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Enactive Understanding and Motor Intentionality




Enacting Intersubjectivity: A Cognitive and Social Perspective on the Study of Interactions
F. Morganti, A. Carassa, G. Riva (Eds.)
Amsterdam, IOS Press, 2008, pp. 17-32




2
Enactive Understanding and Motor
Intentionality

Corrado SINIGAGLIA

Abstract. Most of our social interactions rest upon our ability to understand the
behavior of others. But what is really at the basis of this ability? The standard view
is that we understand the behavior of others because we are able to read their
mind, to represent them as individuals endowed with mental states such as beliefs,
desires and intentions. Without this mindreading ability the behavior of others
would be meaningless for us. Over the last few years, however, this view has been
undermined by several neurophysiological findings and in particular by the
discovery of mirror neurons. The functional properties of these neurons indicate
that motor and intentional components of action are tightly intertwined, suggesting
that the basic aspects of intentional understanding can be fully appreciated only on
the basis of a motor approach to intentionality. This paper has a dual objective: to
develop this approach in order to account for the crucial role of motor
intentionality in action and intention understanding below and before any meta-
representational ability, and to shed new light on the ontogeny of mindreading, by
explaining how the first forms of understanding in infants may be intentional in
nature, even without presupposing any explicit and deliberate mentalizing.
Contents

2.1 Introduction......................................................................................................... 18
2.2
Mirror neurons for actions: goals and movements.............................................. 19
2.3 Basic motor acts and enactive understanding ..................................................... 21
2.4 Motor chains and intention understanding.......................................................... 23
2.5 Before mindreading: the ontogeny of intentional understanding ........................ 25
2.6 Teleological stance and motor intentionality ...................................................... 27
2.7 Concluding remarks ............................................................................................ 30

2.8 References........................................................................................................... 31











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Enacting Intersubjectivity

A Cognitive and Social Perspective on the Study of Interactions
Volume 10
Emerging Communication: Studies on New Technologies and Practices in Communication

Edited by: F. Morganti, A. Carassa and
G. Riva

May 2008, approx. 280 pp., hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-58603-850-2
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The Hidden Structure of Interaction

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2.1 Introduction

Most of our social interactions rest upon our ability to understand the behavior of
others. But what is really at the basis of this ability? How exactly do we
understand the behavior of others? This issue encompasses two distinct but
complementary questions. In the first place, how do we realize that what we are
observing are not pure physical events but intentional movements in other words,
how do we attribute the status of action to the observed movements? And in the
second place, how do we understand what type of action these movements are in
other words, how do we identify them as this or that given action?
It is widely assumed in the fields of cognitive science and philosophy of mind
that both the recognition of an event as an action, and its identification as that
particular action, depend equally on the ability of attributing to others those mental
states (beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.) that are supposed to be at the origin of the
observed motor behavior and that therefore can render it intelligible and in many
cases predictable. Whether such mindreading ability is considered to be related to
a more or less explicit use of a theory of mind, or to the assumption of an
intentional stance based on a postulate of rationality, or to a more or less
complex form of simulation (see [1-2] on this point), is of minor importance in
this context. What is important here is that, even though the suggested mechanisms
are very different, these various views share the idea that both the status and the
identity of an action depends on its connection to specific mental states, so that
without the ability to read the mind of others, that is to attribute them with specific
mental states, it would be impossible to grasp the intentional meaning of their
behavior [3].
However this idea is being radically challenged by an increasing number of
studies in the field of what has been called neurophysiology of action. Analyses
of the functional properties of the cortical motor system and, even more, the
discovery of a distinct class of sensory-motor neurons (the so-called mirror
neurons) have suggested the hypothesis that our understanding of the actions
performed by others is primarily based on a mechanism that directly matches the
sensory representations of the observed actions with the motor representations of
the observers own actions. According to the direct matching hypothesis, we
primarily understand the actions of others by means of our own motor knowledge: