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Your goal is my goal
An outcome is a \emph{collective goal} of two or more actions involving multiple agents
just if the actions are directed to this goal and this is not, or not just, a matter
of each action being individually directed to that goal.
collective
Jack’s and Ayehsa’s actions are collectively directed to developing a vaccine for Zika
not collective
Ilsa and Ahmed’s actions are each individually directed to developing a vaccine for Zika
Those speakers collectively provide high fidelity reproduction.
Each of those speakers individually provides high fidelity reproduction
collective goal : an outcome to which our actions are collectively directed
joint action : an action with a collective goal
In what follows I’m going to rely on two assumptions:
(1) joint actions involve collective goals
(2) you can identify something as a joint action without ascribing any mental states.
intuitive idea, not quite right
Here is an intuitive idea that doesn't quite work:
if an interpreter is engaged in an interaction with her target that involves a collective goal,
it may be easy for the interpreter to know what the goal of her target's actions is because this
goal is the goal of her own actions.
So if she knows the goal of her own actions and she knows that she is engaged with
her target in an interaction involving a collective goal,
then she already knows what the goal of her target's actions are.
Roughly speaking, the mindreader can reason about her target thus: your goal is my goal.
Of course this intuitive idea is no use it stands.
For the inference it captures relies on the premise that the interpreter and her
target are engaged in actions with a collective goal.
But for the mindreader to know this premise it seems she must
already know which goal her target's actions are directed to.
but: cues to joint action
Fortunately there is a way around this.
For there are various cues which signal that one agent is prepared
to engage in some joint action or other with another,
and joint actions involve collective goals.
\label{twin_pram}
Seeing you struggling to get your twin pram onto a bus and noticing you have
the haggard look of a new parent, a passing stranger grabs the front wheels
and makes eye contact with you, raising her eyebrows and smiling.
(The noise of the street rules out talking.)
In this way she signals that she is about to act jointly with you.
Since you are fully committed to getting your pram onto the bus,
you know what the sole goal of your own actions will be.
But you also know that the stranger will engage in joint action with you,
which means that, taken together, her actions and your actions will have a collective goal.
This may enable you to infer the goal of the stranger's imminent actions:
her goal is your goal, to get the pram onto the bus.
\begin{enumerate}
\label{your_goal_is_my_goal}
\item You are
about to attempt to
engage in some joint action\footnote{
We leave open the issue of how joint action is to be characterised subject only to the
requirement that all joint actions must involve collective goals.
Attempts to characterise joint action in ways relevant to explaining development include
\citet{Tollefsen:2005vh},
\citet{Carpenter:2009wq},
\citet{pacherie_framing_2011} and
\citet{Butterfill:2011fk}.
}
or other with me.
%(for example, because you have made eye contact with me while I was in the middle of attempting to do something).
\item I am not about to change the single goal to which my actions will be directed.
\end{enumerate}
%
Therefore:
%
\begin{enumerate}[resume]
%
\item A goal of your actions will be my goal, the goal I now envisage that my actions will be directed to.
\end{enumerate}
Your-goal-is-my-goal
1. You are about to attempt to engage in some joint action or other with me.
For example, because you have made eye contact with me while I was in the middle of attempting to do something)
2. I am not about to change the single goal to which my actions will be directed.
Therefore:
3. A goal of your actions will be my goal, the goal I now envisage that my actions will be directed to.
I claim (i) you could know the premises without already knowing the conclusion,
and (ii) knowing the premises could put you in a position to know the conclusion.
So the inference is a route to knowledge.
It describes how interacting interpreters might come to know facts
about the goals of others’ actions.
The teleological stance is one route to knowlegde of other’s goals,
and this is another.
The two routes to knowledge are complementary: one
demands knowledge of means-ends relations and so is no good when the
means are opaque to the interpreter; the other places different demands
on the interpreter.
| teleological stance | your-goal-is-my-goal | |
| demands know means | ✓ | ✗ |
| demands can interact | ✗ | ✓ |
What about the problem of opaque means?
I claim that your-goal-is-my-goal enables you to avoid
the problem of opaque means. But how does it work?
Earlier I mentioned three examples.
Let’s see how your-goal-is-my-goal enables you to avoid
the problem of opaque means in each of these three cases.
e.g. pram -> bus; gorilla preparing nettles
e.g. tool use illustrates inversion of demands
e.g. communicative actions
Actually I already did this one in introducing the inference.
We saw earlier that the problem of opaque means may impair goal
ascription where actions involve novel uses for tools.
How could your-goal-is-my-goal mitigate the problem in such cases?
Imagine we are interacting with a young child,
Ayesha,
and want her to understand how a new tool is used.
It is difficult to convey this to her directly.
So we first get her interested in achieving an outcome that would require the new tool,
knowing that she will perform actions directed to achieving this outcome.
We then signal to Ayesha that we will act jointly with her.
Now she is in a position to know what the goal of our action will be when we deploy the tool.
She is able to identify this goal
despite being unable to recognize it as an end to which our tool-using action is a means.
She is able to identify this goal
because she knows that this is her goal
and that we were attempting to engage in joint action with her.
This is one illustration of how
interacting interpreters have at their disposal ways of
identifying the goals of actions involving novel uses of tools
which are unavailable to interpreters who can only observe.
As this example indicates,
exploiting your-goal-is-my-goal
can shift the burden of identifying goals from a mindreader to her target.
In the example Ayesha is the focal mindreader and we are her target;
but her success in identifying the goal of our actions
depends on this,
that our willingness to act jointly with her is based on \emph{our} knowledge of the goals of \emph{her} actions.
In purely observational mindreading, the target's beliefs about the goals of the mindreader's actions are not normally relevant (except, of course, when the mindreader is ascribing such beliefs).
But interacting mindreaders who rely on your-goal-is-my-goal
thereby rely on their targets' having correctly identified the goals of their actions.
Of course this is sometimes a reason not to rely on your-goal-is-my-goal.
But where the target understands relevant means-ends relations,
such as actions involving novel tools,
the your-goal-is-my-goal route to knowledge of others' goals may sometimes be the only option.
This is a bit of a problem ...
My question was ...
Could interacting interpreters be in a position to know things which they would be unable to know if they were manifestly passive observers?
I’ve argued that the answer is yes.
A thesis about interaction and social cognition
Some routes to knowledge are closed to interpreters who rely exclusively on observation
but open to interacting interpreters.
Have we vindicated the rough intuition about interaction enabling a meeting
of minds? Clearly not.
There’s much more to do on this; I suspect the observer paradigm is a
source of big problems. But so far my attempts to investigate this,
including by organising a bit workshop, haven’t got very far.