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Intentions and Motor Representations: the Interface Challenge

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Abstract

A full account of purposive action must appeal not only to propositional attitude states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, but also to motor representations, i.e., non-propositional states that are thought to represent, among other things, action outcomes as well as detailed kinematic features of bodily movements. This raises the puzzle of how it is that these two distinct types of state successfully coordinate. We examine this so-called “Interface Problem”. First, we clarify and expand on the nature and role of motor representations in explaining intentional action. Next, we characterize the respective functions of intentions and motor representations, the differences in representational format and content that these imply, and the interface challenge these differences in turn raise. We then evaluate Butterfill and Sinigaglia’s (2014) recent answer to this interface challenge, according to which intentions refer to action outcomes by way of demonstrative deference to motor representations. We present some worries for this proposal, arguing that, among other things, it implicitly presupposes a solution to the problem, and so cannot help to resolve it. Finally, we suggest that we may make some progress on this puzzle by positing a “content-preserving causal process” taking place between intentions and motor representations, and we offer a proposal for how this might work.

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Notes

  1. Brand (1984) draws a useful distinction between two problems of causal deviance, or, as he calls it, causal waywardness: antecedent and consequential. The first problem concerns the causal connection between the antecedent mental events and the initiation of bodily behavior; the second concerns the consequences of the activity once initiated. Our focus here is on the former.

  2. We leave it open here whether the action concepts that feature in the contents of distal intentions should also be executable action concepts or perhaps superordinate executable action concepts. For instance, one might argue that Frédérique can rationally form the distal intention to cartwheel around her house to celebrate her next birthday, even though at the moment she is forming this intention she has no executable concept of cartwheeling, provided that it is part of her plan to acquire this motor skill before her birthday.

  3. Note that this suggests an alternative view of motor imagery. If the general form of an action is stored at the level of motor schemas, imagining performing an action may not involve, contra Butterfill and Sinigaglia’s view, forming a fully specified motor representation of an action but rather activating the corresponding action schema without specifying parameters at all or while providing only rough estimates of these parameters rather than the values that would be needed for successful action (see, e.g., Arbib 2008).

  4. Though we include mention of them here, we note that it is currently a matter of some controversy whether inverse models should be included in Bayesian accounts (see, e.g., Friston 2011).

  5. These constraints set by motor primitives on motor learning may be considered a form of what Clark (2013) calls systemic priors, i.e., priors built-in the motor system rather than empirical priors.

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Acknowledgments

Elisabeth Pacherie’s work was supported by grants ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL*.

Myrto Mylopoulos would like to thank audiences at the Institut Jean Nicod PaCS workshop and the Carleton University philosophy colloquium for useful discussion. Elisabeth Pacherie would like to thank the audience at the Spring School on Action in Tübingen.

Both authors are grateful to Daniel Burnston for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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Mylopoulos, M., Pacherie, E. Intentions and Motor Representations: the Interface Challenge. Rev.Phil.Psych. 8, 317–336 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0311-6

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