Antonella Corradini

Mirroring mirror neurons in an interdisciplinary debate

Since the discovery of mirror neurons in the early 1990s, numerous experiments have been carried out to investigate what functions such neurons serve in their different domains of application. Among these experiments, one in particular has given rise to a lively debate involving not only neuroscientists, but also philosophers, psychologists and experts in the social sciences. This is Fogassi’s experiment concerning whether mirror neurons differentiate between actions with the same motor pattern but which are associated with different intentions (Fogassi et al., 2005). Fogassi’s result was that mirror neurons fire differently (that is, at a much higher rate) when the same action of grasping leads to eating food compared with placing an inedible object into a container. Fogassi’s experiment seems therefore to support the hypothesis that mirror neurons are the neural correlates of mindreading. However, the evidence bearing on this issue is quite controversial, as the literature shows. In the literature there are at least two distinct criticisms of the proposed role of mirror neurons in intentionality. The first criticism maintains that the function of mirror neurons is negligible or even irrelevant (Borg, 2007; Jacob, 2008). The second criticism accepts that mirror neurons do have a function to perform, but argues this function is different from that assigned to them by the Parma team, since it has rather to do with predictive simulation (Csibra, 2007). As part of an attempt to clarify and extend the above mentioned debate by integrating scientific and philosophical contributions (Antonietti & Iannello, 2011; Corradini, 2011), the editors of this Special Issue ran a workshop on this topic at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart on 4th September 2011 in Milan, under the auspices of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy (ECAP7). This Special Issue contains not just the contributions presented on that occasion, but a series of new essays both by participants in the 2011 workshop and by authors who have subsequently joined the original group. As the title of the Special Issue indicates, the starting point of this collection of papers are articles that report experimental evidence, respectively from the neurosciences, social psychology and developmental psychology (Fogassi’s, Prinz’ and Southgate’s contributions). These studies are followed by more theoretical essays which either update the ongoing discussion (Hutto’s, Jacob’s and Borg’s articles) or introduce a new associated theme, as Corradini and Antonietti do in their essay about the relationship between mirror neurons, intentionality and empathy. Let us see the contributions in more detail. In the first paper Leonardo Fogassi and co-workers (Bonini, Ferrari, & Fogassi, 2013) of the Parma group, while acknowledging that the intentionality of behaviour has been subject to wide interest in many different disciplines, point at the fact that there is no general consensus about how to describe and explain intentions underlying human beings’ motor acts. A possible contribution to the debate has come in the last decades from neuroscientific studies whose aim was to identify some pre-motor processes associated to ‘whether’, ‘what’ or ‘when’ performing an action. A different line of research consisted in identifying the content of motor intentions with the agent’s behavioural goal, that is, with the ‘why’ of her action. The article reviews the most recent neurophysiologic experiments of the Parma group on the organisation of intentional actions in monkeys and on the role of the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) in intention understanding. In the last part of the paper the authors discuss some recent human data based on neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques demonstrating that, as in monkeys, some of the areas belonging to the human mirror system play an important role in an immediate form of decoding other people’s intention on the basis of their motor behaviour. In the second paper Prinz (2013) addresses some conceptual issues tied to the examination of mirroring mechanisms from the viewpoint of cognitive science (Prinz, 2012). As to the topic of this Special Issue, on the author’s approach embodied mirroring does not require explicit communication and perception; rather, it appears to be a form of automatic response to others’ behaviour. On the other hand, symbolic mirroring needs a common-sense framework for action description and explanation, as well as mirroring devices which enable humans to couple perception and action. Prinz then moves to describe the design principles underpinning the mirroring mechanisms, which leads him to investigate the concepts of common coding and distal reference. Afterwards, the crucial distinction between embodied devices, based on implicit

The Emergence of Mind: A Dualistic Understanding

The aim of this essay is to show that emergentism in the philosophy of mind should be understood as a dualistic position. Before exposing my thesis I would like to say something about emergentism. It is a philosophical movement that was initiated in Great Britain in the first quarter of the twentieth century by thinkers such as S. Alexander (1920), C. Lloyd Morgan (1923), C.D. Broad (1925) and others. From a methodological viewpoint, emergentism strives to safeguard the autonomy of the so-called special sciences. It also supports an image of reality as structured into hierarchical levels of increasing complexity. According to British Emergentism, there are properties of complex systems, the emergent ones, that cannot be reduced to those of less complex systems. The concept of irreducibility can be traced back at the ontological level by and large to the concept of non-deducibility. By saying that a property of an emergent system, for example liquidity, is non-deducible, we mean that the belonging of that property to the emergent system cannot be logically deduced from the laws governing lower-level components, that is to say the atomic micro-structure. This implies that the theory which describes the properties at the lower-lever is incomplete as regards the properties occurring at the higher-level.