ABSTRACT
There are many different forms of joint action and shared activity. While some of these require little communication and exchange between participants, communication can make joint action smoother and help avoid misunderstandings. But the links between communication and joint action run deeper. Communication itself can be seen as a form of human collaborative activity. A tradition springing from the works of Grice and further elaborated by Sperber and Wilson, Clark, and Tomasello seeks to illuminate the nature of communication as a special form of shared intentional activity by describing the set of special intentional and inferential processes that are characteristic of such a form of exchange. This chapter explores the social infrastructure of human communication understood as a root form of shared intentional activity and argues that the traditional view championed by Grice and others is not suited for this task. To conclude, an alternative view of communication is presented, inspired by recent philosophical debates on the second person that emphasise the embodied, embedded and active character of intersubjective engagements in communication, and challenge the priority that views based on observation, inference, and theory, such as those based on the Gricean model, have had in shaping our views about the topic.
