Source
De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007), LIT-571 (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6: 485–507), read in full in NOTE-456. NOTE-456 declined a THEORY “because the source does not carry a claim beyond the definition itself; the evidence is illustrative”. This document is filed Proposed under that caution: it states the account the definition commits to, and the one reported result that bears on it.
What was actually shown
Coordination is cheap (pp. 490–491). Coordination is “the non-accidental correlation between the behaviours of two or more systems that are in sustained coupling” (p. 490). Pendulum clocks do it; pairs swinging pendulums phase-lock when they can see each other (Schmidt and O’Brien). Coordination can be absolute or relative, with phase attraction (Kelso).
The double influence (pp. 492–494). In a social encounter the pattern of coordination affects whether the encounter continues, and the encounter affects the likelihood of coordination. That loop makes the encounter “an emergent and autonomous process”, “typically a fleeting one”.
The condition (pp. 493–495). The interaction is social only while the interactors remain autonomous. Body heat shared at a bus stop is coupling without regulation, so not social. Coercion that destroys an interactor’s autonomy is, “at that point”, no longer social.
Participatory sense-making (p. 497, Fig. 2). Because movements are the tools of sense-making, coordinating movement coordinates sense-making. It runs from one partner’s sense-making being modulated (a video-link delay changes the meaning of a pause) through orientation (pointing) to meaning made jointly (charades).
Perceptual crossing (pp. 501–502), reported. In Auvray et al.’s minimal virtual-tape experiment, partners recognise each other because both search for each other; mutual scanning is the only globally stable configuration. “The sense-making that solves the task only happens at the level of the collective dynamics.”
What could have come out otherwise. In perceptual crossing, recognition could have been explained by each participant’s detection of a moving object. The reported result is that it depends on both partners searching.
What this does not say
- That the interaction is an agent. It has its own precarious closure, but the paper does not call it an agent or a subject. It is dyadic and fleeting.
- That a minutes-long encounter has operational closure in the strict sense. How a fleeting relational pattern has processes that “would run down” in isolation is not spelled out (NOTE-456, Limitations).
- That individual mechanisms explain nothing. The case against mirror-neuron explanations is an argument (C5, weak).
- That social difficulty is relational. The remark on autism is one sentence, citing De Jaegher 2006.
- Anything about groups. Groups larger than two are set aside.
Connections
- QUESTION-009 asks when a pattern of coordination constitutes an additional agent. This account gives the closest criterion the record holds short of agency: coordination becomes an autonomous organization when it and the encounter’s continuation regulate each other, and only while the members stay autonomous. It constrains the question; it does not answer it, since autonomy here is not agency.
- Its relative coordination is the metastable regime of the extended HKB model (LIT-601), whose phase-transition account is THEORY-069.
- The enactive autonomy it applies to social encounters is the same group’s (LIT-566).