Best Philosophy, Mind, and Consciousness Books of 2014 (according to me)

Here are some of the best books I have been exposed to this year. Obviously, I cannot read everything, so this is a partial list at best. They are listed in alphabetical order. Descriptive text is from the publisher's blurb on Amazon.

A few of these books warrant the RECOMMENDED READ classification.

Consciousness: Theories in Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind

Andrea Eugenio Cavanna and Andrea Nani

This book reviews some of the most important scientific and philosophical theories concerning the nature of mind and consciousness. Current theories on the mind-body problem and the neural correlates of consciousness are presented through a series of biographical sketches of the most influential thinkers across the fields of philosophy of mind, psychology and neuroscience. The book is divided into two parts: the first is dedicated to philosophers of mind and the second, to neuroscientists/experimental psychologists. Each part comprises twenty short chapters, with each chapter being dedicated to one author. A brief introduction is given on his or her life and most important works and influences. The most influential theory/ies developed by each author are then carefully explained and examined with the aim of scrutinizing the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches to the nature of consciousness.

Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making: Making Sense of Non-Sense

Massimiliano Cappuccio and Tom Froese, Editors

The enactive approach is a growing movement in cognitive science that replaces the classical computer metaphor of the mind with an emphasis on biological embodiment and social interaction as the sources of our goals and concerns. Mind is viewed as an activity of making sense in embodied interaction with our world. However, if mind is essentially a concrete activity of sense-making, how do we account for the more typically human forms of cognition, including those involving the abstract and the patently nonsensical? To address this crucial challenge, this collection brings together new contributions from the sciences of the mind that draw on a wide variety of disciplines, including psychopathology, phenomenology, primatology, gender studies, quantum physics, immune biology, anthropology, philosophy of mind, and linguistics. This book is required reading for anyone who is interested in how the latest scientific insights are changing how we think about the human mind and its limits.

The Escape of the Mind

Howard Rachlin

The Escape of the Mind is part of a current movement in psychology and philosophy of mind that calls into question what is perhaps our most basic, most cherished, and universally accepted belief--that our minds are inside of our bodies. Howard Rachlin adopts the counterintuitive position that our minds, conscious and unconscious, lie not where our firmest (yet unsupported) introspections tell us they are, but in how we actually behave over the long run. Perhaps paradoxically, the book argues that our introspections, no matter how positive we are about them, tell us absolutely nothing about our minds. The name of the present version of this approach to the mind is "teleological behaviorism."

The approaches of teleological behaviorism will be useful in the science of individual behavior for developing methods of self-control and in the science of social behavior for developing social cooperation. Without in any way denigrating the many contributions of neuroscience to human welfare, The Escape of the Mind argues that neuroscience, like introspection, is not a royal road to the understanding of the mind. Where then should we look to explain a present act that is clearly caused by the mind? Teleological behaviorism says to look not in the spatial recesses of the nervous system (not to the mechanism underlying the act) but in the temporal recesses of past and future overt behavior (to the pattern of which the act is a part). 

But scientific usefulness is not the only reason for adopting teleological behaviorism. The final two chapters on IBM's computer, Watson (how it deviates from humanity and how it would have to be altered to make it human), and on shaping a coherent self, provide a framework for a secular morality based on teleological behaviorism.

The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self- Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It

Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban

When it comes to politics, we often perceive our own beliefs as fair and socially beneficial, while seeing opposing views as merely self-serving. But in fact most political views are governed by self-interest, even if we usually don't realize it. Challenging our fiercely held notions about what motivates us politically, this book explores how self-interest divides the public on a host of hot-button issues, from abortion and the legalization of marijuana to same-sex marriage, immigration, affirmative action, and income redistribution.

Expanding the notion of interests beyond simple economics, Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban look at how people's interests clash when it comes to their sex lives, social status, family, and friends. Drawing on a wealth of data, they demonstrate how different groups form distinctive bundles of political positions that often stray far from what we typically think of as liberal or conservative. They show how we engage in unconscious rationalization to justify our political positions, portraying our own views as wise, benevolent, and principled while casting our opponents' views as thoughtless and greedy.

While many books on politics seek to provide partisans with new ways to feel good about their own side, The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind illuminates the hidden drivers of our politics, even if it's a picture neither side will find flattering.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Consciousness and the Self

Sangeetha Menon, Anindya Sinha, B.V. Sreekantan, Editors

This volume is a collection of 23 essays that contribute to the emerging discipline of consciousness studies with particular focus on the concept of the self. The essays together argue that to understand consciousness is to understand the self that beholds consciousness. Two broad issues are addressed in the volume: the place of the self in the lives of humans and nonhuman primates; and the interrelations between the self and consciousness, which contribute to the understanding of cognitive functions, awareness, free will, nature of reality, and the complex experiential and behavioural attributes of consciousness. The book presents cutting-edge and original work from well-known authors and scholars of philosophy, psychiatry, behavioural sciences and physics. This is a pioneering attempt to present to the reader multiple ways of conceptualizing and thus understanding the relation between consciousness and self in a nuanced manner.

Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

Barbara Ehrenreich 

RECOMMENDED READ.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will change the way you see the world.

Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In LIVING WITH A WILD GOD, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find "the Truth" about the universe and everything else: What's really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a "mystical experience"-and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering.

In LIVING WITH A WILD GOD, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition. With her signature combination of intellectual rigor and uninhibited imagination, Ehrenreich offers a true literary achievement-a work that has the power not only to entertain but amaze.

Macrocognition: A Theory of Distributed Minds and Collective Intentionality

Bryce Huebner

We live in an age of scientific collaboration, popular uprisings, failing political parties, and increasing corporate power. Many of these kinds of collective action derive from the decisions of intelligent and powerful leaders, and many others emerge as a result of the aggregation of individual interests. But genuinely collective mentality remains a seductive possibility.

This book develops a novel approach to distributed cognition and collective intentionality. It argues that genuine cognition requires the capacity to engage in flexible goal-directed behavior, and that this requires specialized representational systems that are integrated in a way that yields fluid and skillful coping with environmental contingencies. In line with this argument, the book claims that collective mentality should be posited where and only where specialized subroutines are integrated to yields goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to the concerns that are relevant to a group as such. Unlike traditional claims about collective intentionality, this approach reveals that there are many kinds of collective minds: some groups have cognitive capacities that are more like those that we find in honeybees or cats than they are like those that we find in people. Indeed, groups are unlikely to be "believers" in the fullest sense of the term, and understanding why this is the case sheds new light on questions about collective intentionality and collective responsibility.

Making Minds: How Theory of Mind Develops

Henry M. Wellman

Developmental psychologists coined the term "theory of mind" to describe how we understand our shifting mental states in daily life. Over the past twenty years researchers have provided rich, provocative data showing that from an early age, children develop a sophisticated and consistent "theory of mind" by attributing their desires, beliefs, and emotions to themselves and to others. Remarkably, infants barely a few months old are able to attend closely to other humans; two-year-olds can articulate the desires and feelings of others and comfort those in distress; and three- and four-year-olds can talk about thoughts abstractly and engage in lies and trickery.

This book provides a deeper examination of how "theory of mind" develops. Building on his pioneering research in The Child's Theory of Mind (1990), Henry M. Wellman reports on all that we have learned in the past twenty years with chapters on evolution and the brain bases of theory of mind, and updated explanations of theory theory and later theoretical developments, including how children conceive of extraordinary minds such as those belonging to superheroes or supernatural beings. Engaging and accessibly written, Wellman's work will appeal especially to scholars and students working in psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, and social cognition.

Mind, Language, and Subjectivity: Minimal Content and the Theory of Thought

Nicholas Georgalis

In this monograph Nicholas Georgalis further develops his important work on minimal content, recasting and providing novel solutions to several of the fundamental problems faced by philosophers of language. His theory defends and explicates the importance of ‘thought-tokens’ and minimal content and their many-to-one relation to linguistic meaning, challenging both ‘externalist’ accounts of thought and the solutions to philosophical problems of language they inspire. The concepts of idiolect, use, and statement made are critically discussed, and a classification of kinds of utterances is developed to facilitate the latter. This is an important text for those interested in current theories and debates on philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and their points of intersection.

Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition

Mattia Gallotti and John Michael, Editors

Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition brings together contributions discussing issues arising from theoretical and empirical research on social ontology and social cognition. It is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary collection in this rapidly expanding area. The contributors draw upon their diverse backgrounds in philosophy, cognitive science, behavioral economics, sociology of science and anthropology.

Based largely on contributions to the first Aarhus-Paris conference held at the University of Aarhus in June 2012, the book addresses such questions as: If the reference of concepts like money is fixed by collective acceptance, does it depend on mechanisms that are distinct from those which contribute to understanding the reference of concepts of other kinds of entity? What psychological and neural mechanisms, if any, are involved in the constitution, persistence and recognition of social facts?

The editors’ introduction considers strands of research that have gained increasing importance in explaining the cognitive foundations of acts of sociality, for example, the theory that humans are predisposed and motivated to engage in joint action with con-specifics thanks to mechanisms that enable them to share others’ mental states. The book also presents a commentary written by John Searle for this volume and an interview in which the editors invite Searle to respond to the various questions raised in the introduction and by the other contributors.

The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition

Lawrence Shapiro, Editor

Embodied cognition is one of the foremost areas of study and research in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science. The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics and debates in this exciting subject and essential reading for any student and scholar of philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six parts:

• Historical underpinnings
• Perspectives on embodied cognition
• Applied embodied cognition: perception, language, and reasoning
• Applied embodied cognition: social and moral cognition and emotion
• Applied embodied cognition: memory, attention, and group cognition
• Meta-topics.

The early chapters of the Handbook cover empirical and philosophical foundations of embodied cognition, focusing on Gibsonian and phenomenological approaches. Subsequent chapters cover additional, important themes common to work in embodied cognition, including embedded, extended and enactive cognition as well as chapters on empirical research in perception, language, reasoning, social and moral cognition, emotion, consciousness, memory, and learning and development.

Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame

Dan Zahavi

RECOMMENDED READ - I recommend this book even though I disagree with Zahavi's basic understanding of consciousness and selfhood. My sense is that his philosophy lacks an adequate grounding in attachment theory and relational neuroscience (specifically, interpersonal neurobiology).

Can you be a self on your own or only together with others? Is selfhood a built-in feature of experience or rather socially constructed? How do we at all come to understand others? Does empathy amount to and allow for a distinct experiential acquaintance with others, and if so, what does that tell us about the nature of selfhood and social cognition? Does a strong emphasis on the first-personal character of consciousness prohibit a satisfactory account of intersubjectivity or is the former rather a necessary requirement for the latter?

Engaging with debates and findings in classical phenomenology, in philosophy of mind and in various empirical disciplines, Dan Zahavi's new book Self and Other offers answers to these questions. Discussing such diverse topics as self-consciousness, phenomenal externalism, mindless coping, mirror self-recognition, autism, theory of mind, embodied simulation, joint attention, shame, time-consciousness, embodiment, narrativity, self-disorders, expressivity and Buddhist no-self accounts, Zahavi argues that any theory of consciousness that wishes to take the subjective dimension of our experiential life serious must endorse a minimalist notion of self. At the same time, however, he also contends that an adequate account of the self has to recognize its multifaceted character, and that various complementary accounts must be integrated, if we are to do justice to its complexity. Thus, while arguing that the most fundamental level of selfhood is not socially constructed and not constitutively dependent upon others, Zahavi also acknowledges that there are dimensions of the self and types of self-experience that are other-mediated. The final part of the book exemplifies this claim through a close analysis of shame.

Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects

Peter Gratton

Speculative realism is one of the most talked-about movements in recent Continental philosophy. It has been discussed widely amongst the younger generation of Continental philosophers seeking new philosophical approaches and promises to form the cornerstone of future debates in the field.

This book introduces the contexts out of which speculative realism has emerged and provides an overview of the major contributors and latest developments. It guides the reader through the important questions asked by realism (what can I know? what is reality?), examining philosophy's perennial questions in new ways. The book begins with the speculative realist's critique of 'correlationism', the view that we can never reach what is real beneath our language systems, our means for perception, or our finite manner of being-in-the-world. It goes on to critically review the work of the movement's most important thinkers, including Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, and Graham Harman, but also other important writers such as Jane Bennett and Catherine Malabou whose writings delineate alternative approaches to the real. It interrogates the crucial questions these thinkers have raised and concludes with a look toward the future of speculative realism, especially as it relates to the reality of time.

Waking, Dreaming, Being: New Light on the Self and Consciousness from Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

Evan Thompson

RECOMMENDED READ - I am not in complete agreement with some of Thompson's views, but his position on consciousness as enactive and embodied is, in my mind, spot on, as is his position on self as a verb (process) not a noun (thing).

A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of the mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. 

Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the "I" as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate--either in the waking state or in a lucid dream--we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as "me." We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self. 

Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness the dissolution of the self with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life's profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives.

"Mental Notes" from the Mind & Life Institute

Posted below are two articles from the Mind and Life Institute blog, both of which are slightly related. The first one features Evan Thompson's work with neurophenomenology and the second one looks at Richard Davidson's work with meditation and compassion as it relates to theory of mind.

Grey Matters

Mind and Life’s resident neuroscientist on the past, present, and future of neurophenomenology.

By Wendy Hasenkamp | September 18, 2014

What is the human mind, and how can we develop it to its greatest potential?

There are many ways of trying to answer this age-old question. As a neuroscientist, I was trained within a theoretical system that largely equates the mind with the physical structure of the brain. Operating from this perspective, science has made incredible strides, giving us insights ranging from the molecular array of genes and proteins to the electrical firing patterns of individual neurons and neuronal assemblies. Yet, until recently, a central element of the human mind was largely missing from neuroscientific investigations: lived experience.

However much neuroscience can tell us about the brain, if we are to have a complete picture of the mind, conscious experience must ultimately be incorporated into our investigations. As a way to illustrate this, imagine reading a detailed description of the neural circuitry that underlies vision—the many processes that result in detecting color, contrast, shape, and motion. While such a description could provide a thorough account of the biological substrates involved in, say, observing a sunset, it is a different thing entirely to gaze at the sun dipping below the horizon and experience its gradations, beauty, stillness, as well as the emotions or memories that arise. A similar case can be made for the majority of mental processes since most have an experiential component.

To access lived experience in scientific studies, researchers must take into account what is referred to as the “subjective perspective”—the participant’s first-person point of view on their own experience, usually reported through narrative, questionnaires, scales, or novel interfaces with measurement instruments. For many decades, however, the use of subjective report in psychological and cognitive research was considered unreliable, in part due to studies showing that memories can be inaccurate, and that introspection can be influenced by factors such as expectation or denial. As a result, subjective data was largely abandoned in favor of more “objective,” third-person measures such as behavior or physiological data. Experience was thus relegated to a black box, inaccessible to science.

Fortunately, cognitive science has begun to return to first-person approaches with renewed interest. Concerns about the reliability of subjective report remain important; at the same time, recent research continues to prove the value of subjective information. The National Research Council, for example, just released a report formally urging researchers to seek information on subjective well-being, which they describe as “the self-reported levels of contentment, stress, frustration, and other feelings people experience throughout the day and while performing different activities.”

Mind and Life’s own history is related to this shift in thinking, and an emphasis on subjective experience remains central to our mission. In the 1990s, Francisco Varela, cognitive neuroscientist and one of Mind and Life’s cofounders, proposed the scientific approach known as neurophenomenology, which seeks to integrate valid first-person subjective information with third-person objective measures. Varela, along with Mind and Life Fellow Evan Thompson, believed that relating moment-to-moment subjective experiences to dynamic activity in neural networks represents an enormous opportunity for cognitive research, and will yield a more comprehensive understanding of the human mind. Areas where this approach is highly relevant include investigations into perception, attention, memory, the self, motivation, volition, emotion, spontaneous cognition, mind wandering, and craving and addiction—all fields in which Mind and Life has sponsored research.

Of course, as cognitive neuroscience continues to advance as a discipline, the development of rigorous methods to probe the subjective contents of the mind will be increasingly essential. Standard questionnaires, for example, often do not offer enough opportunity for individualized answers, and responses are framed within a priori assumptions. Interviews are more detailed, but the resultant information is qualitative in nature and complicated to code and score in a systematic way. Further, untrained participants may be unable to introspect at a high level of detail about their internal experiences, making their reports unreliable or unclear.

To encourage exploration of both the challenges and potential of neurophenomenology, I recently joined with Evan Thompson to host a special issue in the journal Human Frontiers in Neuroscience devoted to the theme of “examining subjective experience.” This issue, now complete and available online for free, contains 18 innovative articles furthering the goals of neurophenomenology. Both primary research reports as well as theoretical and methodological papers are featured, highlighting creative new approaches for probing subjective experience in real-world and laboratory settings, and for eliciting more refined and informative first-person reports. Topics include investigating the experience and neural correlates of selflessness, detailed interview methods that can be used with untrained participants, perspectives on dreaming and hypnosis, and studies of real-time biofeedback in meditators using fMRI.

In the quest to understand the mind—and in so doing, discover ways to alleviate suffering and promote flourishing—subjective experience can serve as a guiding beacon, illuminating scientific findings in a new and meaningful light. Editing this collection of articles, I have been pleased and encouraged to see the high quality of cutting-edge research that also embraces the richness of subjective experience. It is our hope that this issue will help advance the field of neurophenomenology, and serve as a resource as we continue to study the complexities of human experience in an integrative way.



WENDY HASENKAMP, PhD, serves as senior scientific officer at the Mind & Life Institute. As a neuroscientist and a contemplative practitioner, she is interested in understanding how subjective experience is represented in the brain, and how the mind and brain can be transformed through experience and practice to enhance flourishing. Her research examines the neural correlates of meditation, with a focus on the shifts between mind wandering and attention. She has also contributed to neuroscience curriculum development, teaching, and textbook creation for the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, which aims to integrate science into the Tibetan monastic education system in India.

* * * * *

Theory of Mind

Contemplative science begins to unpack the critical elements of caring

By Wendy Hasenkamp | September 18, 2014

One of the central elements of caring involves the capacity to see things from another person’s point of view. In psychology, this ability is referred to as “theory of mind.” If we want to be able to respond to someone compassionately, we must first understand what he or she may be thinking, feeling, or perceiving—we must have a theory of his or her mind.

In order to do that, we must shift from our own perspective and “put ourselves in their shoes.” In that process, however, we don’t completely abandon our own view. Since we can’t observe others’ minds directly, we instead make use of personal memories and experiences, intuiting what another person is going through by way of analogy. If you think about it, this is actually a complicated set of cognitive operations, but we make this shift effortlessly, many times each day.

Not surprisingly, the brain mechanisms for processing self-related experiences are also used for interpreting the mental states of others. Neuroscientific research has implicated a region called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) as important for theory of mind. The TPJ is also involved in processing self-related information (e.g., the spatial unity of self and body, or “embodiment”), and is key for distinguishing between self and other. Several medial frontal and parietal areas appear to work with the TPJ to form a brain network that underlies theory of mind.

So, if we want to become more caring, the first question we might ask is whether it’s possible to enhance our theory of mind? In psychology, theory of mind has not historically been viewed as a skill that might vary among the population, or be trainable. Until recently, theory of mind has been viewed as a capacity that is either “normal” or grossly impaired, as has been suggested in autism. However, psychology research is now beginning to examine differences in theory of mind ability in healthy adult populations. For example, it was recently shown that people who read literary fiction have improved scores on theory of mind tests.

Researchers have not yet examined whether meditation affects theory of mind ability directly, but some contemplative practices appear to target exactly this capacity.

Richard Davidson and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin studied expert and novice meditators, scanning their brains while they performed a compassion-based meditation. During the scans, participants were also exposed to emotional sounds. The study showed that both during meditation and in response to the sounds, expert meditators had greater brain activation than novices in several areas including the TPJ. In fact, more than any other area, activity in the TPJ was most strongly related to meditative expertise. This suggests that experienced meditators might be more primed to share emotion with, or take the perspective of, another person.

Another study, at Emory University, tested people’s ability to infer others’ emotions by looking only at their eyes, a standard test of “empathic accuracy” that is closely related to theory of mind. Compared to a control group trained in healthy living, participants trained in compassion were more likely to improve their accuracy on the test, indicating they were better able to judge the emotions of other people based on subtle cues. In addition, the improvement in scores correlated with increased brain activity in frontal cortical regions known to be involved in empathic accuracy and theory of mind.

Finally, a recent longitudinal study of brain structure at Harvard found that the TPJ and other regions implicated in theory of mind had increased grey matter density after eight weeks of mindfulness training. It is generally assumed that increases in grey matter (neurons) result from repeated activation of a brain region, through a process of experience-dependent neuroplasticity. This study suggests that just eight weeks of training may induce neural rewiring in brain structures important for social cognition.

Taken together, these studies indicate that meditation impacts brain areas that are critical for theory of mind. However, when interpreting such results, it is important to remember that all of these brain regions are also involved in other mental processes. For example, the TPJ has been implicated in various forms of attention, as well as aforementioned self-related processes. Of course, one can argue that these other functions are important for developing theory of mind. Still, conclusions about the specific cognitive implications of these brain changes must remain tentative until more standard behavioral and cognitive testing is applied. In future studies, it would be fascinating to examine whether people who practice meditations that involve perspective-taking show changes in basic theory of mind tests, as well as related neural alterations.

Based on all we know about how the brain changes with repeated practice of any skill, it is reasonable to assume that theory of mind can be improved through intentional exercises. In some ways however, we don’t need brain scans to show this; you can engage in these kinds of contemplative practices and see if there are effects in your own life. Can you more easily imagine how others might be feeling? Are you moved toward caring and compassion? These will be the true indicators of meaningful change.

The other day I posted an article from the Frontiers sites on an enactive approach to the self. This article is from August of this year, and it looks at an enactive model of cooperation.

to define cooperation as the result of two de-contextualized minds reading each other’s intentions may fail to fully acknowledge the complexity of situated, interactional dynamics and the interplay of variables such as the participants’ relational and personal history and experience. 

The authors question such accounts of cooperation, preferring an embodied approach that conceptualizes cooperation as more than an "individual attitude toward the other," but also as a property of interaction processes. The authors take an enactive perspective, arguing that cooperation is an intrinsic to any interaction, and that there can be cooperative interaction before complex communicative abilities are achieved.

We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation

Valentina Fantasia [1], Hanne De Jaegher [2,3] and Alessandra Fasulo [1]

1. Centre for Situated Action and Communication, Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK
2. IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society, Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián, Spain
3. Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

Abstract

The past years have seen an increasing debate on cooperation and its unique human character. Philosophers and psychologists have proposed that cooperative activities are characterized by shared goals to which participants are committed through the ability to understand each other’s intentions. Despite its popularity, some serious issues arise with this approach to cooperation. First, one may challenge the assumption that high-level mental processes are necessary for engaging in acting cooperatively. If they are, then how do agents that do not possess such ability (preverbal children, or children with autism who are often claimed to be mind-blind) engage in cooperative exchanges, as the evidence suggests? Secondly, to define cooperation as the result of two de-contextualized minds reading each other’s intentions may fail to fully acknowledge the complexity of situated, interactional dynamics and the interplay of variables such as the participants’ relational and personal history and experience. In this paper we challenge such accounts of cooperation, calling for an embodied approach that sees cooperation not only as an individual attitude toward the other, but also as a property of interaction processes. Taking an enactive perspective, we argue that cooperation is an intrinsic part of any interaction, and that there can be cooperative interaction before complex communicative abilities are achieved. The issue then is not whether one is able or not to read the other’s intentions, but what it takes to participate in joint action. From this basic account, it should be possible to build up more complex forms of cooperation as needed. Addressing the study of cooperation in these terms may enhance our understanding of human social development, and foster our knowledge of different ways of engaging with others, as in the case of autism.

Introduction

The ability to cooperate has received increasing attention over the past years, particularly by researchers from analytical philosophy, and from developmental and comparative psychology. Cooperation has been described as the “coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem” (Teasley and Roschelle, 1993) or, more basically, as consisting in “(i) acting or working together and (ii) a common or the same end or purpose” (Tuomela, 2000, p. 3). One of the reasons why cooperation has been considered such an important topic in the past two decades, is its apparent importance in exploring differences between humans and other animals (especially great apes; Tomasello et al., 2005; Tomasello, 2009). Moll and Tomasello (2007, p. 1) have argued that “among primates, humans are by far the most cooperative species, in just about any way this appellation is used (…) constituted by all kinds of cooperative institutions and social practices with shared goals and differentiated roles.”

Despite its extensive exploration by philosophers and psychologists, a clear description and understanding of what makes an activity cooperative is still controversial. This is because cooperation is often described, by mainstream accounts, as depending on high-level social skills, and this, as Butterfill (2012) puts it, “already presupposes too much sophistication in the use of psychological concepts” to be applicable in the investigation of more basic forms of cooperation. Indeed, most of the empirical studies on children’s cooperation are based on inferential and mentalistic theoretical accounts, which may not be the most adequate framework to study how it emerges in typical and atypical developmental paths.

In this paper we challenge these theoretical models and propose to widen the exploration of what cooperation is, what kind of experiences may support someone’s cooperative participation in joint actions, and how this participation may develop over time. Widening the concept of cooperation, we aim to explore the different interactional modalities for it to work out, including those that are not explicitly or previously agreed on as cooperation. We end by drawing some implications of such a change in perspective for cooperation in infancy and in autism.

Philosophical Accounts of Cooperation

Current theories of joint action have attempted to describe cooperation as a phenomenon primarily based in cognitive abilities. These theories depict social encounters (and cooperative actions) as encounters of minds, where participants have to infer each other’s beliefs and desires to understand and predict the other’s intentions and moves. Central to these theories is the concept of shared intentionality. Many philosophical theories propose that joint actions require the creation of shared (or collective, or joint) intentions¹ (Gilbert, 1989; Bratman, 1992, 1993; Searle, 1995; Tuomela, 1995). Sharing intentions is possible when partners make individual plans for achieving a common goal, and then formulate predictions upon the other’s intention to achieve the same goal (Gilbert, 1989, 2000; Bratman, 1992; Tuomela, 1993, 2005; Pacherie, 2006). Shared intentions, according to Bratman (1992) are defined as a set of interrelated individual intentional states. In shared activities, he claims, “each agent intends that the group perform the joint action in accordance with and because of meshing subplans of each participating agent’s intention that the group so act.” (Bratman, 1992, p. 333). According to this view, a joint activity is the result of a shared intention, and a shared intention is simply a pattern of “interlocking” plan-intentions of the participants about which they have common knowledge. Essentially, for cognitivist philosophical approaches, partners engage in cooperative actions if they are able to infer each other’s thoughts and plans, and combine them to build their co-actions in some shared way.

As the interest in exploring joint intentionality and joint actions has grown, further theorization followed the original descriptions of cooperation. Building up on Bratman’s account, for example, Tummolini (2013) suggests that representing one’s own goal and those of others from a third-person observational perspective is also a necessary cognitive ability to collaborate, along with mind-reading. Thanks to this allocentric representation of goals (as he names it) individuals are endowed with both “an intention in favor of the joint action and one in favor of a joint mode of reasoning,” which enables them to coordinate in a joint action. Other researchers have attempted to formulate less cognitively demanding accounts of shared intentionality, yet still considering representing intentions at the very ground of any joint action. Sebanz et al. (2006, p. 70), for instance, proposed that a successful joint action “depends on the abilities (i) to share representations, (ii) to predict actions, and (iii) to integrate predicted effects of own and others’ actions.”

Because they presuppose the presence of high-level socio-cognitive capacities, standard accounts of cooperation hardly apply to those who do not possess propositional knowledge about others’ intentions, such as young children or animals, and some philosophers have already questioned this assumption. Tollefsen (2005), for instance, argued that awareness of another’s intention may not depend on inferring it, but on the ability to track intentions-in-action. She argues that attending to each other’s actions provides participants with a shared perceptual space constructed through joint attention dynamics. In this shared space, intentions-in-action are perceptually overt and identifiable so that even young children without a “robust theory of mind” (p. 81) can theoretically engage in cooperative activities. Despite these developmental concerns, the author explicitly renounces to address how this perspective can be effectively applied from very early in development, by saying that “[p]rior to the first year, young infants are like windowless monads” (p. 80), implying that they cannot yet interact. By stressing the importance of joint attention and social referencing mechanisms (as defined by Tomasello, 1995) for the building up of a shared space, she neglects the possibility of earlier forms of cooperation, e.g., in infancy. Similarly concerned with understanding the role of joint action in development, Butterfill (2012) proposed to replace the concept of shared intentions with that of shared goals. Sharing a goal, in his view, only requires agents’ goal-directed actions to be coordinated, but does not imply knowledge. This move should make cooperation possible in early development. However, he also claims that possessing a shared goal requires representing goal-directed actions, and the way this is achieved by young children, in his proposal, is not completely clear.

We find all these arguments to reflect a general problem with the cooperation research reviewed so far: cooperation is framed in its full-blown, adult form and therefore it is difficult to see how those who do not have high socio-cognitive skills (including representing goal-directed actions) or experience could possibly cooperate. This is our main concern in the present paper.

Cognitive Developmental Accounts of Cooperation

Defining what is to cooperate from a developmental point of view is challenging. Recent developmental research in psychology has endorsed a cognitivist account of shared cooperative activities, suggesting that a major step in children’s social cognitive development occurs when, at around 12–14 months, children begin to engage with adults in cooperative activities involving an understanding of interdependent roles (Tomasello et al., 2005), and are generally motivated to help the other to accomplish her role if needed (Moll and Tomasello, 2007). Therefore, in order to cooperate, it seems that “children must be able to represent, monitor, and regulate both their own and the partner’s behavior relative to their relation to a single, common goal” (Brownell and Carriger, 1990, p. 1165).

To empirically investigate early cooperative skills through abilities such as perspective taking and understanding of the other’s intentions and goals, most of the studies on young children have adopted specifically designed lab tasks involving role reversal or simultaneous coordination of movements (Brownell and Carriger, 1990; Warneken et al., 2006, 2012). In the majority of these studies, successfully performed joint tasks would set the age threshold for attributing cooperative abilities and instrumental helping to children.

For example, Brownell et al. (2006) observed children at 19, 23, and 27 months of age engaging in peer cooperative problem solving tasks. In these tasks, each child had to pull simultaneously or sequentially one handle of a wooden box to activate a musical toy mounted on the box. Activating the toy by coordinating each other’s timing and movements would lead to successful performance of the task. The researchers found that 1-year-old children coordinated their actions more by coincidence than in a cooperative way, whereas older children appeared to be more actively cooperating toward a shared goal. They took these results to confirm their view that the ability to cooperate depends on “being able to represent and to share goals and intentions with a partner” (p. 806); an ability that, according to the study, could only be seen over the second and third years of life. Another example is a study in which Warneken and Tomasello (2007) investigated instrumental helping and cooperation in 14-months-olds children. Instrumental helping was defined as providing help to people in completing a task, e.g., pick up an out-of-reach object, whereas cooperation was measured through a series of cooperative tasks to be resolved jointly, such as retrieving an object from a vertically movable cylinder embedded in a platform. Results showed that at 14 months children reliably helped a partner who could not achieve a goal, but cooperated successfully only in tasks demanding low coordination. The authors concluded that “Helping might be easier for children than cooperating because it requires the understanding of what another individual intends to do (…), whereas cooperation requires the ability to form a shared goal and to mesh plans of action toward that goal” (ibid. p. 291). In other words, helping would only require to read another’s intention, whereas cooperation would also need for one’s own and the other’s intentions to be co-dependent and converge.

In sum, developmental research has attempted to define the beginning of cooperation by setting tasks based on similar premises, thus designing practical tasks that need not only inferring but also mobilizing well-formed intentions to be completed. These premises derive from the mainstream philosophical accounts of cooperative actions, which propose that to be engaged in a cooperative action requires possessing mind-reading abilities, and abilities to align one’s own intentions and beliefs with the other’s, although milder, less cognitively weighted positions have also been proposed. In the next section we will discuss what we believe are some pitfalls of both the existing theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of cooperation.

Methodological and Theoretical Issues with Standard Approaches

To put shared intentionality at the very basis of shared cooperative action raises the question of how humans get to know others’ intentions and goals. On the standard accounts, this is done by use of a theory of mind or a simulation mechanism, which is “any cognitive system … that predicts or explains the behavior of another agent by postulating that unobservable inner states particular to the cognitive perspective of that agent causally modulate that agent’s behavior” (Penn and Povinelli, 2008, p. 394). This cognitive system is often thought to be supported by the so-called social brain (Frith and Frith, 2003; Frith, 2007).

If intentions are hidden, are joint intentions hidden too?

Within mind-reading approaches, social understanding requires, among other things, being able to get access to another’s intentions, or more in general, contents of the mind. The “problem” of understanding others’ minds is based on the premise that intentions are hidden and private, that is, that others’ intentions (like thoughts, ideas, beliefs) need to be inferred through complex representational operations (Apperly, 2011). Now, how are such intentions shared? On standard representationalist accounts, this is often proposed to happen through some forms of mental alignment, for instance by simultaneous mirror system activation (Gallese, 2003; Pacherie, 2006; Sebanz et al., 2006). In this view, everyone has her own understanding of others’ intentions to jointly perform an action, but how these understandings become shared remains unclear. For example, Knoblich and Sebanz (2008) have attempted to explain how people can form intentions to act together in three steps. First, they need to be able to derive the other person’s intentions behind her object-directed actions or actions directed to her partner. Then, actors need to be able to keep knowledge of these intentions separate from their own intentions. Eventually, “There needs to be an intentional structure that allows an actor to relate his/her own intention and the other’s intention to an intention that drives the joint activity” (Knoblich and Sebanz, 2008, p. 2025). Although it may seem very basic, this definition is still quite cognitively demanding, and does not solve the main problem of how an “intentional structure” works. Is it individual or shared, implicitly or explicitly created?

There seems to be a gap here in the form of an empty space in between people: these approaches have explained shared intentionality from an observer’s perspective, but not from a participant’s one. This is in line with criticisms of the standard approach to social cognition (e.g., Gallagher, 2001; Leudar and Costall, 2009) and with views on interpersonal alignment as primarily based on embodied engagement (Macmurray, 1991; Braten, 2003; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009; Reddy and Morris, 2009). Shotter (1983, p. 39) nicely summarized these alternative positions: “Motives, intentions, sentiments are (. . .) directly perceived by those directly involved in [a joint action] as first person actors and second person recipients in that activity. Only third person observers have to make inferences.”

Another consideration is whether we need to know that we are cooperating in order to be able to cooperate. Often, cooperation is presupposed as something we set out to do, so that actions are either clearly cooperative or not – a separate and identificable type of action altogether. This may indeed sometimes be the case, for example when two people meet to perform a certain shared task, like bathing a very agitated dog. But taking this idea as the starting point for understanding cooperation presupposes that we already know what it is, and so we do not need to define the elements out of which it could arise. It precludes, for example, the possibility that cooperation arises without there being a predefined intention or motive to cooperate, while this may be key to understanding how people get to cooperate in the first place. Shared goals may emerge during the course of an interaction, and so participants can “roll into” cooperation without having previous awareness of it. For instance, making space for someone who enters a crowded bus is achieved by the new and old passengers together, each adjusting movements and postures. Here, a common goal emerges out of the interaction and in the context of a small space to be shared as smoothly as possible. Understanding this emergent kind of phenomenon will give us further insights into what cooperation is and how it works.

Where is development?

We may question to what extent we can explain the role of cooperative actions in children’s development if we conceive of cooperation as heavily relying on high cognitive skills, and a long experience with social interactions. As Butterfill (2012, p. 24) wrote:

If the leading account were the whole truth about joint action, engaging in joint action would presuppose, and therefore not explain, much of the development of reasoning about others’ mental states. (. . .) We need a further account of joint action, one that is compatible with the premise that joint action plays a role in explaining how humans develop abilities to think about minds.

Furthermore, developmental research on cooperation is based on a rather restricted pool of tasks, which are designed to assess cooperative problem solving and related abilities like role reversal, perspective-taking and joint attention. These do not necessarily cover the whole range of possible cooperative interactions in a child’s life, as there are many situations (some of which we discuss below) in which a clear, explicit division of roles and statement of goals is not needed. Furthermore, the structure of these tasks implies a “pass or fail” evaluation and seems therefore more appropriate to detect when cooperative skills are already present, rather than telling us how they emerge or develop in time (Thelen and Smith, 1994).

Which view on cooperation one adopts is likely to have rather serious consequences when studying cooperative exchanges in typical and atypical development. This is, for example, the case with research on cooperation in autism. Studies on cooperation in autism that are based on mind-reading and perspective-taking abilities² find that children with autism are less successful than children with developmental delay (Sally and Hill, 2006; Liebal et al., 2007). However, this does not mean that they are completely incapable. For instance they seem able to help an adult as needed (Liebal et al., 2007), particularly when they understand the other person’s goals toward an object (Aldridge et al., 2000; Carpenter et al., 2001). Liebal et al. (2007) explained these findings in terms of a specific impaired understanding of the partner’s role within the cooperative task that would not apply when the situation does not require knowledge of and agreement on each partner’s role. Thus, it may be that children with autism can succeed in cooperative tasks, if they do not entail an explicit understanding and prior agreement on each partner’s role. Similarly, if they are given appropriate interactive support, e.g., if they are helped with being aware of the other person in the interaction, they can cooperate in a dual-control technology task (Holt and Yuill, 2014).

In conclusion, to study cooperation as it develops and in conditions implying impairments in social skills we need to investigate it at a more basic level than has been done so far. In the next section, we put forward our proposal, which looks at cooperative interactions from the point of view of what is at stake for the individuals participating in them, and the organization of cooperative interaction processes. For doing this, we will use the concepts and research tools of enaction, a specific approach to cognition within the embodiment movement in cognitive science (Varela et al., 1991; Thompson, 2007; Di Paolo et al., 2010).

The Enactive Perspective on Sense-Making and Social Interactions

Enaction is a non-reductive naturalistic approach that proposes a deep continuity between living and cognitive processes. It is a scientific program that explores several phases along this life-mind continuum, based on six mutually supporting, operational concepts: autonomy, sense-making, embodiment, emergence, experience, and participatory sense-making (Varela et al., 1991; Thompson, 2005, 2007; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Di Paolo et al., 2010). Here, we first introduce two of its main concepts: sense-making—the enactive notion of cognition in general; and participatory sense-making—enactive social cognition. In section 3, we start applying these ideas to understanding cooperation.

Sense-Making

For enaction, “the mind is seen not as inhering in the individual, but as emerging, existing dynamically in the relationship between organisms and their surroundings (including other agents)” (McGann et al., 2013). Or, as Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 430) already put it:

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.

In this view, the paradigmatic cases of cognizers are living organisms (Varela, 1997; Thompson, 2007). One of their crucial properties is their constitutive and interactive autonomy, which is defined as a network of dynamical processes (metabolic, immune, neural, sensorimotor, etc.) that actively generates and sustains an identity under precarious conditions (Di Paolo, 2005). An autonomous system constantly produces itself physically, and regulates its interactions with the world to satisfy the needs created by its precarious condition (Di Paolo, 2005). The living organism spontaneously generates its own goals and responds to the environment (McGann, 2007), in accordance with its self-organization. The cognizer is therefore always situated in a world that is significant for it, based on this perspective based on need. Its world is not pre-given but largely enacted, i.e., shaped as part of its autonomous activity. For the enactive approach, cognition is embodied, meaning that a cognizer’s activity depends non-trivially on the body. The body is more than just anatomical or physiological structures and sensorimotor strategies; it is the precarious combination of various interrelated self-sustaining identities (organic, cognitive, social), each interacting with the world in terms of the consequences for its own viability (Di Paolo, 2005).

These ideas together ground the enactive characterization of cognition as sense-making: a cognizer’s adaptive regulation of its states and interactions with the world, with respect to the implications for the continuation of its own autonomous identity. The concept of sense-making describes the relation between an autonomous agent and the world of significance it enacts. It therefore does not conceive of cognitive processes as representational and avoids the known problems of cognitivism. Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations whose significant value is to be added later. Natural cognitive systems participate in sense-making as a relational and affect-laden process grounded in biological organization (Jonas, 1966; Varela, 1991, 1997; Weber and Varela, 2002; Di Paolo, 2005; Thompson, 2007). Sense-making, thus, is valued or concerned acting and interacting, leaving no gap between affect and cognition—they are one in the relation of significance between cognizer and world.

Participatory Sense-Making

Having briefly explained what enactive cognition is, and sense-makers’ inherently meaningful perspective on and interactions with the world, let us now take a closer look at social encounters, the second main element in our enactive sketch of cooperation. The enactive approach considers sociality in its broadest form, namely as intersubjectivity, or the meaningful engagement between subjects (Reddy, 2008), in which three aspects are crucial: engagement, meaning, and subject. Meaning and subjectivity have been explained above in terms of sense-making, namely as the way living (cognizing) systems always meaningfully engage with their environment, because they are self-organizing and self-maintaining. In this section, we turn our gaze on engagement between such concerned subjects.

Crucial to the enactive approach is the focus on social interaction processes, which are complex phenomena involving different dimensions of verbal and non-verbal behavior, varying contexts, numbers of participants and technological mediation. They impose strict timing demands, involve reciprocal activity, exhibit a mixture of discrete and continuous events at different timescales, and are often robust against external disruptions. Essential to interaction is that it involves engagement between agents. Engagement (Reddy, 2008; Reddy and Morris, 2009) captures the qualitative aspect of social interactions once they start to “take over” and acquire a momentum of their own. It also reflects the way this experience is described in everyday language (e.g., “being in sync with someone”). Experientially, engagement is the fluctuating feelings of connectedness with one another, including that of being in the flow of an interaction.

In order to capture this taking-over aspect of engagement, enaction defines social interaction in terms of the autonomy (as defined above) of the interaction process and that of the individuals involved, as:

a co-regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where: (i) the co-regulation and the coupling mutually affect each other, constituting an autonomous self-sustaining organization in the domain of relational dynamics and (ii) the autonomy of the agents involved is not destroyed (although its scope can be augmented or reduced; De Jaegher et al., 2010, pp. 442–443; also De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007, p. 493).

Apart from each agent involved in such a coupling contributing to its co-regulation, the interaction process itself also self-organizes and self-maintains. To illustrate this, think of how sometimes, when you encounter someone coming from the other direction in a narrow corridor, you end up in front of each other, then each step aside, moving to the same side at the same time, preventing both of you from continuing on your way. This simple example shows how the interaction process can become autonomous or “take on a life of its own.” At the same time, the interactors also maintain their autonomy as participants. This is a necessary condition for calling an interaction social, because if one of the participants loses their autonomy, for the other it would be like interacting with an object or a tool, and thus not a social interaction anymore (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007).

Social interactions are sustained by processes of embodied coordination, including its breakdowns and repairs (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2012). Coordination does not necessarily require cognitively complicated skill. Analyses of social interactions and conversations in social science show that participants can unconsciously coordinate their movements and utterances, and this is already the case in mother-infant interactions (Condon and Sander, 1974; Stern, 1977/2002; Condon, 1979; Scollon, 1981; Davis, 1982; Tronick and Cohn, 1989; Kendon, 1990; Grammer et al., 1998; Malloch, 2000; Jaffe et al., 2001; Issartel et al., 2007; Malloch and Trevarthen, 2009). With the concept of coordination and other dynamical systems tools, interaction dynamics can be measured (see e.g., Kelso, 2009). Moreover, they can be related to neural activity (see e.g., Lindenberger et al., 2009; Dumas et al., 2010, 2012; Cui et al., 2012; Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2012; Konvalinka and Roepstorff, 2012; Schilbach et al., 2013).

Based on this definition of social interaction, and the notions of sense-making and coordination, we can now characterize social understanding as participatory sense-making: If, as indicated above, we make sense of the world by moving around in and with it, and we coordinate our movements with others when interacting with them, this means that we can coordinate our sense-making activities. That is, we literally participate in each other’s sense-making activities. Thus, on the enactive account, social understanding is understood as the generation and transformation of meaning together in interaction (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; De Jaegher, 2009; Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009). Participants co-create the interactive situation, but also the interaction process as such influences the sense-making that takes place. If a social interaction is as characterized, then people can act together, also for no apparent end or purpose of their own, or even against their individual ends (e.g., the corridor encounter). Even without a shared intention to start with or when entered into against their will by the participants, interacting can change or affect one’s ends or purposes.

This has an interesting consequence for understanding intentions, namely they are truly generated and transformed interactionally, and interacting with each other opens up new domains of sense-making that we would not have on our own. This contrasts with the way intentions are conceived in cognitivist approaches to cooperation, as introduced above, namely as hidden, and only shareable by high-level cognitive mechanisms. On our account, intentions do not first arise or are first made individually, but they emerge as the interaction goes on (Di Paolo, under review). Therefore, intentions are visible and understandable by each participant, also in cooperative interactions, as they are contextualized and stem from that specific ongoing interaction. This makes understanding and aligning with the other’s intentions un-mysterious: it happens in doing things together, which is moving together, since movements are already and always imbued with meaning for sense-makers (Johnson, 2007; Sheets-Johnstone, 2011; Merritt, 2013). On the basis of this, we can see how intentions can evolve in their jointness, meanings and specificity for those involved throughout interaction, including cooperative ones.

Cooperation as a Process

Here, we start from the most rudimentary or minimal form of cooperation, in order to make it understandable from a developmental point of view. With the enactive concepts of sense-making and participatory sense-making in hand, let us now look again at cooperation, starting from its basic definition as “(i) acting or working together and (ii) a common or the same end or purpose” (Tuomela, 2000, p. 3). Now, considering social interactions as already cooperative in a basic sense (in line with our enactive approach), we want to characterize our approach to cooperation starting from this definition by Hubley and Trevarthen (1979, p. 58):

cooperation means that each of the subjects is taking account of the other’s interests and objectives in some relation to the extrapersonal context, and is acting to complement the other’s response.”

In our view, “taking account of the other’s interests and objectives” does not need inferencing, as we argued, but happens through embodied interactions that are meaningful in the given situation and in the interactional history. These actions are complementary in that they fit each other in some form. This is not only the case for positive co-operations but also for situations in which we argue and disagree about something, where some complementarity is still needed in order for the disagreement even to be played out. This means that there are different forms, layers, and aspects of cooperation: embodied, in time, in space, in topic, imitative or complementary, etc. The fact that we are interacting guarantees that some basic cooperative layer is present (e.g., in the corridor situation, we cooperate to stop cooperating) and therefore, every time we interact, we cooperate, in a basic sense. Also, since sense-making always involves affect, this view of cooperation becomes less intellectualistic and begins to investigate how affective processes may be involved in cooperation. Then, the challenge is to investigate what further levels of cooperation are present in a specific interaction or situation, over and above the basic interaction process. This can involve different, increasingly more complex levels of sense-making.

Like the enactive approach, interactionist approaches such as ethnomethodology and conversation analysis have also based their empirical program on a theory of social interaction as a dynamical constructions and a view of others’ intentions as mutually accessible and accountable for. Ethnomethodology was originally developed by Garfinkel to “discover the methods that persons use in their everyday life (. . .) in constructing social reality” (Psathas, 1968, p. 509), and thus study how this reality is constructed, produced and organized in social encounters. Derived from phenomenology, it shares with it an interest in exploring the participants’ embodied experience of being engaged in mundane interactions; the latter are seen as phenomena in their own right, yet situated in specific cultural contexts and practices (see, for instance, the work of Schütz, 1967/1932). Inspired by ethnomethodology and by ((s))Goffman’s (1983) work on the interaction order, Conversation analysis (Sacks et al., 1974; Sacks, 1992; Schegloff, 2007) investigates the systematic features of naturally occurring conversations. In a large body of work now spanning over five decades, it has revealed the fine, moment-by-moment coordination of speakers, and the sequential structuring that enable the orderly participation of different interactors across turns-at-talk and within complex activities. Central in this approach is a view of human communication as multimodal, where different but integrated communicative resources (verbal and non-verbal) contribute to establishing the interactional context, anticipating, co-constructing, and if necessary repairing the emergent definition of what is going on (Kendon, 1990; Streeck et al., 2011; Tulbert and Goodwin, 2011). Thus, interactions are always cooperative, inasmuch as participants orient to, monitor and support the interlocutors’ understanding and act so as to enable their successive moves (Goodwin, 1995, 2013).

Intentions and goals are not searched before or behind the communicative action as its “cause,” but manifest in speakers’ behavior, shaped and adjusted as the interaction unfolds. Within this framework, and in convergence with enactivism, cooperating is possible even for those – like young children – who do not possess a robust capacity to “read” others’ intentions or plans, but can nevertheless participate in joint, situated interactions (Forrester, 2008; Lerner et al., 2011; Mehus, 2011).

Cooperation in Infancy

We can now ask what this view implies for understanding cooperation in infancy. Since infants cannot remain alive alone, they need others to help them with nourishing, shelter, hygiene, and social interaction. On our account, it is to be expected that infants contribute actively to this caring, because they are themselves sense-makers, generating and maintaining their own living identity, and also, quite possibly, already their social identity (Stern, 1985/2000; Delafield-Butt and Gangopadhyay, 2013).

Hubley (1983) defined cooperation in infancy as the joint management of objects, actions or ideas to fulfill a purpose that two interactors share. She identified some minimum requirements for cooperative actions in infancy, which are (1) a shared plan of action within mutual orientation, with the infant attending to and acting with reference to the partner’s indicated purposes; (2) active contributions to a single coordinated event, which, on the infant’s part, is seen as a clearly identifiable and oriented action to influence the behavior of the partner and then mesh with the partner’s action to complete a shared purpose; (3) willing participation. On the one hand, such a definition seems fitting with the infant’s limited communicative resources as it does not imply that the partners should verbally agree on a shared plan or goal. However, it presupposes that some shared plan has been somehow established, and requires that each partner understands the interest or purposes of the other regarding the shared action. As we already argued, such an explicit agreement may not be required in all forms of cooperative interactions.

The fundamental contribution of past developmental research has been to reveal how early communicative interactions are created out of contributions of both the infant and the caregiver (Hubley and Trevarthen, 1979; Trevarthen, 1979). Bruner (1977) recognized shared reference and role-taking as cooperative features in communicative interactions involving giving and receiving objects before 1 year of age. More recent observations have demonstrated how, since very early in life, infants adjust and facilitate actions directed to them, especially in daily routines such as when the caregivers pick them up, change their nappy, or play a social game with them (Service, 1984; Nomikou and Rohlfing, 2011; Reddy et al., 2013; Rączaszek-Leonardi et al., 2013; Fantasia et al., 2014). Under a perspective that considers social interactions as basic forms of cooperation by participating in shared, meaningful interactions, infants practice their ability to make sense of and coordinate with the caregiver’s action, becoming increasingly skilled in their social participation.

One of the criticisms we made of existing studies was that they measured children’s cooperative ability when they successfully performed a joint pre-fixed task; regarding cooperation as a cognitive skill that can be switched on and off means neglecting the importance of learning processes that sprout from and within cooperative interactions. In contrast, in a here and now perspective the process of cooperating enables children to build up their actions moment by moment through a sequence of relational adjustments and (dis-)engagements toward a joint goal. Thanks to its structuring and structured nature, cooperation may be seen as a framework in which development occurs and at the same time as a mode of being with others learnt during development. If we take seriously what was proposed so far – that any interaction requires some basic cooperation, followed, in some cases, by a process of co-negotiation toward a more or less explicit goal that matters to those who are involved in that process – then we may also explain how it develops. And, at the same time, we may be able to see how participating in goal-directed joint actions supports and shapes infants’ development.

Cooperation in Autism

A different theoretical perspective may also open up new possibilities for investigating cooperation in autism. As reported above, empirical findings suggest that some children with autism (at different chronological ages) perform poorly in high-level cooperative tasks and in other correlated abilities, such as joint attention, imitation, perspective taking, and role-reversal (see Colombi et al., 2009). Yet, performing “poorly” does not mean that the capacity is absent, and indeed some children with autistic spectrum condition (ASC) do pass the cooperative tasks. This result is not consistent with the theoretical premises informing the design of the tests and the difficulties of children with autism, classically understood. One way to explain this (controversial) evidence may lie in changing the premises we start from, instead of post hoc adjustments to the interpretation.

Studies of the verbal production of children with autism that do not start from a deficit but try to understand the children’s spontaneous interactional behavior, can help to illustrate and support this shift of perspective. Conversation analysis studies, for example, allow to observe how even echolalic productions (the repetition of utterances with no apparent relation to prior talk from other speakers), often seen in children with autism, are in fact responsive moves (Loca and Wootton, 1995; Wootton, 1999; Stribling et al., 2005/2006; Sterponi and Shankey, 2014). The repetition of available utterances helps children to stay in the conversation despite their difficulty with improvising a newly designed turn. Sometimes these stereotypical contributions can take the form of questions and feed the progression of an interaction, supporting the child’s continued participation in a social exchange (Sterponi and Fasulo, 2010).

Dickerson et al. (2007) also show that observing what children actually do reveals capacities for cooperation that cannot emerge in pre-defined tasks, for sometimes the ways in which children find solutions for their difficulties are not incorporated into the tasks. They investigated classroom interactions between two autistic children and their tutors. The children were asked to answer questions, using answer-cards. During the session, each of the children tapped the answer-cards, an action which at first sight seemed meaningless. However, using conversation analysis, Dickerson et al. (2007) could show that the children tapped on the cards just before they started answering, and sometimes continuing into their answering. This seems to indicate that the tapping is a way of engaging and of “projecting a relevant forthcoming response on the part of the child” (Dickerson et al., 2007, p. 297). In other words, the children found means to signal their ongoing engagement when the timing of their verbal production was delayed, thus cooperating to the maintenance of the interactive plane.

Using fine-grained observational methods, the actions of all participants can be studied and analyzed in interaction, making it possible to pick up the forms of cooperation that infants and people with autism are capable of (see also Stribling et al., 2009). These examples demonstrate how the use of non-verbal and non-vocal resources for building up a co-participatory model of how the child and teachers work together becomes possible thanks to transcripts of the interactions. In this way, not only the participants’ talk, but also a number of non-verbal activities that are salient for the interaction are acknowledged. These results fit well with the Vygotskian idea that collaborative work leads to learning (Vygotsky, 1978; see also Goodwin, 2013). Furthermore, these studies suggest that ways to observe cooperative interactions in autism exist, if only we consider interactions and autism from a different perspective. During everyday interactions at home or school, in the car or at the park, children with autism are involved in many simpler, not-always-explicit cooperative exchanges. Not only are the children part of these exchanges, but they also grow into them; namely, they learn to be active partners out of everyday cooperative interaction, just like every other child does. This is not to say that there are no difficulties or differences, but social understanding in autism may be more fruitfully studied from thebasic and positive perspective we put forward here.

Implications

In summary, the perspective shift we propose has implications for understanding development as well as autism. Firstly, our approach supports a developmental stance on cooperation in that it explores how we become cooperative interaction partners in the first place. If we assume high-order mental skills (or a great deal of “social experience”) to be prerequisite for cooperating, we would not able to see how infants can grow into social interactions and gradually learn to engage with the social world around them, but rather wait until much of the development has already happened. If, on the other hand, we propose that cooperation is a form of interacting and understanding each other, it does become possible to investigate how cooperation can emerge and be learnt even in early interactions. In this perspective, cooperation in infancy is a product of development, as well as a process in which development occurs.

An interesting aspect to consider regarding development is how to conceive of cooperation in asymmetrical interactions. Infants seem to be able to cooperatively coordinate with caregivers since very early (see e.g., Reddy et al., 2013; Fantasia et al., 2014), but they may not do it with peers until later on, as suggested by some research (Warneken and Tomasello, 2006, 2007). From an enactive point of view, it is not surprising that infants are better able to cooperate with a caregiver than with a peer, since the presence of someone with more interactive experience makes the overall interaction more competent. This is related to ((s))Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of the zone of proximal development, where it is possible to scaffold someone in interaction to be jointly more capable of activities they cannot yet do alone. What is needed for an interaction to be cooperative if the relation is asymmetric? If we think of a pick up situation, we know that the adult is doing the major part by actually holding the infant and lifting her up. Yet, infants are not passively waiting for it to happen. They make specific preparatory body adjustments that facilitate the mother’s movements, and thus, the pick up sequence (Service, 1984; Reddy et al., 2013). At the same time, when the adult fails to complete the expected pick up sequence, infants seem to stop being cooperative by dropping their body tension and participation (Fantasia et al., 2014). In this case, although the mother has the main role in making the pick up sequence effective, the infant’s role is essential in its being clearly oriented toward the joint achievement of the interaction. Obviously, asymmetry may or may not play a strong role depending on the task.

As a second point, if we are to understand autism in general, and specifically people with autism’s capacity to cooperate (which is firstly a particular form of social interaction) the change of perspective we propose here may also be helpful. We may try to forsake a typical-development perspective and, as Petra Björne and other authors have already suggested, reverse our glasses, paying more attention to what people with ASC can do and the way they describe their own experiences (Björne, 2007; Robledo et al., 2012; De Jaegher, 2013; Donnellan et al., 2013). As shown by the studies on autism presented in the previous section, if we consider actions in their interactional context and in their significance for all participants, it becomes possible to understand the emergence of cooperation also in the interactions of and with people with autism. Exploring cooperation in children with autism from an observer or third-person perspective not only fails to take into account the child’s experience of cooperating as an engaged partner; it also cuts out how the other person is feeling or experiencing the child as a partner. In cases like autism, in which social interactions run a different course, in which jointly attending to an object may not be at the core of the interaction, approaching cooperation from a second person perspective can make all the difference.

We thus suggest that future studies on cooperation and autism should include more ecological observations and parental reports. We expect to gain more detailed knowledge about what infants and children with autism can do cooperatively in early goal-directed interactions from taking an enactive approach. This involves: finely studying the interaction (e.g., through ethnomethodology or conversation analysis), taking into account the context or the environment (using, for instance, parental reports or ecological observations), and studying what is at stake for the individuals involved (i.e., asking how they make sense in and of the interaction).

Conclusion

We hope to have shown that it is possible to encompass a wider range of cooperative interactions, not only those in which interactors explicitly agree upon and set rules and roles for a specific shared task to be performed. This is not to neglect that in some particular scenarios participants do need to make efforts to make sense of the other’s intentions, and indeed goals need to be set out and agreed beforehand. Only, this is not always the case, as cooperation is a multi-layered process that may take different forms. In this perspective, we share Tollefsen’s view that intentions-in-action can emerge out of ongoing interaction (Tollefsen and Dale, 2012), with the minimum requirement that interactors share an interactional space. Cooperation is a form of participating in each other’s sense-making, in which we may form a goal or purpose together while interacting. It is not a skill that can be lacked but rather a way of being with others that is possible to learn. Learning to cooperate then becomes understandable as an important aspect of typical and atypical development. For this reason, we think that future developmental research on cooperation (and social cognition in general) could benefit from more ecological observational methods and less adult-centric approaches (Donaldson, 1978). As the adult’s way of cooperating is an already fully blossomed one, one in which the picture is complete (and intentions can be easily inferred if needed), we need instead to observe infants and their daily living and discover the basic, emerging ways in which cooperation develops.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We are greatly thankful to Alan Costall, Beatriz López, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Vasu Reddy, Stephen Butterfill, the two reviewers and the researchers who attended the presentation of this paper at the Children and Technology Lab, Developmental and Clinical Psychology Group, University of Sussex for their suggestions, support and inspirational discussions. This work is supported by the Marie-Curie Initial Training Network, “TESIS: Towards an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity” (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, 264828).”

Footnotes

1. ^ We will not go into the debate here about specific differences between shared or collective intentionality or other denominations as it is not relevant for our argument. For an overview of analytic standpoints on the terms, see (Schweikard and Schmid, 2013).
2. ^ Mainstream accounts of autism have long proposed that people with autism have difficulties in mind-reading (Baron-Cohen, 1989; Dinishak and Akhtar, 2013), joint attention (Loveland and Landry, 1986), or impairments in turn-taking skills (McEvoy et al., 1993), although these findings are not uncontroversial, and even primary proponents recognize that there is always a number of participants who do pass the tests (Happé, 1994; but see also Boucher, 1989, 1996, 2012; Gernsbacher et al., 2008).

References at the Frontiers site