Corrado Sinigaglia

In the present article we discuss the relevance of the mirror mechanism for our sense of self and our sense of others. We argue that, by providing us with an understanding from the inside of actions, the mirror mechanism radically challenges the traditional view of the self and of the others. Indeed, this mechanism not only reveals the common ground on the basis of which we become aware of ourselves as selves distinct from other selves, but also sheds new light on the content of our self and other experience, showing that we primarily experience ourselves and the others in terms of our own and of their motor possibilities respectively.

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

When witnessing someone else's action people often take advantage of the same motor cognition that is crucial to successfully perform that action themselves. But how deeply is motor cognition involved in understanding another's action? Can it be selectively modulated by either the agent's or the witness's being actually in the position to act? If this is the case, what does such modulation imply for one's making sense of others? The paper aims to tackle these issues by introducing and discussing a series of experimental studies showing how body and space may constrain one's own motor cognition reuse in understanding another's action. These findings, I shall argue, may shed new light on the mechanisms underlying the primary ways of identifying ourselves with other people and of being connected to them