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Salomone-Sehr’s Minimalist Account of Joint Action

Salomone-Sehr (2024) proposes a minimalist account of joint action which does not involve shared intentions. If the account succeeds, it would show that we do not need a theory of shared intention to solve The Problem of Joint Action.

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Essay Questions

This section is relevant for answering the following questions:

Notes

Aim

Our aim in this section is to evaluate whether we can use Salomone-Sehr (2024)’s minimalist account of joint action to show that we do not need a theory of shared intention to solve the The Problem of Joint Action.

Salomone-Sehr’s Theory

Salomone-Sehr (2024) argues that joint action (which he calls ‘shared activity’) ‘is plan-coordinated activity.’ His analysis starts with three key desiderata for any theory of joint action:

  1. It must distinguish joint action from mere multi-agent causation.
  2. It must account for the ‘common practical orientation’ that unifies the constituent actions.
  3. It must ensure this orientation is followed non-coincidentally.

Salomone-Sehr aims to provide an account that meets these desiderata while not invoking shared intentions.[1]

This is achieved, according to Salomone-Sehr, by the following analysis:

Some people perform a joint action if and only if:

  1. Each person’s activities conform to a common plan.[2]
  2. This ‘common plan figures in an explanation of our joint conformity to it’.

In addition, Salomone-Sehr imposes some additional conditions. One is a condition on ‘tightness’:

‘the explanation that links the plan to our joint conformity to it must be sufficiently tight: the more circuitous the path from the plan to our activities, the more controversial it will be to say that, together, we have enacted it.’ (Salomone-Sehr, 2024)

Another pair of conditions are designed to rule out ‘deviant causal chains’ and a potential counterexample involving the indirect effects of a plan (the cleaning-up example):

the ‘plan must be self-referential: [...] it is part of the content of the plan that the plan itself be causally involved in the production of the enactors’ joint conformity to it. Second, the plan must be involved in the production of the enactors’ joint conformity to it not just in any possible way, but in the way that the plan stipulates.’[3] (Salomone-Sehr, 2024)

A Contrast Case

Case A: The Surgical Team (Paradigm Case)

A surgical team (surgeon, anesthesiologist, nurses) performs a complex heart operation. They follow a detailed surgical plan, communicate constantly, and adjust their actions in response to one another and the patient's condition. Their roles are distinct but interlocking, and they share the explicit intention to save the patient's life by completing this procedure together. This is a clear, intentional, and cooperative instance of shared agency.

Case B: The Hiring Pipeline (Contrast Case)

A corporation implements a "Culture Fit Initiative," an official, written hiring plan. Its stated goal is to "ensure new hires integrate smoothly and preserve the company's successful 'secret sauce'."

  1. Stage 1 (HR Screener): The screener uses software that automatically scores and filters resumes based on proxies for cultural similarity—such as alma mater, previous employers, and even listed hobbies. Their performance is measured by how quickly they pass along high-scoring candidates.
  2. Stage 2 (Hiring Manager): The hiring manager receives this pre-filtered, high-"fit" pool. They must use a mandatory interview rubric that heavily weights these same "fit" criteria. Deviating is costly: advancing a low-scoring candidate requires special justification and negatively impacts the manager's performance review.

Neither the screener nor the manager intends to discriminate by race or gender. They are both diligently following the official plan to maximize "Culture Fit." Their actions are tightly and non-deviantly coordinated by this plan's artifacts (the software, the rubric, the performance metrics) to produce a systematically homogenous workforce.

An Objection to Salomone-Sehr’s Minimalist Account

In the above Contrast Case, both Case A and Case B meet Salomone-Sehr’s criteria for shared agency.

However, a "common practical orientation" features in Case A only, not Case B.

Yet Salomone-Sehr (2024) states:

"adequate theories of shared agency must account for the fact that if [something] is a shared activity, then there must be some common practical orientation"

and, further:

"this analysis captures the fact that constituent individual activities of a shared activity follow a common practical orientation."

Therefore Case B meets all of Salomone-Sehr’s criteria while lacking features that Salomone-Sehr takes to be required for shared agency.

Conclusion

Salomone-Sehr (2024)’s minimalist account is perhaps the best available attempt to solve The Problem of Joint Action without shared intention.

If the above objection works, then it does not succeed. While this would not show that we need a theory of shared intention to solve The Problem of Joint Action (of course), it does motivate thinking we might.

We should note, however, that Salomone-Sehr (2024) claims to have argued that ‘shared intentions are not necessary for shared agency’ before introducing his minimalist account.[4] It would be important, therefore, to evaluate that argument, which might succeed even if his positive account fails.

And, in any case, perhaps there is a way to respond to the objection, either by showing that it fails or by revising Salomone-Sehr (2024)’s minimalist account?

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.
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. (1992). Shared cooperative activity. The Philosophical Review, 101(2), 327–341.
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
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.
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
Kutz, C. (2000). Acting together. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61(1), 1–31.
Longworth, G. (2019). Sharing non-observational knowledge. Inquiry, 0(0), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2019.1680430
Ludwig, K. (2016). From Individual to Plural Agency: Collective Action. Oxford University Press.
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
Salomone-Sehr, J. (2024). How to be minimalist about shared agency. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 109(1), 155–178. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.13030
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. (2000). Cooperation: A Philosophical Study. Dordrecht: Springer.
Tuomela, R., & Miller, K. (1985). We-Intentions and Social Action. Analyse & Kritik, 7(1), 26–43. https://doi.org/10.1515/auk-1985-0102
Velleman, D. (1997). How to share an intention. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57(1), 29–50.

Endnotes

  1. ‘I argue that our activities are shared just when they are coordinated by a common plan of action that might, but need not, figure in the content of shared intentions’ (Salomone-Sehr, 2024). The account is minimalist in aiming to show that joint action can occur not only without shared intentions, but also without mutula obligations, common knowledge, or cooperation. ↩︎

  2. What is a plan? ‘At the highest level of generality, a plan is a description of how an item with connecting parts is supposed to operate (Graham, 2011). For instance, the plan of a watch specifies how it is supposed to work, that is, how its different parts are supposed to behave. Similarly, then, a plan of action specifies a blueprint for a collection of activities. The plan of action behind a complex production process describes how that process is supposed to function, that is, how the tasks are divided, when and how each task should be completed, by whom, and with which tools’ (Salomone-Sehr, 2024). ↩︎

  3. The self-referential condition appears to conflict with a later discussion about the possibility of plans without planners, which is required to support Salomone-Sehr’s claim to minimalism and mechanism-neutrality: ‘The idea of plans without planners, perhaps odd at first, is in fact a familiar one when interpreted with the tools of evolutionary theory (Graham, 2011). In this picture, the instantiation of a plan by some item or other (e.g., an organism) is the outcome of a history of selection: the plan in question specifies how a selected item has been operating for it to be selected. One major insight of evolutionary theory is that selection does not necessitate anyone’s intentions. In fact, smart plans might arise through the combination of rather unintelligent processes’ (Salomone-Sehr, 2024). If I understand, the self-referential condition requires that a plan be forward-looking whereas a plan arising from natural selection would be backward-looking. ↩︎

  4. ‘To see this, consider the dancers of a ballet company ...’ (Salomone-Sehr, 2024). ↩︎