Abstract
Tenenberg, Roth and Socha (2016) documents interaction within a paired programming task. The analysis rests on a conceptualization the authors term “We-awareness.” “We-awareness”, in turn, builds on Tomasello’s notion of “shared intentionality” and through it, upon Clark’s formulation of Common Ground (CG). In this commentary I review the features of CG. I attempt to show that neither Tomasello’s (2014) notion of “shared intentionality” nor Clark’s (1996) model of CG-shared develop an adequate treatment of the sequential emergence of subjective meaning. This is a critical problem for CG and other conceptualizations that build upon it (e.g., “shared intentionality”, “We-awareness”). And it calls into question their usefulness for building an analytic apparatus for studying mutual awareness at the worksite. I suggest that Schütz’s (1953) model of “motive coordination” might serve as a better starting place.
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Notes
Clark (1996, p. 93), himself, credits the expression to Stalnaker (1978), but Stalnaker’s treatment of mutual knowledge is a bit different from Clark’s. Stalnaker notes that Grice (1989) previously used the expression “common ground status” in his 1966–67 William James Lectures. So the idea has been around for a while.
This treatment of intention is congruent with how intention is taken up by philosophers of action within the analytic tradition and in Speech Act theory (e.g., Bratman 1992; Searle 1990). Intentionality as described by Brentano, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others within the phenomenological tradition is dismissed by Tenenberg et al. as mere “I-intentionality” (p. 7). The differences between the two notions of intentionality, however, go much deeper than whether the analysis is conducted from an individual or collective perspective.
Elsewhere, Tomasello (2008, pp. 78–79) develops a slightly different taxonomy of common ground based on whether it is established [1] in the here-and-now or is something recalled, [2] is object-directed or non object-directed (i.e., is “top-down” or “bottom-up”), and [3] whether it is explicit or implicit (i.e., “common cultural knowledge”).
We return to the problems of intersubjectivity anon.
See Suchman (1987) for an expanded development of this point.
Schmidt (2002), writes: “Liberated from the scepticist mystification of intersubjectivity, we no longer have to marvel at the apparent miracle that actors effortlessly make sense of the actions of coworkers” (p. 294). Schütz’s (1953) scepticism, however, would appear to be well-founded and he is certainly no mystic. Intersubjectivity does not arise as a problem within the CG model, because it does not attend to subjective meanings. But, one important implication of Schütz’s scepticism with regard to intersubjectivity is that it would preclude the very possibility of two parties ever holding a proposition p in common.
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Koschmann, T. The Trouble with Common Ground. Comput Supported Coop Work 25, 303–311 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-016-9245-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-016-9245-x