Action understanding of children develops from simple associative learning to mentalizing. With the rise of embodied cognition, the role of interoception in action observation and action understanding has received more attention. From a developmental perspective, this study proposes a novel developmental model that explores how interoception promotes action understanding of children across ages. In early infancy, most actions observed in infants come from interactions with their caregivers. Babies learn about action effects through (...) automatic interoceptive processing and interoceptive feedback. Interoception in early infancy is not fully developed, such as the not fully developed gastrointestinal tract and intestinal nervous system. Therefore, in early infancy, action understanding is based on low-level and original interoceptive information. At this stage, after observing the actions of others, infants can create mental representations or even imitate actions without external visual feedback, which requires interoception to provide internal reference information. By early childhood, children begin to infer action intentions of other people by integrating various types of information to reach the mentalizing level. Interoception processing requires the integration of multiple internal signals, which promotes the information integration ability of children. Interoception also provides inner information for reasoning about action intention. This review also discussed the neural mechanisms of interoception and possible ways by which it could promote action understanding of children. In early infancy, the central autonomic neural network automatically processes and responds to the actions of caregivers on infants, providing interoceptive information for action understanding of infants. In infancy, the growth of the somatomotor system provides important internal reference information for observing and imitating the actions of infants. In early childhood, the development of interoception of children facilitates the integration of internal and external information, which promotes the mentalization of action understanding of children. According to the proposed developmental model of action understanding of children promoted by interoception, there are multilevel and stage-dependent characteristics that impact the role of interoception in action understanding of children. (shrink)

We address recent interpretations of infant performance on spontaneous false belief tasks. According to most views, these experiments show that human infants attribute mental states from a very young age. Focusing on one of the most clearly worked out, minimalist versions of this idea, Butterfill and Apperly's "minimal theory of mind" framework, we defend an alternative characterization: the minimal theory of rational agency. On this view, rather than conceiving of social situations in terms of states of an enduring mental substance (...) animating agents, infant interpreters parse observed bouts of behavior and their contexts into goals, rational means to those goals, and available information. In other words, the social ontology of infant interpreters consists in goal-directed, informed bouts of behavior, by non-enduring agents, rather than agents animated by states of enduring, unobservable minds. We discuss a number of experiments that support this interpretation of infant socio-cognitive competence. (shrink)

Tackling some central problems in the philosophy of action, Mele constructs an explanatory model for intentional behavior, locating the place and significance of such mental phenomena as beliefs, desires, reason, and intentions in the etiology of intentional action. Part One comprises a comprehensive examination of the standard treatments of the relations between desires, beliefs, and actions. In Part Two, Mele goes on to develop a subtle and well-defended view that the motivational role of intentions is of a different (...) sort from that of beliefs and desires. Mele, also offers a provocative explanation of how we come to have intentions and elaborates on his earlier work concerning akratic failures of will. (shrink)

Tackling some central problems in the philosophy of action, Mele constructs an explanatory model for intentional behavior, locating the place and significance of such mental phenomena as beliefs, desires, reasons, and intentions in the etiology of intentional action. In the first part, Mele illuminates the connection between desire and action and defends detailed characterizations of irresistible desires and reasons for action. Mele argues for the viability of a causal approach to the explanation of intentional action (...) in terms of psychological states and events, paying special attention to recent worries about the causal relevance of the mental. In Part Two, Mele goes on to develop a subtle and well-defended view that the motivational role of intentions is of a different sort from that of beliefs and desires. Mele's account, based largely on a careful study of the functions of intentions, presents intentions as states irreducible to collections of beliefs and desires which hinge on their executive and representational features. Springs of Action will be of interest not only to philosophers of action, but also to those interested in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and ethics. (shrink)

The Morphogenetic Régulation approach (MR) contributes to the Morphogenetic Approach by explaining the material and ideational origins of change and stasis in agency, structure, and culture. In this paper, we focus on the expressive quality of ideas and systemic persistence in three research projects. The first demystifies inclusive governance and its adverse impacts. It shows how, contrary to institutions of governance, inclusiveness is not simply a norm but actually the explication of corporate agents’ ideas about rational choice institutionalism which leads (...) to adverse impacts on vulnerable groups and ecologies known as adverse inclusion. The second investigates the role of ideas as adequacy and self-explication in guiding Palestinian actors’ actions towards the deepening of neoliberalization in Palestine. The third explains the relevance of the systemic persistence problematique for understanding how three juxtaposed themes – Web2, Web3, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – are shaping the political economy and infrastructure of the Internet. (shrink)

A common deflationary tendency has emerged recently in both philosophical accounts and comparative animal studies concerned with how subjects understand the actions of others. The suggestion emerging from both arenas is that the default mechanism for understanding action involves only a sensitivity to the observable, behavioural (non-mental) features of a situation. This kind of ‘smart behaviour reading’ thus suggests that, typically, predicting or explaining the behaviour of conspecifics does not require seeing the other through the lens of mental (...) state attribution. This paper aims to explore and assess this deflationary move. In §1 I clarify what might be involved in a smart behaviour reading account via looking at some concrete examples. Then in §2 I critically assess the deflationary move, arguing that, at least in the human case, it would in fact be a mistake to assume that our default method of action understanding proceeds without appeal to mental state attribution. Finally in §3 I consider briefly how the positive view proposed here relates to discussions about standard two-system models of cognition. (shrink)

We focus on the thesis that action understanding is a function of the mirror neuron system. According to our opinion, understanding is a process that runs through hermeneutic circles from the “Vorverständnis” (“previous understanding”) to steps of deeper understanding. Our critique relates to the narrow neuroscientific definition of action understanding as the capacity to recognize several movements as belonging to one action. After a reconstruction of the model's developments, we will challenge the (...) claims of the model by Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia (2010). By analyzing the relation between the experimental results and its interpretation, we will conclude that there is no proof that mirror neuron activity leads to action understanding. (shrink)

This paper focuses on how human complex imitation and its developmental processes are related to the abilities for action representation, acquisition of symbols, and language. After overviewing the characteristics of imitation in chimpanzees and humans, I propose a model of imitation emphasizing how these two species differ in the ways they process visual-motor information. These differences may in turn contribute to core interspecies differences in higher-order cognitive functions, not only for bodily imitation but for action understanding through (...) complex referential information from faces, sharing symbols, and language. This ‘developmental-comparative’ approach reveals the development of species-specific intelligences, and shows what is shared and not shared between humans and other primates. In doing so, we can obtain a more complete understanding of the emergence of the ‘language-ready brain’ in relation to its biological and evolutionary foundations. (shrink)

This book is a very good example of a movement in contemporary analytic philosophy propounding "the philosophy of action." This movement begins with work by Donald Davidson in the 1960s and 1970s in which he argues for the intelligibility of the belief-desire model of rational behavior implicit in common sense and in much of social science. Major contributors to the school include William Alston, Robert Audi, and Alvin Goldman. This movement has three essential characteristics: a conservative attitude toward the (...) basic elements of commonsense or "folk" psychology; an armchair, nonexperimental methodology; and the avoidance of formal logic, and a concomitant lack of interest in the logical issues arising from the investigation of intentional notions. This book exemplifies well all three of these characteristics. (shrink)

The extended mind hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers in Analysis 58(1):7–19, 1998; Clark 2008) is an influential hypothesis in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I argue that the extended mind hypothesis is born to be wild. It has undeniable and irrepressible tendencies of flouting grounding assumptions of the traditional information-processing paradigm. I present case-studies from social cognition which not only support the extended mind proposal but also bring out its inherent wildness. In particular, I focus on cases of action- (...) class='Hi'>understanding and discuss the role of embodied intentionality in the extended mind project. I discuss two theories of action-understanding for exploring the support for the extended mind hypothesis in embodied intersubjective interaction, namely, simulation theory and a non-simulationist perceptual account. I argue that, if the extended mind adopts a simulation theory of action-understanding, it rejects representationalism. If it adopts a non-simulationist perceptual account of action-understanding, it rejects the classical sandwich view of the mind. (shrink)

Among philosophers, there are at least two prevalent views about the core concept of intentional action. View I (Adams 1986, 1997; McCann 1986) holds that an agent S intentionally does an action A only if S intends to do A. View II (Bratman 1987; Harman 1976; and Mele 1992) holds that there are cases where S intentionally does A without intending to do A, as long as doing A is foreseen and S is willing to accept A as (...) a consequence of S’s action. Joshua Knobe (2003a) presents intriguing data that may be taken to support the second view.1 Knobe’s data show an asymmetry in folk judgements. People are more inclined to judge that S did A intentionally, even when not intended, if A was perceived as causing a harm (e.g. harming the environment). There is an asymmetry because people are not inclined to see S’s action as intentional, when not intended, if A is perceived as causing a benefit (e.g. helping the environment). In this paper we will discuss Knobe’s results in detail. We will raise the question of whether his ordinary language surveys of folk judgments have accessed core concepts of intentional action. We suspect that instead Knobe’s surveys are tapping into pragmatic aspects of intentional language and its role in moral praise and blame. We will suggest alternative surveys that we plan to conduct to get at this difference, and we will attempt to explain the pragmatic usage of intentional language. (shrink)

Is human freedom and choice exaggerated in recent social theory? Should agency be the central in sociology? In this, penetrating and assured book, one of the leading commentators in the field asks where social theory is going. Barnes argues that social theory has taken the wrong turn in over-stating individual freedom. The result is that social contexts in which all individual actions are situated, is dangerously under-theorized. Barnes calls for a form of social theory that recognizes that sociability is the (...) essential characteristic of human life. It is our capacity to communicate with each other, and plan for each other’s welfare, that makes us truly human. Once this is allowed, notions of “agency”, “freedom”, and “choice” lose their connotation with free-floating individualism. Instead the embedded character of agency is starkly revealed. This is a model of well-informed and balanced analysis. It will be of interest to students of sociology, philosophy and social theory. (shrink)

Affordances are possibilities for action offered by the environment. Recent research on affordances holds that there are differences in how people experience such possibilities for action. However, these differences have not been properly investigated. In this paper I start by briefly scrutinizing the existing literature on this issue, and then argue for two claims. First, that whether an affordance solicits action or not depends on its relevance to the agent’s concerns. Second, that the experiential character of how (...) an affordance solicits action depends on the character of the concern to which it is relevant. Concerns are conceived of as bodily forms of responsiveness, and solicitations are experienced through this responsiveness. The main aim of this paper is to make clear that an understanding of experiential differences in solicitations has to be based on a phenomenological appreciation of how one experiences one’s responsiveness to those solicitations. In the remainder of the paper I show how such a phenomenological appreciation reveals several characteristics of our responsiveness and I briefly explore three of them: valence, force and mineness. In the final section I discuss the self-referentiality of affordances in light of the current proposal, and argue that this self-referentiality is broader than is typically acknowledged. (shrink)

Despite a strong sensitization to the corruption problem and a large body of interdisciplinary research, scientists have only rarely investigated which motivational, volitional, emotional, and cognitive components make decision makers in companies act corruptly. Thus, we examined how their interrelation leads to corruption by proposing an action model. We tested the model using a business simulation game with students as participants. Results of the PLS structural equation modeling showed that both an attitude and subjective norm favoring corruption led to (...) a desire to act corruptly. Given high perceived behavioral control, this desire was transformed into an intention that finally resulted in corrupt action. Components related to general private and professional goals did not allow for any prediction. Based on these results, we discuss preventative measures and methods for combating intra- and inter-organizational corruption. (shrink)

Humans are capable of understanding an incredible variety of actions performed by other humans. Even though these range from primary biological actions, like eating and fleeing, to acts in parliament or in poetry, humans generally can make sense of each other’s actions. Understanding other people’s actions is called action understanding, and it can transcend differences in race, gender, culture, age, and social and historical circumstances. Action understanding is the cognitive ability to make sense of (...) another person’s action by integrating perceptual information about the behavior with knowledge about the immediate and sociocultural contexts of the action and with one’s own experience. Scholars are increasingly dissatisfied with monodisciplinary approaches to understanding human action. Such one-sidedness can rest upon various motives. For example, “hermeneutic interpretations” of action understanding tend to emphasize historical and cultural influences while overlooking that ultimately such influences depend upon individual cognitive processes. This has provoked criticism of the corresponding assumption that humans are born as a “blank slate” and that culture is solely responsible for all cognitive contents. However, such critique in turn easily slides into an overemphasis on the biology of human nature and a denial of sociocultural influences on cognition (Pinker, 2003). Fortunately, recent interdisciplinary endeavors have shown that an interdisciplinary approach is preferable when investigating complex functions like action understanding. The purpose of this chapter is to propose a “mechanism-based explanation” of action understanding that will provide a theoretical framework for integrating various and often conflicting disciplinary insights. (shrink)

This is an important new book about human motivation, about the reasons people have for their actions. What is distinctively new about it is its focus on how people see or understand their situations, options, and prospects. By taking account of people's understandings, Professor Schick is able to expand the current theory of decision and action. The author provides a perspective on the topic by outlining its history. He defends his new theory against criticism, considers its formal structure, and (...) shows at length how it resolves many currently debated problems: the problems of conflict and weakness of will, Allais' problem, Kahneman and Tversky's problems, Newcomb's problem, and others. The book will be of special interest to philosophers, psychologists, and economists. (shrink)

Many actions have instrumental aims, in which we move our bodies to achieve a physical outcome in the environment. However, we also perform actions with epistemic aims, in which we move our bodies to acquire information and learn about the world. A large literature on action recognition investigates how observers represent and understand the former class of actions; but what about the latter class? Can one person tell, just by observing another person’s movements, what they are trying to learn? (...) Here, 5 experiments explore epistemic action understanding. We filmed volunteers playing a ‘physics game’ consisting of two rounds: Players shook an opaque box and attempted to determine (i) the number of objects hidden inside, or (ii) the shape of the objects inside. Then, independent subjects watched these videos and were asked to determine which videos came from which round: Who was shaking for number and who was shaking for shape? Across several variations, observers successfully determined what an actor was trying to learn, based only on their actions (i.e., how they shook the box)—even when the box’s contents were identical across rounds. These results demonstrate that humans can infer epistemic intent from physical behaviors, adding a new dimension to research on action understanding. (shrink)

Scholars have questioned the doctrine of desireless action in the Bhagavadgita and questioned whether Krishna’s advice is to be taken literally on the basis that the Humean account of motivation is more plausible than the anti-Humean account. In this paper, I will avoid the Humean principle debate by proposing a new way of examining the term ‘desireless action’. I aim to show that Krishna’s advice can be rendered coherent on the basis that we understand a desireless action (...) as an action motivated by a benevolent desire. I will be referring to the notion of benevolence as constructed by Francis Hutcheson because there is a parallel between the Hutchesonian experience of benevolence and purusha, or pure consciousness. Benevolent desire results in a desireless action since to act benevolently is to act ‘disinterestedly’ and thereby accepting purusha as one’s true nature. (shrink)

This study presents the case of a Metropolitan Municipality in the Aegean Region of Turkey, which undertook a series of initiatives to conduct projects on environmental protection and sustainability. This case study was conducted as two separate studies as a part of Horizon 2020-funded ECHOES project under Work Package 6, aiming to gain insight into the collective magnitudes of energy-related choices and behavior. The starting point of the process is marked, in 2015, by the municipality becoming a party to the (...) Covenant of Mayors movement, joining around 8,000 signatories from over 50 countries. In line with European Union’s climate targets and associated energy-related policies, signatories of the Covenant of Mayors aim to decrease carbon emissions by 20% by 2020 and by 40% by 2030. In order to enhance the design and operationalization of policies for achieving these targets, each partner in the Covenant of Mayors is required to develop a Sustainable Energy Action Plan. The SEAP is to be prepared within 2 years of becoming a party to the Covenant of Mayors and involves action plans and projects in order to operationalize the strategies for achieving the associated targets. To this end, this study analyzes the Metropolitan Municipality’s SEAP and its components, which include zero-emission public transportation project, transformation of existing buildings to a more energy-efficient standard and related energy audit studies, a project for decreasing waiting periods in traffic via a Smart Traffic System, a pedestrianization project, and a project for increasing the use of geothermal energy for district heating. This study set out to identify the internal and external factors, as well as bottom-up and top-down mechanisms involved in various phases of the preparation and implementation of the SEAP. The research method was expert interviews, incorporating viewpoints and perceptions of stakeholders from different levels of the municipality. Among the key results are understanding the roles of enthusiasts and frontrunners in such initiative and the importance of top-management and central government support. (shrink)

This paper asks how anti-nuclear activists form collectives that are able to act collectively. It argues that shared interests and collective identities only insufficiently explain the emergence of collective action. Alternatively, the paper investigates meeting talk of German anti-nuclear groups where activists discuss proposals for collective action. Based on audio recordings, a sequential analysis of activists’ deliberations traces the transformation of vague ideas into concrete and collectively agreed to proposals. It is shown how the process by which activists (...) reach a common understanding about a particular protest activity—as something that is being talked about here and now—and the process of becoming an acting collectivity—a group that is ready to carry out this protest activity in the future—are interdependent. Activists make use of “indexicality” to introduce specifically vague proposals, enabling others to respond and contribute to the emerging proposal while group agency is suspended. At first, the authorship of proposals is minimized. Step by step, vague proposals are specified by meeting participants until a “change in footing” marks group consensus. While the group emerges as the author and principal of proposals through this process, the paper shows that implementation relies on individual principals again who take responsibility during and after the meeting. (shrink)

Existing research highlights the role of partnerships between business and non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) in addressing poverty, climate change, disease and other challenges. But less is known about how such partnerships may also challenge our very understanding of the nature of those problems. This paper draws on Habermas' theoretical ideas about communicative action and deliberative democracy, applying them to an ethnographic study of Concern Universal, an international NGO with a particular focus on working collaboratively with business. The focus of (...) the study is the seam between two apparently different ‘worlds’, along which alternating processes of ‘colonisation’ and resistance are played out. Partnership emerges as an arena for both instrumental and communicative encounters, in which slow progress is occasionally punctuated by leaps in partners' understanding of both themselves and the challenges they seek to address. As such, despite the evolutionary ambitions of participants, partnership emerges as a potential catalyst of social change. (shrink)

Developmental psychologists assume that infants understand other persons’ actions after and because they understand their own. However, there is another possibility as well, namely that infants come to understand their own actions after and because they understand other persons’ actions. We reviewed infant research on the influence of perceived actions on self-performed actions as well as the reverse. Furthermore, we investigated the interplay between both aspects of action understanding by means of a sequence variation. The results show the (...) impact of agentive experience for action understanding, but not the reverse. The question whether infants’ perceived and to-be-produced actions share common representations of the perceptual and the motor system is discussed in relation to its implications for the social making of minds. (shrink)

Existing research highlights the role of partnerships between business and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in addressing poverty, climate change, disease and other challenges. But less is known about how such partnerships may also challenge our very understanding of the nature of those problems. This paper draws on Habermas' theoretical ideas about communicative action and deliberative democracy, applying them to an ethnographic study of Concern Universal, an international NGO with a particular focus on working collaboratively with business. The focus of (...) the study is the seam between two apparently different ‘worlds’, along which alternating processes of ‘colonisation’ and resistance are played out. Partnership emerges as an arena for both instrumental and communicative encounters, in which slow progress is occasionally punctuated by leaps in partners' understanding of both themselves and the challenges they seek to address. As such, despite the evolutionary ambitions of participants, partnership emerges as a potential catalyst of social change. (shrink)

This chapter considers infants' understanding that acts of attention — looking and pointing — as object-directed, that is, as implying a relation between the agent who produces them and the object at which they are directed. Sensitivity to the object-directed structure of these actions provides an essential framework for understanding the phenomenological, psychological, and behavioural implications of these actions. The evidence reviewed indicates that although young infants sometimes orient appropriately in response to others' gaze shifts and points, they (...) seem not to understand these actions as object-directed until late in the first year of life. Findings of relatively early success at orienting but later success in action understanding raise questions about the mechanisms by which action understanding emerges, and these are considered at the end of the chapter. (shrink)