there is a difference in the relation between the actions and the outcome.

 

Now consider one last sentence:

 

 

Whereas the previous sentence was causal, and so concened an actual outcome of some actions, this sentence is teleological, and so concerns an outcome to which actions are directed.

 

Like the previous sentence, this sentence has both distributive and collective readings. On the distributive reading, each of their actions was directed to an outcome, namely soaking Zach’s trousers. So there were as many attempts on his trousers as there are actions. On the collective reading, by contrast, it is not necessary that any of the actions considered individually was directed to this outcome; rather the actions were collectively directed to this outcome.

 

Conclusion so far: two or more actions involving multiple agents can be collectively directed to an outcome.

 

Where two or more actions are collectively directed to an outcome, we will say that this outcome is a *collective goal* of the actions. Note two things. First, this definition involves no assumptions about the intentions or other mental states of the agents. Relatedly, it is the actions rather than the agents which have a collective goal. Second, a collective goal is just an actual or possible outcome of an action.

 

We provide a defintion of joint to include the notion of a collective goal ...

 

 

Is this good enough? I’m not sure it is. But note that it is agnostic about mechanisms ... Our acting on a shared intention is one way of for our actions to have a collective goal; but maybe there are others ...

 

Recall how Ayesha takes a glass and holds it up while Beatrice pours prosecco; and unfortunately the prosecco misses the glass, soaking Zachs’s trousers. Ayesha might say, truthfully, ‘The collective goal of our actions was not to soak Zach's trousers in sparkling wine but only to fill this glass.’ What could make Ayesha’s statement true?

 

As this illustrates, some actions involving multiple agents are purposive in the sense that

 

among all their actual and possible consequences,

 

there are outcomes to which they are directed

 

and the actions are collectively directed to this outcome

 

so it is not just a matter of each individual action being directed to this outcome.

 

In such cases we can say that the actions have a collective goal.

 

 

As what Ayesha and Beatrice are doing---filling a glass together---is a paradigm case of joint action, it might seem natural to answer the question by invoking a notion of shared (or `collective') intention. Suppose Ayesha and Beatrice have a shared intention that they fill the glass. Then, on many accounts of shared intention,

 

the shared intention involves each of them intending that they, Ayesha and Beatrice, fill the glass; or each of them being in some other state which picks out this outcome.

 

The shared intention also provides for the coordination of their actions (so that, for example, Beatrice doesn't start pouring until Ayesha is holding the glass under the bottle). And coordination of this type would normally facilitate occurrences of the type of outcome intended. In this way, invoking a notion of shared intention provides one answer to our question about what it is for some actions to be collectively directed to an outcome.

 

Are there also ways of answering the question which involve psychological structures other than shared intention? In this paper we shall draw on recent discoveries about how multiple agents coordinate their actions to argue that the collective directedness of some actions to an outcome can be explained in terms of a particular interagential structure of motor representations. Our actions having collective goals is not always only a matter of what we intend: sometimes it constitutively involves motor representation.

 

 

The objection will seem unanswerable if we assume that all joint actions involve shared intention and that Bratman’s account of shared intention is correct.

 

But I’ve argued that the evidence suggests that children in the second and third years of life are not in the business of coordinating plans, so Bratman’s account of shared intention does not characterise the way they understand the joint activities that they participate in.

 

For this reason we should not accept that all joint actions involve shared intention and that Bratman’s account of shared intention is correct.

 

Instead, I think we can allow that there are joint actions which do not involve shared intentions but instead involve shared goals. It is these joint actions that we will need to appeal to in explaining the emergence of mindreading and referential communication.

 

Our next (and last) question ...