Action and Interaction

by Shaun Gallagher

Shaun Gallagher presents a ground-breaking interdisciplinary account of human action, bringing out its essentially social dimension. He explores and synthesizes the different approaches of action theory, social cognition, and critical social theory. He shows that in order to understand human agency and the aspects of mind that are associated with it, we need to grasp the crucial role of context or circumstance in action, and the normative constraints of social and cultural practices. He also investigates issues concerning social cognition and embodied intersubjective interaction, including direct social perception and the role of narrative and communicative practices from an interdisciplinary perspective. Gallagher thereby brings together embodied and enactive approaches to action for the first time in this book and, in developing an alternative to standard conceptions of understanding others, he bridges social cognition and critical social theory, drawing out the implications
for recognition, autonomy, and justice.

320 pages, Hardcover

Published June 2, 2020

About the author

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Reviews

[Yates Buckley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book raises important issues around understanding of embodied experience, in particular as relevant to new applications of technology. The author is a philosopher with a strong intuition about the complexity around understanding what interactions are about.

However, as is case with many philosophy texts, this is difficult reading and hard to integrate with other knowledge.

The main point is that embodiment is much more than appears and that extracting agency or intent from embodied action requires us to look at the whole.

My main insight from this book is to realize how even a simple interaction cannot really be taken without the full context of the subjective experience that includes really every possible factor from cultural, to environmental, cognitive, etc...