Abstract
The repeated attempts to characterise joint action have displayed a common trend towards minimalism – whether they focus on minimal situations, minimal characterisations, cognitively minimal agents or minimal cognitive mechanisms. This trend also appears to lead to pluralism: the idea that joint action may receive multiple, equally valid characterisations. In this paper, I argue for a pluralist stance regarding joint action, although one stemming from maximalism. After describing three cases of “maximal” joint action – demonstrations, deliberations and free collective improvisation – that stretch our conceptual characterisations of joint action, I introduce and defend contextual minimalism, which focuses on joint actions occurring in contexts from which the factors that typically favour successful cooperation are absent. Although maximalist as compared to the other forms of minimalism, contextual minimalism does fit the minimalist trend and its recent emphasis on specific cognitive cooperative mechanisms.
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Notes
- 1.
Such factors include commitments, promises, reputation, publicity, shared goals with clear conditions for success, common background values, beliefs or interests; see below.
- 2.
Although not in the very first analysis of joint action, namely Tuomela and Miller (1988). Tuomela’s is the main body work that bucks the trend of minimalism.
- 3.
Of course, this does not prevent analyses from being entirely compatible with holistic approaches as well.
- 4.
Using the vocabulary of constraints rather than of minimalism, Paternotte (2014b) labels these two strands of cognitive minimalism as the ‘developmental constraint’ and the ‘motor constraint’ for joint action.
- 5.
This was already noted by Heinonen (2016), although he considers only two strands of what I have dubbed cognitive minimalism.
- 6.
To be formally accurate, minimality (and maximality) can be defined as soon as a set is endowed with a partial order, that is, a reflexive, antisymmetric and transitive binary relation.
- 7.
The claim that the possible location of social elements in joint action may be the content, the subject or the mode of the intention is made by Schweikard and Schmid (2013). I do not mention the mode here, as it is a more complex notion, found mostly in Tuomela’s recent work, and because it in turn involves several social elements. So it cannot be part of an ontological minimal or nearly minimal account.
- 8.
Note that any characterisation that is nearly individualistic in this sense can be suspect of circularity, as it aims to analyse a social concept by resorting to at least another one.
- 9.
See Paternotte (2015) for an argument that Tollefsen’s and Peacocke’s alternatives to common knowledge are actually equivalent to it, since they are only weakenings of an artificial, unduly strong concept of common knowledge.
- 10.
Bratman’s definition only requires action according to meshing subplans, regardless of whether they have been determined prior to the interaction. By contrast, team reasoning consists In doing’s one part of what has been determined (in one way or another) as the best strategy from the team’s perspective (Bacharach 1999, 2006).
- 11.
Also note that this convergence presupposes at least some shared background assumptions regarding which empirical evidence is relevant to which account or to which research question (see below).
- 12.
Paternotte (2014a) talks of ‘minimal cooperation’ in this sense.
- 13.
The defense of this position, which I tend to favour, would go beyond the scope of this paper.
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Paternotte, C. (2020). Joint Action: Why So Minimal?. In: Fiebich, A. (eds) Minimal Cooperation and Shared Agency. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29783-1_3
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