Elisabeth Pacherie

An important tradition in philosophy holds that in order to successfully perform a joint action, the participants must be capable of establishing commitments on joint goals and shared plans. This suggests that social robotics should endow robots with similar competences for commitment management in order to achieve the objective of performing joint tasks in human-robot interactions. In this paper, we examine two philosophical approaches to commitments. These approaches, we argue, emphasize different behavioral and cognitive aspects of commitments that give roboticists a way to give meaning to monitoring and pro-active signaling in joint action with human partners. To show that, we present an example of use-case with guiding robots and we sketch a framework that can be used to explore the type of capacities and behaviors that a robot may need to manage commitments

For more than a decade, the field of human-robot interaction has generated many valuable contributions of interest to the robotics community at large. The field is vast and addresses issues in perception, decision, action, communication and learning, as well as their integration. At the same time, research on human-human joint action has become a topic of intense research in cognitive psychology and philosophy, providing elements and even offering architecture hints to help our understanding of human-human joint action. In this paper, we analyse some findings from these disciplines and connect them to the human-robot joint action case. This work is a first step toward the development of a framework for human-robot interaction grounded in human-human interaction.

This paper concerns the credibility problem for commitments. Commitments play an important role in cooperative human interactions and can dramatically improve the performance of joint actions by stabilizing expectations, reducing the uncertainty of the interaction, providing reasons to cooperate or improving action coordination. However, commitments can only serve these functions if they are credible in the first place. What is it then that insures the credibility of commitments? To answer this question, we need to provide an account of what motivates us to abide by our commitments. We first discuss two conceptions of the nature of the commitments present in joint action and of the norms that govern them. We contend that while normative considerations may have some motivational force, there are reasons to doubt that they, by themselves, could provide a sufficient motivational basis to fully explain why agents abide by their commitments and thus why their commitments are credible. In the next two sections, we discuss two proposals regarding further sources of motivation, reputation management and social emotions. We argue that while reputation management and social emotions certainly play a role in motivating us to act as committed, there are both theoretical and empirical reasons to think that neither captures the most basic motivational force at work in sustaining commitments. We propose instead that the need to belong, i.e., the need to affiliate with others and form long-lasting bonds with them, is what primarily motivates us to interact and engage with those around us and act so as to preserve and reinforce the bonds we have forged with them. We argue that the need to belong is a more basic proximate motivation for conforming to commitments, in the sense both that affiliative behaviors are evidenced much earlier in human development than either reputation management or social emotions and that the need to belong is at least part of an explanation of why we care for our reputation and why we care about others’ assessments of our behavior.

A popular approach to monothematic delusions in the recent literature has been to argue that monothematic delusions involve broadly rational responses to highly unusual experiences. Campbell calls this the empiricist approach to monothematic delusions, and argues that it cannot account for the links between meaning and rationality. In place of empiricism Campbell offers a rationalist account of monothematic delusions, according to which delusional beliefs are understood as Wittgensteinian framework propositions. We argue that neither Campbell's attack on empiricism nor his rationalist alternative to empiricism is successful.

Two main approaches can be discerned in the literature on agentive self-awareness: a top-down approach, according to which agentive self-awareness is fundamentally holistic in nature and involves the operations of a central-systems narrator, and a bottom-up approach that sees agentive self-awareness as produced by lowlevel processes grounded in the very machinery responsible for motor production and control. Neither approach is entirely satisfactory if taken in isolation; however, the question of whether their combination would yield a full account of agentive self-awareness remains very much open. In this paper, I contrast two disorders affecting the control of voluntary action: the anarchic hand syndrome and utilization behavior. Although in both conditions patients fail to inhibit actions that are elicited by objects in the environment but inappropriate with respect to the wider context, these actions are experienced in radically different ways by the two groups of patients. I discuss how top-down and bottom-up processes involved in the generation of agentive self-awareness would have to be related in order to account for these differences.

Pierre Jacob's book, What Minds Can Do , is mainly concerned with intentionality. Jacob's primary goal is to explain both how it is possible for a physical system to have intentional mental states and how the intentional content of such mental states can play a role in the causal explanation of behaviour. Yet, he also tackles the issue of the nature of conscious experience. I shall focus here on a claim he makes in connection with this latter topic. The claim (made at the very end of Chapter 2, p. 77) is that in order to undergo states of consciousness a creature must have concept-forming abilities. At first sight, this contention seems implausibly strong. Although our intuitions in such matters may not be very reliable, I think many people would be willing to attribute to members of certain animal species a capacity to enjoy conscious experiences, while being reluctant to grant them concept forming abilities. The plausibility or implausibility of Jacob's claim depends in a large part on how one construes the notion of a conscious experience, as well as on what one considers concept-forming abilities to be. Since the topic of consciousness is rather peripheral in Jacob's book, the rejection of this claim would not directly affect his more central theses. Yet, examining it gives us an opportunity to scrutinize a distinction that plays a central role in Dretske's work and that Jacob endorses, namely, the distinction between analogical and digital coding of information. Since this distinction underlies in turn the distinction between sensory content and conceptual content and since the latter distinction is at the core of informational semantics, this discussion may have at least indirect implications for some other problems discussed by Jacob in his book

In this paper, we evaluate the proposal that a central function of commitments within joint action is to reduce various kinds of uncertainty, and that this accounts for the prevalence of commitments in joint action. While this idea is prima facie attractive, we argue that it faces two serious problems. First, commitments can only reduce uncertainty if they are credible, and accounting for the credibility of commitments proves not to be straightforward. Second, there are many other ways in which uncertainty is commonly reduced within joint actions, which raises the possibility that commitments may be superfluous. Nevertheless, we argue that the existence of these alternative uncertainty reduction processes does not make commitments superfluous after all but, rather, helps to explain how commitments may contribute in various ways to uncertainty reduction.

My main thesis is this paper is that, although Dretske's distinction between simple perception and cognitive perception constitutes an important milestone in contemporary theorizing on perception, it remains too coarse to account for a number of phenomena that do not seem to fall squarely on either side of the divide. I argue that what is needed in order to give a more accurate account of perceptual phenomena is not a twofold distinction of the kind advocated by Dretske but a threefold distinction allowing for an intermediate level of perceptual content that is structured and yet non-conceptual. In the first section, I discuss Dretske's distinction between sensory perception and cognitive perception as well as a number of attendant notions. In section 2, two sets of phenomena that seem neither to constitute instances of sensory perception nor instances of cognitive perception as defined by Dretske are presented. I argue that they are evidence in favor of the existence of an intermediate level of perception. In section 3, I defend the view that this intermediate level of content is a level of structured non-conceptual perceptual content and I attempt to provide criteria for distinguishing among the three levels of content.

The discovery of mirror neurons has given rise to a number of interpretations of their functions together with speculations on their potential role in the evolution of specifically human capacities. Thus, mirror neurons have been thought to ground many aspects of human social cognition, including the capacity to engage in cooperative collective actions and to understand them. We propose an evaluation of this latter claim. On the one hand, we will argue that mirror neurons do not by themselves provide a sufficient basis for the forms of agentive understanding and shared intentionality involved in cooperative collective actions. On the other hand, we will also argue that mirror neurons can nevertheless play an important role in an account of the production and understanding of joint action, insofar as they provide the basic constituents of implicit agent-neutral representations and are useful elements in a process of online mutual adjustment of participants' actions.

I argue that in order to solve the main difficulties confronted by the classical versions of the causal theory of action, it is necessary no just to make room for intentions, considered as irreducible to complexes of beliefs and desires, but also to distinguish among several types of intentions. I present a three-tiered theory of intentions that distinguishes among future-directed intentions, present-directed intentions and motor intentions. I characterize each kind of intention in terms of its functions, its type of content, its dynamics and the rationality and time constraints that bear on it. I then try to show how the difficulties encountered by the causal theory can be solved within this new framework. 1

This paper is concerned with the problem of selfidentification in the domain of action. We claim that this problem can arise not just for the self as object, but also for the self as subject in the ascription of agency. We discuss and evaluate some proposals concerning the mechanisms involved in selfidentification and in agencyascription, and their possible impairments in pathological cases. We argue in favor of a simulation hypothesis that claims that actions, whether overt or covert, are centrally simulated by the neural network, and that this simulation provides the basis for action recognition and attribution

In this paper I argue that, to make intentional actions fully intelligible, we need to posit representations of action the content of which is nonconceptual. I further argue that an analysis of the properties of these nonconceptual representations, and of their relation- ships to action representations at higher levels, sheds light on the limits of intentional control. On the one hand, the capacity to form nonconceptual representations of goal-directed movements underscores the capacity to acquire executable concepts of these movements, thus allowing them to come under intentional control. On the other hand, the degree of autonomy these nonconceptual representations enjoy, and the specific temporal constraints stemming from their role in motor control, set limits on intentional control over action execution.

The abilities to attribute an action to its proper agent and to understand its meaning when it is produced by someone else are basic aspects of human social communication. Several psychiatric syndromes, such as schizophrenia, seem to lead to a dysfunction of the awareness of one’s own action as well as of recognition of actions performed by other. Such syndromes offer a framework for studying the determinants of agency, the ability to correctly attribute actions to their veridical source. Thirty normal subjects and 30 schizophrenic patients with and without hallucinations and/or delusional experiences were required to execute simple finger and wrist movements, without direct visual control of their hand. The image of either their own hand or an alien hand executing the same or a different movement was presented on a TV-screen in real time. The task for the subjects was to discriminate whether the hand presented on the screen was their own or not. Hallucinating and deluded schizophrenic patients were more impaired in discriminating their own hand from the alien one than the non-hallucinating ones, and tended to misattribute the alien hand to themselves. Results are discussed according to a model of action control. A tentative description of the mechanisms leading to action consciousness is proposed.

Trying to understand better the role played by epistemic artifacts in our quest for reliable knowledge, it is interesting to compare their contribution with the one made by the epistemic organs or systems with which we are naturally endowed. This comparative approach may yield the further benefit of an improved understanding of the nature and epistemic functions of our natural epistemic equipment. In this paper, I shall concern myself with comparing the role of a family of instruments, microscopes, with that of visual systems and with assessing the similarities and dissimilarities in accounts of their epistemic contributions

In this paper, we evaluate the proposal that a central function of commitments within joint action is to reduce various kinds of uncertainty, and that this accounts for the prevalence of commitments in joint action. While this idea is prima facie attractive, we argue that it faces two serious problems. First, commitments can only reduce uncertainty if they are credible, and accounting for the credibility of commitments proves not to be straightforward. Second, there are many other ways in which uncertainty is commonly reduced within joint actions, which raises the possibility that commitments may be superfluous. Nevertheless, we argue that the existence of these alternative uncertainty reduction processes does not make commitments superfluous after all but, rather, helps to explain how commitments may contribute in various ways to uncertainty reduction.