Chapter 13: Joint Action and 4E Cognition

Joint Action and 4E Cognition begins by exploring the definition of joint action, navigating the tension between broad definitions that focus on spatiotemporal coordination changing the environment and narrow philosophical accounts that require shared goals, we-intentions, or joint commitments as necessary conditions for acting together,. The text details classical philosophical approaches by scholars such as Bratman, Searle, and Tuomela, who posit that joint action is caused by high-level representational states and mutual knowledge, while noting the critiques that these views over-intellectualize social interaction, exclude animals and children, and create an "execution problem" regarding how intentions translate to motor control,. The summary examines the role of shared task representations, highlighting the "Joint Simon Effect" as evidence that individuals co-represent a partner's actions, although alternative explanations involving non-social attentional referential coding are also debated,. A significant portion of the chapter is dedicated to embodied and ecological perspectives, which argue that complex joint action emerges bottom-up from basic perceptuomotor synchronization, entrainment, and dynamic systems rather than solely from internal mental states,. This extends into Material Engagement Theory (MET) and Actor-Network Theory, which challenge the boundaries of agency by suggesting that cognition and action are distributed across networks of people and material artifacts, such as the board-lifting experiments where material constraints modulate interaction,. The authors further investigate the "extended mind" in social contexts, discussing Transactive Memory Systems and the debate over whether groups, like the dyad of Olaf and Inga, can form integrated cognitive systems or "group minds" that satisfy the social parity principle,. Developmental perspectives are integrated by contrasting Tomasello’s view that shared goals distinguish human joint action from primate co-action with enactivist accounts of primary and secondary intersubjectivity that rely on embodied engagement rather than mindreading,. Finally, the chapter advocates for an ecumenical approach that synthesizes high-level intentional accounts with low-level sensorimotor dynamics, potentially utilizing neuroscience methods like brain-to-brain coupling to bridge the gap between internalist and externalist explanations,.