Corrado Sinigaglia

Simulation theories of social cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear what simulation means and how it works. The discovery of mirror neurons, responding both to action execution and observation, suggested an embodied approach to mental simulation. Over the last years this approach has been hotly debated and alternative accounts have been proposed. We discuss these accounts and argue that they fail to capture the uniqueness of embodied simulation (ES). ES theory provides a unitary account of basic social cognition, demonstrating that people e their own mental states or processes represented with a bodily format in functionally attributing them to others.

Several authors have recently pointed out the hyper-mentalism of the standard mindreading models, arguing for the need of an embodied and enactive approach to social cognition. Various attempts to provide an account of the primary ways of interacting with others, however, have fallen short of allowing for both what kind of intentional engagement is crucial in the basic forms of social navigation and also what neural mechanisms can be thought to underpin them. The aimof the paper is to counter this fault by showing that most of the primary ways of making sense of others are motor in nature and rooted in a specific brain mechanism: the mirror mechanism. I shall argue that the mirror-based making sense of others not only can be construed within the enactive approach to social cognition, but also allows us to refine it, supplying a plausible and unitary account of the early forms of social interaction

The aim of our paper is to show that there is a sense of body that is enactive in nature and that enables to capture the most primitive sense of self. We will argue that the body is primarily given to us as source or power for action, i.e., as the variety of motor potentialities that define the horizon of the world in which we live, by populating it with things at hand to which we can be directed and with other bodies we can interact with. We will show that this sense of body as bodily self is, on the one hand, antecedent the distinction between sense of agency and sense of ownership, and, on the other, it enables and refines such distinction, providing a conceptual framework for the coherent interpretation of a variety of behavioral and neuropsychological data. We will conclude by positing that the basic experiences we entertain of our selves as bodily selves are from the very beginning driven by our interactions with other bodies as they are underpinned by the mirror mechanism.