Dear Students!!
Welcome back from spring break - I hope you all had a good time and are refreshed for our next round of seminars!
This week we
have Shaun Gallagher as a speaker, whose selected reading is in fact by Vittorio
Gallese: Bodily selves in relation: embodied simulation as second person perspective on intersubjectivity.
We sent the paper already before the spring break!
Please do not forget to post your comments by 9am on Wednesday - they are part of your class participation!!!
cheers
Julia
On the whole, I agree with the gist of this article. A few questions/concerns:
ReplyDelete1) It remains an open empirical questions as to how far Gallese's ES theory can go in terms of social cognition. For example, it might be worthwhile for more low-level, in-the-moment understandings (e.g., "He is reaching for that glass to take a drink.") but is it able to scale up to more complicated, distal social understandings (e.g., "He is getting in the car to go to the doctor because he has to pick up his sister.")? Or are other, further mechanisms needed for that?
2) While he does bring emotions and empathy into his ES theory, I still wonder if the role of cognitions have been overemphasized. I'm not sure I have any more to back up this worry than just a familiarity with the different positions that are similar to his. Maybe he breaks the mold to some extent, but I still wonder if emotions and empathy take more of a primary role than his account seems to suggest.
On page 6, Gallese brings up the radical enactivist (REC) position in contrast to his own. On a REC account:
ReplyDelete"Social interactions would not be based upon the sub-personal processes of the individuals participating to the interaction, but would be themselves constitutive of individuals’ capacity to understand others’ behaviours, intentions and feelings [89,90]."
Then he says this:
"Clearly, in contrast with this version of radical enactivism, my proposal actually presupposes that social understanding—at least at a basic level—constitutively depends on the sub-personal representations in bodily format people entertain of others’ actions, emotions and sensations."
My question is this: Do we have any reason to presuppose, as Gallese does, that sub personal representations are necessary for social understanding? He doesn't seem to defend this claim, so I'm just curious what arguments we can think of for holding this presupposition. The REC account seems to work just fine and seems to get around the chicken and egg problem (that Gallese brings up just before saying this) a little more elegantly
To me, it is quiet hard to understand, in some parts, due to philosophical approaches and technical jargons used in this article. Luckily the Dr. Gallese’s speech was able to find here. (http://wn.com/intersubjectivity_and_mirror_neurons) It was interesting that the author expand the findings from the mirror neuron mechanism into the concept of intersubjectivity. I got to know that not only ventral premotor area F5 but also some other brain areas also activated by mirror mechanism. Do these differently located mirror neurons are in charge of different specific work?
ReplyDeleteI agree with Gallese’s statement: “Mindreading as conceived of in a narrow sense should instead qualify the type of explicit third-person form of understanding we refer to when others’ behaviors or mental states are opaque and ambiguous, thus requiring explanations.” I think this captures the phenomenological experience of the use of theory-theory and simulation theories of mind that focus on propositional knowledge, because our knowledge of others comes to us in most cases pre-reflectively (and not propositionally.) We utilize these when things are unclear and not primarily.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Gallese is still a simulation theorist and believes that we use sub-personal processes (MMs) in understanding the actions of others (“neural reuse.”) I find this less compelling than the direct perception ToM, personally, so I’m hoping that Dr. Gallagher can discuss where perception fits in to Gallese’s picture. It seems that Gallese's discussion of the connection between emotions and intentions actually could make a case both for enactive perception and direct perception, and that his claims that we switch between perspectives and use representations is positing more mechanisms and steps than necessary.
Second, he acknowledges that ES can be influenced by “context, cognitive and personal-identity factors,” but doesn’t actually talk about how context fits in. It seems like when we talk about reading intentions off of the other we are isolating the other from their context. This is where the MM as a simulation process doesn’t really work for me, because I think that we read the other in context at all times, and there is not a gap between our MM simulation and an inference based on the context. Gallese’s theory would seem to suggest that in seeing someone reaching for a cup, we have a mechanism that simulates and understands the reaching motion and intention, and that the cup, being non-biological, is perhaps processed through some other mechanism, and then it all comes together somehow in our experience. I feel like I am missing something here.
This article strikes me as a clear and well-articulated view of embodied simulation (ES) as an important alternative in the social cognition literature. I have two questions in light of the four criticisms Gallese highlights towards the end of his essay. First, considering the "chicken-and-egg" problem between whether intersubjectivity or the self takes a lead role in the development of social cognition (6), does this inextricable link entail a necessarily hybrid form of interaction theory and simulation theory as the dominant theory of ES/social cognition or is it still possible to keep these alternatives more or less separate and thus, in turn, support one and reject the other?
ReplyDeleteSecond, in relation to the hypothesis of neural reuse, should we see Gallese's account as building on what I would suggest is a general trajectory from earlier papers we've explored so far concerning a shift away from teleological or adaptionist accounts of explanation in biology? In other words, does the conceptual and empirical work on neural reuse offer us tools for rejecting adaptationism as a primary mode of evolutionary explanation, particularly in light of our course hypothesis that brain, culture, and language are co-evolving phenomenon?
A quick addendum to the second part of my post: How should we understand the relation between adaptionism and teleology? While the author rejects the former, he explicitly argues that the MM captures goals and intentions. Not only is this capability important but, moreover, an essential feature for establishing key components of the ES hypothesis. As a result, is it the case that teleology is being kept the same, conceptually reconfigured, or rejected from an explanatory point of view in this article?
ReplyDeleteI liked the approach focusing on interrelated connections between brain and body unlike classic views in cognitive science that consider the brain in isolation when investigating social cognition. The topic on intersubjectivity in this paper led me to think about children with autism who show a deficit in intersubjective engagement with other persons. Interestingly, Iverson & Wozniak (2007) found that siblings of children diagnosed with autism showed delay in the onset of early developmental milestones and spent significantly less time in a greater number of postures, suggestive of relative postural instability This result may empirically support the author's bottom-up approach.
ReplyDeleteThis article was great. What I took to be important about it for our course had to do with the way that the body constitutively shapes of our psychology; specifically, the way that our integrated motor system allows us to perceive and navigate our physical environment, and how the mirror neuron system allows to perceive and navigate our social environment. This is important for the story that we’re trying to tell in our course. The unit of evolutionary development can’t really be treated as atomistic and isolated anymore, since we see that there is a natural continuity between action/agency affordances and the body of the agent itself. And the body establishes interactive continuity between the agent and the environment, and between the agent and conspecifics. Hence, this article provides with some good analytical tools for talking about how exactly evolutionary development is not a mere matter of genetic heritage alone, but also constitutively involves factors like body, culture and environment.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with Mike that sub-personal representations are superfluous for explanation or ontology
DeleteI liked the breakdown of the relationship between functions of the brain, body and the more conceptual philosophical features. However, I did have a difficult time following the philosophical approach of this article. I found myself wondering how this relates to the evolution of language? I imagine that this notion of intersubjectivity, being able to put yourself in "someone else's shoes," and shared intentionality would provide a catalyst for communication. Other research in the domain of language development would support a similar argument. This idea of action imitation, joint visual attention, and sensitivity to intentionality in infants. I hope that Dr. Gallagher can unpack this a little more as I imagine he will.
ReplyDeleteIt seems reasonable to think that when someone was hurt, we have to know the feeling of pain before generating empathy. Mirror neurons offer a possible perceptual-motor link. On page 3, the author even indicated that the MM’s intensity is different depending on whether the person is an agent or an observer. However, I am still not sure if it is real because one area of the brain may have a lot of different functions, so it is possible that these mirror neurons fire because of some collective work in several different areas of the brain. It will be interesting if the MM is true in children as well. Also, is the ES similar to theory of mind? I am not sure I understand it clearly.
ReplyDelete