Adam Gies

I argue against a received view of common ground in joint action and defend an alternative one based on the mindshaping framework. Common ground is what is ‘in the open’ between two or more agents, the taken-for-granted background that facilitates mutual understanding and interaction. The received view holds that common ground in joint action is ‘in the head’. It depends on the parties using sophisticated mindreading abilities to establish a psychological alignment on a mutually recognized aim. Against the received view, I argue that mindreading alone is both an impossible method of establishing common ground and fails to explain the dynamic features of many joint actions. On my alternative, common ground is in the world, not in the head. My basic idea is that many of our actions are not direct expressions of our individual minds but reflect our conformity to shared social routines, norms, and roles. These dispositions to conform to social models facilitate both interpretation and interaction in joint action by making agents more alike. Combined with team-reasoning, these conformity processes enable agents to establish common ground in joint actions without engaging in sophisticated mindreading. The upshot is that mindreading does not constitute common ground but presupposes it.

In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives towards building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the study of “mindreading” and debates on emotions. We claim that the current practice in cognitive (neuro)science has undergone, in effect, a silent mechanistic revolution, and has turned from initial binary oppositions and abstract proposals towards the integration of wide perspectives with the rest of the cognitive (neuro)sciences.