Abstract
Motor representations live a kind of double life. Although paradigmatically involved in performing actions, they also occur when merely observing others act and sometimes influence thoughts about the goals of observed actions. Further, these influences are content-respecting: what you think about an action sometimes depends in part on how that action is represented motorically in you. The existence of such content-respecting influences is puzzling. After all, motor representations do not feature alongside beliefs or intentions in reasoning about action; indeed, thoughts are inferentially isolated from motor representations. So how could motor representations have content-respecting influences on thoughts? Our aim is to solve this puzzle. In so doing, we shall provide the basis for an account of how experience links the motoric with thought. Such an account matters for understanding how humans think about action: in some cases, we have reasons for thoughts about actions that we would not have if we were unable to represent those actions motorically.
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Notes
We always use the term ‘goal’ to refer to an outcome to which an action is directed. Note that goals in this sense are not intentions or states of agents but rather things specified by such goal-states.
See Wolpert et al. (1995), Miall and Wolpert (1996), Jeannerod (1998), and Zhang and Rosenbaum (2007). Note that motor representations sometimes occur in an agent who has prepared an action and is required (as it turns out) not to perform it: although she has prevented herself from acting, motor representations specifying the action persist, perhaps because they are necessary for monitoring whether prevention has succeeded (Bonini et al. 2014).
Note that we are not claiming that motor representations are necessary for all observational judgements about goals. The findings cited show only that motor representation sometimes influences such judgements. Even if this influence only rarely occurred, the puzzle identified below would still arise.
One outcome matches another in a particular context just if, in that context, the occurrence of an outcome of the first type would normally constitute or cause, at least partially, an occurrence of an outcome of the second type, or vice versa.
In making this analogy we do not intend to propose that there are motor experiences of actions in the sense that there are visual experiences of shape and colour (say). Our proposal is much less ambitious: motor representations influence experiences of some or other kinds, and do so in such a way that, sometimes, which thoughts the experience provides its subject with reasons for depends on what these influencing motor representations represent.
Note that experiences revelatory of action are not necessarily experiences of actions. For comparison, consider two kinds of experience that can be revelatory of fire. One is an experience of fire itself, the other is an experience of smoke. Somewhat similarly, experiencing the effects of an action might, given the right background knowledge, provide you with reasons for a thought about which goal it is directed to. Here we are neutral throughout on whether any experiences revelatory of action are experiences of action.
On the existence of such patients, see for instance Berti et al. (2005); on variety in the extent and nature of the unawareness of paralysis in anosognosia for hemiplegia, and in the accompanying deficits, see for instance Marcel et al. (2004). Note that this paper is not concerned with a fully general explanation of anosognosia for hemiplegia, nor with issues about the unity of the disorder.
Anyone who denies that illusory experiences of shape (say) could provide their subjects with reasons for thoughts about the shapes of the objects experienced is likely also to reject the claim that anosognosic patients’ experiences are revelatory of action. We ignore this complication here; it could be accommodated without substantially changing the conclusions we draw.
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Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to Tim Bayne, Colin Blakemore, Tim Crane, Emma Borg, Naomi Eilan, Aikaterini Fotopoulou, Vittorio Gallese, Hemdat Lerman, Richard Moore, Albert Newen, Wolfgang Prinz, Jean-Michel Roy, Barry Smith, Hong Yu Wong, and our anonymous referees. The authors’ collaboration on this paper was supported by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant.
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Sinigaglia, C., Butterfill, S.A. On a puzzle about relations between thought, experience and the motoric. Synthese 192, 1923–1936 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0672-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0672-x