Keyboard Shortcuts?f

The standard answer to this question involves intention.

An intention (1) specifies an outcome,

(2) coordinates the one or several activities which comprise the action;

and (3) coordinate these activities in a way that would normally facilitate the outcome’s occurrence.

What binds particular component actions together into larger purposive actions? It is the fact that these actions are all parts of plans involving a single intention. What singles out an actual or possible outcome as one to which the component actions are collectively directed? It is the fact that this outcome is represented by the intention.

So the intention is what binds component actions together into purposive actions and links the action taken as a whole to the outcomes to which they are directed.

Now as Elisabeth Pacherie has argued (and I’ve had a go at arguing this in joint work with Corrado Sinigaglia recently too), motor representations are relevantly similar to intentions. Of course motor representations differ from intentions in some important ways (as Pacherie also notes). But they are similar in the respects that matter for explaining the purposiveness of action. (1) Like intentions, some motor representations represent outcomes (and not merely patters of joint displacement, say). (2) Like intentions, some motor representations play a role in coordinating multiple more component activities by virtue of their role as elements in hierarchically structured plans. (3) And, like intentions, some motor representations coordinate these activities in a way that would normally facilitate the outcome’s occurrence. The claim is not that \emph{all} purposive actions are linked to outcomes by motor representations, just that some are. In some cases, the purposiveness of an action is grounded in a motor representation of an outcome; in other cases it is grounded in an intention. And of course in many cases it may be that both intention and motor representation are involved.