Elisabeth Pacherie

The phenomenology of action: A conceptual framework

After a long period of neglect, the phenomenology of action has recently regained its place in the agenda of philosophers and scientists alike. The recent explosion of interest in the topic highlights its complexity. The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework allowing for a more precise characterization of the many facets of the phenomenology of agency, of how they are related and of their possible sources. The key assumption guiding this attempt is that the processes through which the phenomenology of action is generated and the processes involved in the specification and control of action are strongly interconnected. I argue in favor of a three-tiered dynamic model of intention, link it to an expanded version of the internal model theory of action control and specification, and use this theoretical framework to guide an analysis of the contents, possible sources and temporal course of complementary aspects of the phenomenology of action.

Bottom-Up or Top-Down: Campbell's Rationalist Account of Monothematic Delusions

A popular approach to monothematic delusions in the recent literature has been to argue that monothematic delusions involve broadly rational responses to highly unusual experiences. Campbell (2001) calls this the empiricist approach to monothematic delusions, and argues that it cannot account for the links between meaning and rationality. In place of empiricism, Campbell offers a rationalist account of monothematic delusions, according to which delusional beliefs are understood as Wittgensteinian framework propositions. We argue that neither Campbells attack on empiricism nor his rationalist alternative to empiricism is successful.

Narrators and comparators: the architecture of agentive self-awareness

This paper contrasts two approaches to agentive self-awareness: a high-level, narrative-based account, and a low-level comparator-based account. We argue that an agent’s narrative self-conception has a role to play in explaining their agentive judgments, but that agentive experiences are explained by low-level comparator mechanisms that are grounded in the very machinery responsible for action-production.

What are they up to? The role of sensory evidence and prior knowledge in action understanding

Explaining or predicting the behaviour of our conspecifics requires the ability to infer the intentions that motivate it. Such inferences are assumed to rely on two types of information: (1) the sensory information conveyed by movement kinematics and (2) the observers prior expectations – acquired from past experience or derived from prior knowledge. However, the respective contribution of these two sources of information is still controversial. This controversy stems in part from the fact that “intention” is an umbrella term that may embrace various sub-types each being assigned different scopes and targets. We hypothesized that variations in the scope and target of intentions may account for variations in the contribution of visual kinematics and prior knowledge to the intention inference process. To test this hypothesis, we conducted four behavioural experiments in which participants were instructed to identify different types of intention: basic intentions (i.e. simple goal of a motor act), superordinate intentions (i.e. general goal of a sequence of motor acts), or social intentions (i.e. intentions accomplished in a context of reciprocal interaction). For each of the above-mentioned intentions, we varied (1) the amount of visual information available from the action scene and (2) participants prior expectations concerning the intention that was more likely to be accomplished. First, we showed that intentional judgments depend on a consistent interaction between visual information and participants prior expectations. Moreover, we demonstrated that this interaction varied according to the type of intention to be inferred, with participants priors rather than perceptual evidence exerting a greater effect on the inference of social and superordinate intentions. The results are discussed by appealing to the specific properties of each type of intention considered and further interpreted in the light of a hierarchical model of action representation.

Intentional joint agency: shared intention lite

Philosophers have proposed accounts of shared intentions that aim at capturing what makes a joint action intentionally joint. On these accounts, having a shared intention typically presupposes cognitively and conceptually demanding theory of mind skills. Yet, young children engage in what appears to be intentional, cooperative joint action long before they master these skills. In this paper, I attempt to characterize a modest or ‘lite’ notion of shared intention, inspired by Michael Bacharach’s approach to team–agency theory in terms of framing, group identification and team reasoning. I argue that the account of shared intentions this approach yields is less cognitively and conceptually demanding than other accounts and is thus applicable to the intentional joint actions performed by young children. I also argue that it has limitations of its own and that considering what these limitations are may help us understand why we sometimes need to take other routes to shared intentions.

Out of nowhere: Thought insertion, ownership and context-integration

We argue that thought insertion primarily involves a disruption of the sense of ownership for thoughts and that the lack of a sense of agency is but a consequence of this disruption. We defend the hypothesis that this disruption of the sense of ownership stems from a failure in the online integration of the contextual information related to a thought, in particular contextual information concerning the different causal factors that may be implicated in their production. Loss of unity of consciousness, manifested by incoherent subjective experiences is a general phenomenal characteristic of schizophrenia. This loss of coherence has been hypothesized to reflect a generalized deficit of contextual information integration not conveyed by, but related to, a target event. This deficit is manifested across many cognitive domains. We argue that it is also manifested in the process of thinking itself, resulting in causally decontextualized thoughts that are experienced as inserted thoughts.

Delusions and metacognition in patients with schizophrenia.

Introduction. The aim of the present study was to explore the basis of the strong feeling of conviction and the high resistance to change characteristic of delusions and to test whether patients with schizophrenia suffering from delusions have specific metacognitive impairments when compared to both patients without delusions and healthy controls. Methods. 14 actively delusional patients with schizophrenia, 14 nondelusional patients, and 14 healthy subjects were administered two measures assessing different aspects of metacognition: an emotional metacognitive version of the WCST adapted from Koren et al. (2004) and the Beck Cognitive Insight Scale. Results. Relative to both healthy controls and nondelusional patients, delusional participants were specifically impaired on metacognitive measures of free choice improvement and global monitoring. This was correlated with high self-certainty on the BCIS relative to nondelusional patients. Conclusions. Our results suggest that metacognitive impairments play an important role in the maintenance of delusional beliefs. It may therefore be important to adapt remediation strategies to the metacognitive profiles of patients.

Experience, Belief, and the Interpretive Fold

, 11/1: 81-86. Please consult the published version for purposes of quotation. We see two clusters of questions arising out of the papers in this issue. The first cluster concerns the role of experience in the explanation of delusions. Do abnormal experiences play a central role in accounting for delusions, or are they at best only marginal? And if experience plays a central role in accounting for delusions, exactly what role does it play? The second cluster of questions concerns the interpretability of delusions. Are delusional utterances meaningful, or are they mere noises? And if they are meaningful, what makes it the case that they are meaningful?

Shades and Concepts

In this paper, we criticise the claim, made by J. McDowell and B. Brewer, that the contents of perceptual experience are purely conceptual.

Key Elements for Human-Robot Joint Action

For more than a decade, the field of human-robot interaction has generated many valuable contributions of interest to the robotics community at large. The field is vast and addresses issues in perception, decision, action, communication and learning, as well as their integration. At the same time, research on human-human joint action has become a topic of intense research in cognitive psychology and philosophy, providing elements and even offering architecture hints to help our understanding of human-human joint action. In this paper, we analyse some findings from these disciplines and connect them to the human-robot joint action case. This work is a first step toward the development of a framework for human-robot interaction grounded in human-human interaction.