How Sophisticated Our Interaction Can Get

One of the still ill covered topics in collective intentionality is the distinction between a spontaneous, quasi-automatic social interaction (as, for example, walking together while talking), and a more sophisticated one, based on explicit agreements and shared constructions (e.g., voting). It is very intuitive to say that they have something in common, but at the same time they are quite different. In this paper we want, at least partially, to explain this by showing the importance of critical situations in the passage from spontaneous social interaction to sophisticated social ones. With "critical situation" we refer to those situations of impasse, when agents are stuck and do not know how to proceed. For example, each agent may be not completely aware of his/her own capabilities, an agent may be mistaken about the mental attitudes of the other agents, one or all the agents may be mistaken about the environmental situation, there may be misunderstandings about the role each agent should play in the interaction... If we assume that humans are naturally inclined to cooperate, we should deduce that spontaneous interaction is what they engage into by default, on the basis of a sort of "principle of parsimony". But when things get complicated, like when agents are spatially distant one another, or need to act at different times, or do not know each other, they are forced to create conceptual and linguistic coordination structures. This means that the social reality we live in is a product of a continuous trial-and-error process: when the situation is too complex, the spontaneously interacting agents are very likely to incur in an impasse and it is exactly in order to avoid or overcome an impasse (actual or just threatened), that the interaction is moved to a higher, more sophisticated, level.