In Conversation: Joint Action, Shared Intentionality and Ethics

Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 2020

Intersubjectivity consists of the mutual coordination, incorporation and sharing of meaning and experience between people over time. The study of intersubjectivity raises difficult conceptual and meth-odological issues. Defined as a form of mutually coordinated experience , intersubjective processes are those that occur between rather than merely within persons. As such, the concept of intersubjectivity incorporates but extends beyond related concepts such as sociality, commonality, and perspective taking. To the extent that intersubject-ive processes are relational ones, their study requires the ability to analyze forms of engagement that occur between rather than merely within individual actors. We suggest that the most basic way to assess intersubjectivity involves recruiting the human capacity for intersubjective engagement itself as a primary method of psychological research. Toward this end, drawing on existing studies involving moment-by-moment observation of videotaped interaction, we track the developmental changes of different forms of intersubjective engagement as they occur between infants and their caregivers. Building on this work, we propose and illustrate methods for identifying moment-by-moment changes in sociality and intersubjective engagement as they occur in verbal and nonverbal joint action among adults. ARTICLE HISTORY How do people gain the capacity to identify psychological experience in themselves and in other people? The study of experience has long been a challenge to scientific psychology. Psychological science was founded on the value of objectivity. Invoking the concept of objectivity, behavior is understood as external, objective and publicly observable, while psychological experience is understood as internal, subjective and private. From this viewpoint, individuals are assumed to have privileged access to their own psychological experiences (MacDonald, 2014), while the experiences of the self are inaccessible to third-person observers. Despite the intuitive appeal of these ideas, they raise deep problems: how is it possible for people to form shared representations of experiences that are by definition private? Traditional answers invoke the concepts of introspection and projection. Knowledge of one's own experience comes from introspection: first-person experiencers "look within" themselves, identify experience, and then use words to communicate those experiences.

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2009

The present commentary re-introduces Heider’s (1958) common-sense psychology and his treatment of intentionality, comparing and contrasting his theoretical formulations with those of Elstrup (IPBS: Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science 43:4, 2009). Special emphasis is made in all those aspects of Heider’s theory that are related to the perception, interpretation, prediction and control of our behavior and that of another person. Also, different social aspects of interpersonal relations are presented. Finally, some ideas regarding different approaches to the study of attributing are discussed.

A Legacy of Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as a Precursor to Biosemiotics, 2012

Devoted to an explication of how interacting agents mutually and micro-temporally provide for each other the grounds for immediate next action in the seemingly transparent give-and-take of ordinary conversation, empirical findings from the disciplines of Interaction Analysis suggest that " language " as it is actually realized in naturally occurring, everyday talk-in-interaction, may derive its semiotic efficacy more from the active co-participation of situated speakers in creating contexts of relevancy, constraint and possibility for each other's immediate next reshaping of the cybernetic surround than it does from the computational recombination of referential tokens within the bounds of some predetermined, category-structuring syntax. The twin purposes of this article are to: (1) to serve as an introduction to some of the basic principles, methodologies and research data of Interaction Analysis, and (2) to attempt to situate such research and its findings within the broader study of meaning-making among living agents that is the goal of a Gregory Bateson-inspired biosemiotics. Here I hope to show how the former can well illuminate latter's efforts to explicate the principles whereby not only our human social worlds – but our very biological world itself – comes into being not as a " pre-given " in the furniture of the universe, but as a locally organized, massively co-constructed, participant-fashioned accomplishment in that universe instead.

Human Studies, 2000

With reference to Mead, Peirce, speech act theory, conversation analysis, and Luhmann's phenomenological grounded version of systems theory, the paper tries to reconstruct actions as products of communication. A triadic sequence is identified as the elementary unit for the intersubjective constitution of an act. This unit combines three achievements: (a) the constitution of meaning by sequential attribution, (b) the intersubjective coordination of attributed meanings, and (c) the reproduction of rules, guiding the process of constitution and coordination of attributed meanings. Then, using the tools of systems theory and applying them to empirical results of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, it is shown how the rule scheme is integrated in a triadic sequence, functioning on three different levels of communication. Finally, a specific form of repair after next turn is discussed, relating it to the function of preserving the structure of conversational types. The analysis of such conversational types opens a possible realm of cooperation between conversation analysis and Luhmann's version of systems theory.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2023

Ordinary language in Western and non-Western cultures individuates shared mental states or experiences as unitary interpersonal events that belong to more than one individual. However, a default assumption in modern Western thought is that, in this regard, ordinary language is either illusory or merely metaphorical: a mental state or experience can belong to only one person. This assumption is called Cartesian eliminativism and is often taken to be foundational in psychology. It follows that any view that contradicts Cartesian eliminativism is a priori suspected of being “mysterious,” i.e., of not meeting scientific standards. This paper suggests that the very opposite may be the case. The straightforward view explains how individuals assemble and experience a shared mental state as a unitary whole whose components are distributed among the participants. The naturalistic advantages of such a view are brought to light by focusing on developmental science. Since it explains early shared emotions, goals, and attention merely by relying on domain-general, associative processes, the straightforward view is more parsimonious than current psychological theories. Indeed, it abandons the cumbersome postulates of (i) multi-level recursive mindreading and (ii) a special, conceptually elusive phenomenal quality. I outline the distinctive developmental predictions of the view and discuss how it accounts for the functions of shared mental states. As a reductionist, non-eliminativist approach, the straightforward view promises to be viable also for cognitive scientists who have so far worked within the Cartesian framework due to a lack of a rigorous and sufficiently developed alternative.

Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 1997

This paper contains an elaboration of a dialogic, relational paradigm for psychology. The dialogical view is based upon three major assumptions drawn from the works of Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, and others. The dialogical viewpoint focuses on (a) human activity as the product of joint action between individuals, (b) actual, lived utterances as the formative units of situations and joint action, and (c) the ways in which utterances are actualized within speech genres and other social organizations that frame joint action. From this relational view, it is argued that we create our sense of our inner lives through speakings that occur within joint activity and larger forms of social and spoken life. Thus, what psychologists often take to be existing cognitive entitites–intentions, memories, motives, perceptions, emotions, etc.–are not objective and finalized, but are in the process of construction as a function of one's sense of how one is placed in relation to others within varied discursive circumstances.

Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, 2025

Human communication is often depicted as a collaborative activity characterized by a high level of cooperativeness, as both sender and receiver assume supposedly interdependent roles in a process that essentially involves inferring the sender's communicative intention through the signals emitted within a given communicative context. However, the alleged existence of unintentional forms of communication contradicts this interpretation. Building upon the overall framework of Herbert H. Clark's joint activity theory (1996) and assuming that the overarching function of communication is to facilitate the coordination of cooperative activities, the role of communicative intention is reassessed within the general framework of collective behaviors with the aim of analyzing its function in action coordination and communication dynamics to verify whether it is an inherent part of this dynamic. In conclusion, it is suggested that the constraint imposed by the opportunities for cooperation offered by the situational context allows the apprehension of the situation to serve as the primary basis of communication. This implies that the signals from the sender would merely constitute a part of this context, the contribution of which to the final determination of the coordination solution between the agents would vary. As a consequence, in terms of purely informational functionality, there appears to be no qualitative difference between intentional communication and unintentional information transfers. This perspective shifts emphasis to the receiver, redefines the cooperative nature of communication, strengthens parallels of communication with other coordination devices, and offers a coherent account of so-called "unintentional communication".

The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, 2009

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2000

This paper describes some of the basic cooperative mechanisms of dialogue. Ideal cooperation is seen as consisting of four features (cognitive consideration, joint purpose, ethical consideration and trust), which can also to some extent be seen as requirements building on each other. Weaker concepts such as &&coordination'' and &&collaboration'' have only some of these features or have them to lesser degrees. We point out the central role of ethics and trust in cooperation, and contrast the result with popular AI accounts of collaboration. Dialogue is also seen as associated with social activities, in which certain obligations and rights are connected with particular roles. Dialogue is seen to progress through the written, vocal or gestural contributions made by participants. Each of the contributions has associated with it both expressive and evocative functions, as well as speci"c obligations for participants. These functions are dependent on the surface form of a contribution, the activity and the local context, for their interpretation. We illustrate the perspective by analysing dialogue extracts from three di!erent activity types (a travel dialogue, a quarrel and a dialogue with a computer system). Finally, we consider what kind of information is shared in dialogue, and the ways in which dialogue participants manifest this sharing to each other through linguistic and other communicative behaviour. The paper concludes with a comparison to other accounts of dialogue and prospects for integration of these ideas within dialogue systems.

Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2015

In this paper I consider the relevance of Tomasello’s work on social cognition to the theory of communicative action. I argue that some revisions are needed to cope with Tomasello’s results, but they do not affect the core of the theory. Moreover, they arguably reinforce both its explanatory power and the plausibility of its normative claims. I proceed in three steps. First, I compare and contrast Tomasello’s views on the ontogeny of human social cognition with the main tenets of Habermas’ theory of communicative action. Second, I suggest how to reframe the role of language in the theory of communicative rationality in order to integrate the two theories. Third, I show how this affects social ontology, supporting the view that the construction of social reality is normatively constrained.