In Action and Interaction (2020), Shaun Gallagher offers a provocative and original attempt to tackle questions of action and agency from an enactivist perspective. The text is thoroughly inter-disciplinary, drawing on empirical work in developmental psychology, key concepts in philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and critical theory. Gallagher weaves together a narrative that links discussions in traditional action theory to questions of justice as these emerge in the ways in which we interact with one another. The sheer scope of domains covered is breathtaking, and therefore might seem overwhelming. However, the presentation and structure of the book make it so that each link in the argument comes very naturally, and tracing Gallagher’s intuitions as the argument develops does not require any specific technical or theoretical background knowledge. 

The opening Chapter sets the scene for what is to come: that actions “are defined and individuated by their circumstances; they are always situated or contextual” (pg. 7). Here, Gallagher argues for a pluralistic account of how we should go about identifying actions. Specifically, that actions cannot be understood outside of the context or situation in which they occur. Additionally, actions must be understood in relational terms, where reference is made to both the agent’s intention and the action environment in which the agent is embedded. Thus, talk of some kind of static or “basic” action is misguided: action is dynamic and intrinsically temporal, and so we should instead talk of basic activity. 

Chapter 2 builds explicitly on this temporal dynamism of action. Gallagher claims that action is not just an event that occurs “in time”, but that action has an intrinsic temporality (pg. 25). Here we are introduced to the enactive character of action in which perception and cognition are always action orientated (pg. 34). This means that, building on the discussion in Chapter 1, we cannot understand action outside of a given situation. More than that, however, the enactivist approach highlights a “structural coupling between the agentive body and the environment, which generates action-oriented meaning” (pg. 34). When something is perceived in a given environment it is perceived as actionable: such affordances (possibilities for action) shape the way the world is perceived by the subject, and thus cannot be decoupled from action. Additionally, Gallagher notes that our perception of these possibilities for action are also shaped by our personal histories, or narratives. The kinds of people we are will shape the kinds of things we deem possible (and value), and thus it is our continued interaction with our environment (and other agents) that becomes essential to understanding our sense of agency. 

In Chapter 3 we are introduced to Gallagher’s definition of action: “action, which is more than bodily movement and which scales up to more than a set of causal processes, is characterized by three elements or aspects beyond the movement itself: intention, a sense of agency, and meaning which generally goes beyond the agent’s intention” (pg. 43). The Chapter is specifically concerned with addressing the sense of agency, and its associated phenomenology. Toward the end of the Chapter, Gallagher also stresses the often-neglected social dimension of action. Intentions, deliberations, motivations, etc. are not “all in the head” of individual agents, but, rather, are shaped by one’s peer group, family, friends, etc. (pg. 63). This is a key insight that will carry the reader through the rest of the text, so it is worth spelling out in a bit more detail. Gallagher conceives of action as dynamically constituted, “in which many elements come into relations of reciprocal causal couplings” (pg. 61). Thus, it is not the case that mental states are irrelevant, but rather that there are always dynamical relations between bodily processes and elements of the social environment that co-shape and constitute action.

Chapter 4 provides us with reasons to doubt “standard” interpretations of how we come to understand, explain, and predict the actions of others (our “folk psychology”). Gallagher problematizes both theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST) as being insufficiently able to account for the myriad ways our minds are “embodied, environmentally embedded, and extended” (pg. 99). In place of these, in Chapter 5, he proposes his own theory of social cognition: interaction theory (IT). IT stresses the importance of context, circumstance, communication, and narrative practice in our understanding of social cognition (pg. 100). How we come to understand one other is not a matter of a theoretical inference or some internal representation, but rather consists in a variety of embodied practices (pg. 99). Gallagher outlines these practices by drawing on a number of empirical studies that look at the development of various social competencies in children. In each case, we are shown that interaction is at the foundation of our social lives, and that this interaction is not reducible to more basic units. Rather, we are presented with a picture of action that requires at least two embodied agents who are dynamically coupled. This “dynamic coupling” is of a specific kind and makes no appeal to theory or simulation (as TT and ST suggest). Rather, we come into the world already attuned to interact with others. Moreover, this starting point is not given up for a more sophisticated theory as we develop and grow older. Instead, it continuously undergirds our being-with-others in the world. 

In Chapter 6, Gallagher outlines his account of how we directly perceive the emotions and intentions of others, without theoretical inference or simulation. An enactivist reading of intention does not require access to the internal mental states of others, rather “intentions are in the movement, in the action, in the environmentally attuned responses” (pg. 128). Emotions admit of a similar understanding if we come to see emotion perception as a kind of pattern recognition, and not as a kind of “mind reading”. 

Chapter 7 treats us to a more sustained investigation of what exactly constitutes our intersubjective abilities. Specifically, Gallagher is concerned with the role of communicative and narrative practices in social cognition. Communicative practices are solutions to the problems of social cognition. That is, the key problem in social cognition is how we understand each other, and our communicative practices (whether in the form of proto-conversation to a fully formed conversion) are one solution to this problem. These practices, however, admit of a broad understanding: they range from vocalization, postural orientation, facial expressions, etc., all of which point to their dynamic and situated meaning. Narrative is another way in which we come to understand one another (and ourselves!), as our narratives shape what actions we deem appropriate in various contexts. Narratives (and stories more generally) teach us what is expected of us from others, and how we can expect others to treat us (pg. 163). This naturally draws our attention to the background knowledge that agents require in order to get social cognition off the ground. Narrative and communicative practices cannot occur in a vacuum: we are shaped by not just our physical, but also our social, cultural, and normative environments. This background “finds its beginning in intersubjective interactive practices, and, through communicative and narrative practices, is further built up to expand social and cultural norms” (pg. 173).

In Chapter 8, Gallagher begins to situate his argument for a specific kind of social cognition in more explicitly normative terms. Our social interactions are built on primary and secondary intersubjectivity, and both necessarily involve recognizing others. While primary intersubjectivity is dyadic and involves a relation between self and other, secondary intersubjectivity is triadic, and is a relation between self, other, and world (and includes things such as joint attention and action). For Gallagher it is important that we are clear that we do not “upgrade” from primary to secondary subjectivity (in the sense that we move out of the one and into the other), but rather that we see secondary intersubjectivity as being built on primary subjectivity. Thus, our relations (and interactions) with others (primary intersubjectivity) is something that continues to characterize social cognition even as we move out of infancy and gain the ability for secondary intersubjectivity (pg. 202). Gallagher’s notion of autonomy, therefore, is both relational and graded: due to the foundational nature of social relations in shaping who we are, “the autonomy of the individual is interdependent with the autonomy of interaction” (pg. 211).

In his penultimate Chapter, Gallagher works through the provocative suggestion that our legal infrastructures, government agencies, universities, etc. are all examples of cognitive institutions (pg. 213). This leads to an understanding of narrative that is deeply enmeshed with our broader social practices. These narratives, however, are not only a means for maintaining a sense of self- and other-understanding but are also important vehicles of cultural critique. While there is a tendency for narratives to reinforce the status quo, Gallagher pushes back against this by invoking critical narrative practice (pg. 229). 

In a normative sense, then, these narrative practices can enable or hinder our pursuit of justice. Here, critical theory (drawing on the work of Hegel, Habermas, Gadamer, and Mills) aids us in seeing how “idealized” accounts of social cognition (such as TT and ST) ignore the effects that the intersection of properties such as race, gender, and class can have on our perception of the social order of things (pg. 227). Thus, the kinds of interactions that our cognitive institutions promote or distort need to be critically evaluated, and this can be achieved by operationalizing critical narrative practice, resulting in a more just interpretation of social cognition.

In the final Chapter, Gallagher attempts to bring his interactive account of action to bear on questions of justice. Following the major themes of his argument thus far, this conception of justice is not considered in an abstract or overly idealized way. Rather, he is concerned with the practice of justice, as this is informed by the kinds of intersubjectivity that have been key to his account of action. More specifically, he illuminates how there is a sense of justice at play in our everyday interactions with one another. Central to this is a “justice relation”, which cashes out justice as predicated on a “personal concern for others” (pg. 242). This pushes back against traditional approaches to justice that see it as equated with just distribution. Gallagher argues that such a disembodied approach fails to apprehend the central structure of justice itself, as justice is linked to the kind of relational autonomy introduced earlier. Thus, “justice consists in those arrangements that maximize autonomy in our practices” (pg. 245). 

Overall, Action and Interaction is an engaging and empirically sophisticated book. Gallagher makes use of a wide array of literature on human social development, and so those who are interested in human action from developmental, psychological, and philosophical frameworks will find his arguments useful. More than that, this is an incredibly ambitious text. Attempting to bring together such a wide variety of sources is no easy task, yet Gallagher seems to be at home in many (often competing) traditions. From contemporary analytic philosophy of mind to questions of justice in the context of critical social theory, there is something for everybody. 

Fabio Tollon is a doctoral candidate at Bielefeld University, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project 254954344/GRK2073 “Integrating Ethics and Epistemology of Scientific Research”. He is also a fellow at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR). 

Categories: Philosophical

Keywords: philosophy, psychology