Telling Actions: Institutions, Collective Agency, and Critical Narratives

Concepts of socially extended cognition and cognitive institution have relevance for understanding how social and cultural practices shape not only our cognitive processes, but also our actions and interactions. Cognitive institutions are not only institutions that support cognitive processes, but are also such that without them these specific cognitive processes would not exist. Examples include things like legal systems, schools, universities, and cultural institutions. Narrative practices can establish and support such institutions, but critical narratives can operate as the basis for a critique of such institutions. Narratives not only serve to mediate intersubjective relations, they can map out the immediate and deeper contexts of action and understanding, provide detailed descriptions of events, objects and persons, help to coordinate complex tasks, define the identities and roles of individuals and groups, and express agreement among individuals. Critical narrative practice can also generate a reflective attitude about new or different possibilities.

Actions and Abstractions

The philosophical analysis of action often leads to abstractions. I argue that we can avoid some of these abstractions by keeping in mind that actions are defined and individuated by their circumstances; they are always situated or contextual. I argue that the most appropriate way to think of actions and circumstances is to think of them as ordered according to the action’s highest realized affordance within an agentive situation. The concepts of affordance and agentive situation are both relational; they reference both the agent (including the agent’s intention) and the action environment (which is social and cultural). The concept of basic action can also lead to abstractions. To avoid an abstract snapshot analysis of action we need to think of action as a process, as something temporal and more dynamic.

A Practice of Justice

This chapter asks what justice is as it pertains to immediate embodied intersubjective interactions, and how it extends from there to institutionally mediated social interactions. Rather than attempting to work out principles of justice as they might derive from or pertain to the abstractions of original positions or ideal situations of communication, or as they might apply to large-scale social-economic-political regimes, I take everyday practices as a guide. I also draw on animal behavior studies and discussions of justice in Anaximander and Aristotle. By focusing on the practice of justice my aim is not to provide an ideal or necessarily universal notion of justice, but to ask whether there is a conception of justice already at work in our everyday practices. Are there criteria to be found within the analyses of action and interaction that would define the practice of justice or a set of just practices?

Action, Intention, and the Sense of Agency

Autonomous action is characterized by intention, a sense of agency, and meaning, all of which go beyond simple bodily movement. In this chapter I present evidence to support the idea that actions initially emerge out of our early interactions with others. Moreover, to the extent that we learn to act in specific ways, and that our actions aim at some goal, we learn to act in contexts of interaction, and we learn from others what counts as possible and preferred goals. We don’t act or learn to act first, and only then enter into interactions. Most studies of action, intention, and the sense of agency fail to take into consideration the social dimension. I argue that intention formation, the sense of agency, and the meaning of action are significantly affected by factors that involve social contextualization; that is, by dynamical arrangements that are intersubjective, normative, cultural, and/or political.

Direct Social Perception

In this chapter I further develop interaction theory and the concept of primary intersubjectivity by providing evidence for our ability to directly perceive intentions and emotions. Intentions and emotions can be understood at least in part as composed of perceivable patterns of contextualized embodied behaviors. I argue that perception is “smart” and in no need of inferential or simulational supplementation in most instances of social interaction. I consider that even some theory theorists have acknowledged the role of perception but not without giving up the idea of a subpersonal processing that amounts to an inferential mindreading. I also consider recent predictive processing accounts and argue for an embodied-enactive interpretation of such processes. Finally, I consider concerns about direct social perception raised by research in social psychology.

Time in Action

In this chapter I explore the micro-structures of action and the perceptual aspects that accompany action, in order to show how at a very basic level they self-organize into processes that support the intentional lives of agents. The intrinsic temporality of action is shaped in part by the fact that action is dynamically embodied and situated. Initial and boundary conditions are determined not simply by anatomical and neural parameters but also by the circumstances that individuate actions, including agent-related aspects (like intention, motivation, skill, knowledge—but also things like fatigue, physical condition, processes associated with age, emotional experience, starting posture, etc.) and world-related aspects (like facts about objects and physical arrangements, and people in the action environment). This intrinsic temporality is reflected at the macro level (on the narrative scale) where actions are always situated in a world of meaning, and intentions are always future-oriented towards the possibilities of transcending present circumstances.

Introduction

I outline the motivation for thinking about the connections between action and interaction. I then provide a preview of the remaining chapters. The first part of this book focuses on the nature of action, starting with questions about action individuation, context, the notion of “basic action,” and the temporal structure of action. These topics lead to questions about intention and the sense of agency and ultimately to the idea that we need to consider action in the social contexts of interaction. The second part looks at the role of interaction in discussions of social cognition, building a contrast between standard theory of mind, and embodied and enactive accounts. In the third part I explore possible implications of these considerations for some critical social-political questions concerning autonomy, recognition, justice, and the effects of norms and social institutions on our actions and interactions.

Recognition and Critical Interaction Theory

This chapter explores how we might move from considerations that focus on social-cognitive issues to understanding their implications for concepts that are basic to the development of a critical theory that addresses social and political issues—basic concepts of agency, autonomy, and recognition. Following a brief philosophical history of the concept of recognition from Fichte through Hegel to contemporary accounts in Honneth and Ricoeur, this chapter takes a close look at Honneth’s analysis of recognition. I argue that Honneth does not sufficiently distinguish recognition as uniquely or specifically intersubjective. Moreover, he starts at a developmental point too late to acknowledge the role of primary intersubjectivity, a concept he interprets from a psychoanalytic perspective in contrast to its original formulation in developmental psychology. I then outline a concept of responsivity as an alternative to Honneth’s notion of elementary recognition. This is nonetheless in broad agreement with his analysis of relational autonomy.

Interaction

In contrast to standard accounts of social cognition I offer an alternative account—interaction theory. According to this approach we understand other people primarily by means of a diverse set of embodied, social, and cultural practices governed by social norms. Our understanding of someone’s action is frequently shaped by shared pragmatic contexts and in terms of social roles. Developmentally this interaction account builds on three sets of processes or abilities: primary intersubjectivity, a set of sensory-motor abilities and action-oriented perceptual capacities involved in face-to-face dyadic interaction; secondary intersubjectivity, a set of abilities involving joint attention and joint actions with others in shared pragmatic and social contexts; and communicative and narrative competencies that explain more advanced aspects of understanding others. This chapter explores the meaning of and the science behind primary and secondary intersubjectivity.

Communicative Actions and Narrative Practices

This chapter continues to build the more positive account of our everyday intersubjective abilities by considering the role of communicative and narrative practices. Research in applied linguistics shows that our communicative engagements are complex and detailed practices that draw on a multitude of semiotic resources in the environment and in the other person’s embodied comportment. From childhood we learn to make sense of persons in action-oriented and narrative ways, listening to stories, or (re-)producing them in play-acting. We become familiarized with a range of ordinary or extraordinary situations, and the sorts of actions appropriate to them, all of which help to shape our expectations about people and their behaviors. In order to understand others in circumstances instituted by complex social practices and normative formations, to empathize with them, and to engage in such practices with them, much depends on our capacity to frame the actions of others in narrative.