On the immediate mental antecedent of action

ABSTRACT

What representational state mediates between perception and action? Bence Nanay says pragmatic representations, which are outputs of perceptual systems. This commits him to the view that optic ataxics face difficulty in performing visually guided arm movements because the relevant perceptual systems output their pragmatic representations incorrectly. Here, I argue that it is not enough to say that pragmatic representations are output incorrectly; we also need to know why they are output that way. Given recent evidence that optic ataxia impairs peripersonal space representation, I argue that pragmatic representations are output incorrectly because the organizing principle of the vision-for-action system is blocked by optic ataxia. I then show how this means that this principle, not pragmatic representations, is the representational state that mediates between perception and action, i.e. the principle, not pragmatic representations, is the immediate mental antecedent of action.

KEYWORDS:

• Vision-for-action
• dorsal stream
• pragmatic representations
• optic ataxia
• peripersonal space

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Mohan Matthen who read an earlier version of this paper and provided invaluable comments. Constructive feedback from the two anonymous referees for this journal also helped to clarify different aspects of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Of course, one can be an anti-representationalist/enactivist about vision-for-action (e.g., Ballard 1996; Noë 2005), but that would mean cutting out any mediators between perception and action since sensory inputs and motor outputs would now be intertwined in a dynamic process. Talk of the mental antecedent of action is precisely about those mediators, and, so, anti-representationalism can be safely ruled out.

2 He also enlists some optical illusions to this end, especially the 3D version of the Ebbinghaus illusion (Milner and Goodale 1995), whereby a poker-chip surrounded by smaller poker-chips appears to be larger than when it is surrounded by larger ones. The prism goggle experiment suffices for our purposes here, however.

3 Although, as Nanay argues, things are much more complicated. It is also coherent to say that the pragmatic representations attribute the buzz to the spatiotemporal region, guiding where, not what, you slap.

4 The ventral system, however, gets as much inputs from the M as it does from the P pathway (Milner and Goodale 1995).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Omoge

Michael Omoge is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Black Studies at the University of Alberta - Augustana. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and the University of the Western Cape. He obtained his PhD from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He works in the intersection of perception, imagination, and philosophy of mind, with an eye for how these fields can help to naturalize modal epistemology.