Abstract
One of the most important tasks of philosophy of mind is the investigation of the nature of our mental states. However, mental states come in different formats. In this respect, one of the most interesting problems in contemporary philosophy of mind is determining how mental states coming in different formats can interlock. Such a problem has generated two parallel debates, especially when we try to describe the nature of practical knowledge in skilled motor action: the one about Intellectualism and the one about the Interface Problem. Both of these two debates, which are at the crossroad between philosophy of mind and philosophy of action, seem to share a common problem. Action performance requires the interplay between two different representational formats, the practical and the propositional. If so, how can we account for such an interlock between these two different formats? We mention these two debates as starting point, in order to highlight the importance of providing an account capable of explaining the relation between different mental states, especially in the case of propositional and pragmatic, motor states. However, we do not want to directly tackle these two literatures here. Rather, we want to sketch a possible solution for such a problem, which can be beneficial for both the literatures. We suggest that motor and propositional states interlock through the motor mediation of action concepts. Our account is cashed out from the philosophical analysis of empirical evidence showing that the information processing that is responsible for the generation of the representations of action concepts is strictly related to the motor processing that is responsible for generating the appropriate representations recruited in the planning and execution of motor behaviors.
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The best explanation of the above-mentioned behavioral evidence is that the processing of action concepts relies on the functioning of the motor system at the neural level, and therefore that action concepts are motorically formatted. This is supported by the following two facts: (1) the priming effect is usually measured within 200 ms after the stimulus onset. This evidence is not compatible with the hypothesis that the agent is imagining the action or that he/she is performing some instance of indirect inferential processing; (2) our interpretation is compatible with the evidence that action concepts processing somatotopically and functionally activates the motor system.
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The authors are listed in alphabetical order and contributed equally to the article. We wish to thank those scholars who discussed with us about these topics: Bence Nanay, Chiara Brozzo, Joshua Shepherd, Carlotta Pavese, Andrea Borghini, Brian B. Glenney. We thank the audience at the Conference of the Italian Association for Cognitive Science (AISC) in December 2017 for the very insightful comments on this topic. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for the comments.
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Ferretti, G., Zipoli Caiani, S. (2019). A Model for the Interlock Between Propositional and Motor Formats. In: Nepomuceno-Fernández, Á., Magnani, L., Salguero-Lamillar, F., Barés-Gómez, C., Fontaine, M. (eds) Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. MBR 2018. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 49. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32722-4_24
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