Doing without intentions: toward an enactive theory of minimal joint action in human and non-human animals

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.