Agire congiunto e intenzionalità collettiva

The rise of the social world is mainly due to the ability of the humans to act together and cooperate with one another in order to achieve things they cannot achieve alone. The issue of the shared agency between human beings has become increasingly interesting for philosophers who have tried to address it thorough the analysis of the collective intentionality. Scholars generally agree that joint actions are actions done with shared intentions, thus joint intentions and shared intentions are intertwined. Moreover, the analysis of joint actions involves shared intention, as the latter are essential for the understanding coordination in joint action. In a first part my Thesis I considered the leadings philosophical accounts on collective intentionality in order to clarify the debate between the methodological individualism and the summative accounts of collective attitude ascription. Tough the collective intentions involved in joint action can sometimes take the forms proposed by philosophers, I am sceptical that the philosophical account can apply to all joint actions, because it requires too much cognitive sophistication. Though philosophical accounts have improved our understanding of joint agency, they have offered accounts on the joint action that appeal only to higher-level states (such as goals, commitments, and intentions) that are “collective” in some way. Philosophical accounts have rarely been subject to empirical testing. At the same time, the contribution of lower-level processes to social interaction has hardly been considered. This has led philosophers to postulate complex intentional structures that often seem to be beyond human cognitive ability in real-time social interactions—leading to a sort of ‘intention inflation. The psychological approach to the issue of the joint action claim that there are a number of lower-level cognitive phenomena that underlie such agency, such as perceptual processing, motor intentions, cognitive maps, categorization, and so on. Likewise, joint agency involves a number of lower-level phenomena, including joint attention and various alignment mechanisms. Without an understanding of these lower-level phenomena, philosophical theories will remain incomplete How do we arbitrate between existing philosophical and psychological theories? What would help arbitrate between existing theories is if these theories could be operationalized in a way that would generate empirical results. To avoid this gap, I think it is useful to develop a minimalist account to joint action which do not assume that collective intentionality are necessary, or characterize shared intentions in a way that does not requires participants to have a background common knowledge of each other’s intentions or other mental states.