Elsevier

Cortex

Volume 49, Issue 10, November–December 2013, Pages 2954-2956
Cortex

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Mirror neurons, embodied simulation and a second-person approach to mindreading

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2013.09.008Get rights and content

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Mirror neurons (MNs) and embodied simulation (ES)

Intersubjectivity can be profitably understood if framed within a phylogenetic perspective. The discovery of MNs enabled establishing a relation between human intersubjectivity, the inter-individual relations of other animal species and their underpinning neural mechanisms.

MNs are motor neurons first discovered in macaques' premotor area F5 and, later on, also in a sector of the posterior parietal cortex reciprocally connected with area F5 (see Gallese, Gernsbacher, Heyes, Hickock, & Iacoboni,

The so-called “problem of other minds”

A mainstream view in philosophy of mind basically equates human social cognition with social meta-cognition, that is, with the possibility to explicitly reflect upon and theorize about one's mental life in relation to the mental life of others. The understanding of other minds is conceived as a predicative, inferential, theory-like process, called ToM. Most of brain imaging studies investigating ToM (for recent reviews, see Frith and Frith, 2012, Van Overwalle, 2009) have repeatedly claimed the

The second-person approach

The fundamental relational character of human beings is at least two-folded. It can be a third-person relation, or a second-person relation, an I-you. What distinguishes these relations is not their object but the epistemic status adopted by the I. The second-person approach (also known as second-person perspective, see Schieber et al. 2013) differs from third-person approach because it defines a radically different and deflationary epistemic approach to the problem of other minds, by

Conclusion

The neuroscientific results triggered by the discovery of MNs highlight the role played by the motor system in providing the building blocks upon which more sophisticated social cognitive abilities can be built. The relational character of behavior as it is mapped by the cortical motor system enables a direct appreciation of purpose without relying on explicit propositional inference. Is this behavior reading, mindreading, or neither? I leave it to the reader to decide.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Marie-Curie Initial Training Network, “TESIS: Towards an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity” (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, 264828).

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