Introduction to the special issue ‘The phenomenology of joint action’

Abstract

The contributions collected in this special issue explore the phenomenology of joint action from a broad range of different disciplinary and methodological angles, including philosophical investigation (both in the analytic and the phenomenological tradition), computational modeling, experimental study, game theory, and developmental psychology. They also vastly expand the range of discussed cases beyond the standard examples of house-painting and sauce-cooking, addressing, for example, collective musical improvisations, dancing, work at the Diversity and Equity office of a university, and historical examples of collective violence such as the revolutionary Terror in France and the Nazis. In our introduction to this special issue, we group the contributions into three thematic areas – 1) the phenomenological fine-structure of joint action, 2) underlying mechanisms for joint action and 3) phenomenal preconditions for joint action. The first theme is discussed under a number of issues – a) components of the phenomenology of joint action, b) the I and the we in joint action, c) the effect of group size, structure and nature on the phenomenology of joint action and d) how do phenomenal relate to normative aspects of joint action?