Question 6: What distinguishes joint actions from individual actions performed in parallel?
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Check the glossary entry on joint action and The Problem of Joint Action.
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Reading
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Further Reading
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Glossary
joint action : Many of the things we do are, or could be, done with others.
Mundane examples favoured by philosophers include painting a house together (Bratman, 1992),
lifting a heavy sofa together (Velleman, 1997),
preparing a hollandaise sauce together (Searle, 1990),
going to Chicago together (Kutz, 2000),
and walking together (Gilbert, 1990).
These examples are supposed to be paradigm cases of a class of phenomena we shall call ‘joint actions’.
Researchers have used a variety of labels including ‘joint action’ (Brooks, 1981; Sebanz, Bekkering, & Knoblich, 2006; Knoblich, Butterfill, & Sebanz, 2011; Tollefsen, 2005; Pettit & Schweikard, 2006; Carpenter, 2009; Pacherie, 2010; Brownell, 2011; Sacheli, Arcangeli, & Paulesu, 2018; Meyer, Wel, & Hunnius, 2013), ‘social action’ (Tuomela & Miller, 1985), ‘collective action’ (Searle, 1990; Gilbert, 2010), ‘joint activity’ (Baier, 1997), ‘acting together’ (Tuomela, 2000), ‘shared intentional activity’ (Bratman, 1997), ‘plural action’ (Schmid, 2008), ‘joint agency’ (Pacherie, 2013), ‘small scale shared agency’ (Bratman, 2014), ‘intentional joint action’ (Blomberg, 2016), ‘collective intentional behavior’ (Ludwig, 2016), and ‘collective activity’ (Longworth, 2019).
We leave open whether these are all labels for a single phenomenon or whether different researchers are targeting different things. As we use ‘joint action’, the term applies to everything any of these labels applies to.
Researchers have used a variety of labels including ‘joint action’ (Brooks, 1981; Sebanz, Bekkering, & Knoblich, 2006; Knoblich, Butterfill, & Sebanz, 2011; Tollefsen, 2005; Pettit & Schweikard, 2006; Carpenter, 2009; Pacherie, 2010; Brownell, 2011; Sacheli, Arcangeli, & Paulesu, 2018; Meyer, Wel, & Hunnius, 2013), ‘social action’ (Tuomela & Miller, 1985), ‘collective action’ (Searle, 1990; Gilbert, 2010), ‘joint activity’ (Baier, 1997), ‘acting together’ (Tuomela, 2000), ‘shared intentional activity’ (Bratman, 1997), ‘plural action’ (Schmid, 2008), ‘joint agency’ (Pacherie, 2013), ‘small scale shared agency’ (Bratman, 2014), ‘intentional joint action’ (Blomberg, 2016), ‘collective intentional behavior’ (Ludwig, 2016), and ‘collective activity’ (Longworth, 2019).
We leave open whether these are all labels for a single phenomenon or whether different researchers are targeting different things. As we use ‘joint action’, the term applies to everything any of these labels applies to.
The Problem of Joint Action : What distinguishes doing something jointly with another person from acting in
parallel with them but merely side by side?
References
Baier, A. C. (1997). Doing Things With Others: The Mental Commons. In L. Alanen, S. Heinamaa, & T. Wallgren (Eds.), Commonality and particularity in ethics (pp. 15–44). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25602-0_2
Blomberg, O. (2016). Common Knowledge and Reductionism about Shared Agency. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 94(2), 315–326. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2015.1055581
Bratman, M. E. (1997). I intend that we J. In R. Tuomela & G. Holmstrom-Hintikka (Eds.), Contemporary action theory, volume 2: Social action. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Bratman, M. E. (2014). Shared agency: A planning theory of acting together. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://0-dx.doi.org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199897933.001.0001
Bratman, M. E. (2022). Two Faces of Our Idea of Acting Together. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, X(X), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2021.18
Brooks, D. H. M. (1981). Joint action. Mind, 90(357), 113–119. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2253670
Brownell, C. A. (2011). Early Developments in Joint Action. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2, 193–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0056-1
Carpenter, M. (2009). Just how joint is joint action in infancy? Topics in Cognitive Science, 1(2), 380–392.
Gilbert, M. P. (1990). Walking together: A paradigmatic social phenomenon. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 15, 1–14.
Gilbert, M. P. (2010). Collective action. In T. O’Connor & C. Sandis (Eds.), A companion to the philosophy of action (pp. 67–73). Oxford: Blackwell.
Gilbert, M. P. (2013). Joint commitment: How we make the social world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://0-dx.doi.org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199970148.001.0001
Knoblich, G., Butterfill, S. A., & Sebanz, N. (2011). Psychological research on joint action: Theory and data. In B. Ross (Ed.), Psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 51, pp. 59–101). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-385527-5.00003-6
Longworth, G. (2019). Sharing non-observational knowledge. Inquiry, 0(0), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2019.1680430
Meyer, M., Wel, R. P. R. D. van der, & Hunnius, S. (2013). Higher-order action planning for individual and joint object manipulations. Experimental Brain Research, 225(4), 579–588. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-012-3398-8
Pacherie, E. (2010). The phenomenology of joint action: Self-agency vs. Joint-agency. In A. Seemann (Ed.), Joint action. MIT Press.
Pacherie, E. (2013). Intentional joint agency: Shared intention lite. Synthese, 190(10), 1817–1839. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0263-7
Pettit, P., & Schweikard, D. (2006). Joint Actions and Group Agents. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 36(1), 18–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0048393105284169
Sacheli, L. M., Arcangeli, E., & Paulesu, E. (2018). Evidence for a dyadic motor plan in joint action. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 5027. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-23275-9
Schmid, H. B. (2008). Plural action. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 38(1), 25–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0048393107310877
Searle, J. R. (1990). Collective intentions and actions. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, & M. E. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in communication (pp. 90–105). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sebanz, N., Bekkering, H., & Knoblich, G. (2006). Joint action: Bodies and mind moving together. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(2), 70–76.
Tollefsen, D. (2005). Let’s pretend: Children and joint action. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35(75), 74–97.
Tuomela, R., & Miller, K. (1985). We-Intentions and Social Action. Analyse & Kritik, 7(1), 26–43. https://doi.org/10.1515/auk-1985-0102