Abstract
Habitual actions have a history of practice and repetition that frees us from attending to what we are doing. Nevertheless, habitual actions seem to be intentional. What does account for the intentionality of habitual actions if they are automatically performed and controlled? In this paper, we address a possible response to a particular version of this issue, that is, the problem of understanding how the intention to execute a habitual action, which comes in a propositional format, interlocks with motor representations, which come in a motoric-pragmatic format. In order to solve this issue, we propose an account according to which the propositional intentions and the motor representations related to our habitual actions interlock through executable action concepts. This allows us to maintain that habitual actions can be, at the same time, automatically initiated, performed, and controlled and, still, intentional.
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Notes
Ryle’s crucial objection to the intellectualistic view is that it suffers from a regress argument. Here is the argument in Ryle’s words: “The consideration of propositions is itself an operation the execution of which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid. But if, for any operation to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation had first to be performed and performed intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break into the circle” (Ryle 1949, p. 30).
To provide the reader with a taste of the sophistication of the kinematics underlying the execution of manual actions, consider that hand movement requires the coordinated interplay of 39 intrinsic and extrinsic muscles acting on 18 joints, and that from a kinematic point of view the hand has over 20 degrees of freedom, which gives to this structure an astonishing biomechanical complexity (Raos et al. 2006: 709). At present, however, there is no evidence that the kinematic information related to the computational mechanism at the basis of the motor command for moving the entire plethora of muscles, bones and joints comprising the hand is finely grained represented by distinctive propositional states in natural cognitive systems (Rizzolatti et al. 1988). It should be noted, indeed, that an adequate propositional representation of the kinematical properties of manual actions may lead to a proliferation of mental states involved in practical knowledge, with the consequence of overloading the computational process. The fact that propositional states cannot capture the complexity of motor commands, which require representations with a motor format, has been, indeed, recently established, with several arguments, in the literature on the interface problem (Butterfill and Sinigaglia 2014: see esp. Sect. 3, A Motor Format for Representation), as well as on motor representations (Ferretti 2016a, b, c, d, 2020; Ferretti and Zipoli Caiani 2018, 2019; Pacherie 2000; Jacob and Jeannerod 2003).
A reader should have in mind what Searle (1983) originally noted about the relation between prior-intentions and intentions-in-action. In brief, for a generic intention to give course to an action, it must be completed with an ordered series of intentions each of which prescribe how to execute one of the individual motor acts needed to perform that action. What is interesting here is that, while a prior intention alone is not able to prescribe the execution of the series of particular motor acts needed to execute the related action, the intentions in actions cannot be ordered in a suitable manner without a prior intention. This last point allows us to understand why an action cannot be programmed entirely by downstream states of the motor system. Indeed, it would be as if the action were entirely directed by particular intentions in action as a sequence of disjoined motor acts. Of course, this is not the case with habitual actions like brushing the teeth or filling a glass of water. This interplay between prior intentions and intentions in action is also reflected by the philosophical study of action drawn from empirical research showing that the neural correlates at the basis of these two aspects of our intentions interlock in skilled action (Briscoe and Schwenkler 2015; Ferretti 2016a, b, c, d, 2017, 2019, 2020; Zipoli Caiani and Ferretti 2018; Ferretti and Zipoli Caiani 2019; Brozzo 2017; Pacherie 2000).
According to Shepherd (2017), we can solve the interface problem by suggesting that intentions have a double life, as they can have both propositionally formatted contents that are integrated within propositional reasoning and motorically formatted contents that directly exchange information with motoric processing. We agree with Shepherd about the double life of intentions, but there are some differences with his account, as, according to Shepherd, intentions are not confined to be only propositional mental items, as endorsed within the interface problem. According to our account, however, it is a specific component we can find within the propositional structure of an intention, namely the executable action concept, which can be structured with a motor format. So, we take that intentions, qua involved in reasoning, have a propositional format, which can, however, contain mental items, such as action concepts, built in a motor format. And for this peculiarity of action concepts, intentions can interlock, via their processing, to appropriate MRs. Accordingly, since action concepts activate the same motor responses related to MRs, differently from Shepherd, we are not suggesting the need for any translation process. This is the ‘motor bridge’ between intentions and MRs: action concepts are ‘motor mediators’. That said, our proposal is similar to Shepherd’s in that we recognize that intentions and MRs partially share the same motor format, thanks to this motor mediation offered by action concepts, contained in the intention, but motorically interlocking with MRs. So, the idea proposed here is precisely that we have one mental entity, i.e. the intention, structured in a propositional format, and another mental entity, the motor representation, structured in a motor format, and they interlock via a third mental entity, i.e. an executable action concept, which has a motor format, but it is still contained in a propositional structure. Indeed, when we form an intention, which contains an executable action concept, the latter then properly interlocks with a specific motor representation, which permits satisfying the action. So, propositional structures as intentions and motor structures as motor representations can indeed interlock thanks to action concepts, which constitute a motor bridge between intentions and motor representations.
We thank an anonymous Reviewer for asking of offering these clarifications.
We would like to warmly thank two anonymous reviewers for addressing important comments, which allowed us to improve the first version of this article. Gabriele Ferretti was supported by a NOMIS Fellowship, awarded by the Eikones—Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel, Switzerland. We would like to thank Bence Nanay, Pepa Toribio and Joshua Shepherd for discussing with us about the topics of this article.
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Ferretti, G., Zipoli Caiani, S. Habitual Actions, Propositional Knowledge, Motor Representations and Intentionality. Topoi 40, 623–635 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09723-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09723-0