Ric Sims

Minimal joint action is action jointly undertaken without prior planning or contentful intentions. Imagine a person lifting a heavy table upstairs. Her companion, seeing her struggling, rushes to her aid and picks up one end, and they both perform the task together. Despite there being no prior plan nor shared intentions, traditionally understood, this seems to be a perfectly legitimate case of joint action, and one that is not much discussed in the literature. The paper examines cases like this and proposes that there are kinds of joint action that can be analysed in terms of a teleosemiotic approach where coordination of individual agents is achieved through an environmental variable that depends on the results of their actions – stigmergic coordination, rather than through the content of intentional states. We leverage the fact that the mechanism of stigmergic coordination of actions through environmental signs takes place on two levels: that of individual agents and the group itself – hence establishing a notion of joint action at the group level. Normativity is introduced through a set of long-term broadly evolutionary processes – whether biological or cultural, which are responsible for the ontogenesis of tasks, their coordinative signs, and the agents that consume them.

The main proposal of this paper is that boundary objects and the trading zones in which they occur are the analogue of pheromone trails in the foraging of a termite colony. The colony can be construed as a _stigmergic_ system where the traces of the actions of individual termites coordinate their further actions without the existence of any central control or planning structures. The coordinated systems approach proposed by this paper lends support to the idea that such a system is minimally cognitive in the sense that it is responsible for goal-directed behaviour. Boundary objects and trading zones in scientific practice play a similar functional role to pheromone traces because they are responsible for the same kind of coordination. This approach therefore provides a cognitive account of the social notions of boundary object and trading zone without making representationalist or computationalist assumptions. Moreover, it is scale-invariant—the same analytical technique can be applied at multiple scales simultaneously. It therefore provides a framework for an understanding of the complementarity of cognitive and social approaches to scientific investigation and points to areas for further ethnographic research.