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G. Riva, M.T. Anguera, B.K. Wiederhold and F. Mantovani (Eds.)
From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture towards the
Ultimate Communicative Experience. Festschrift in honor of Luigi Anolli
IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006, (c) All rights reserved - http://www.emergingcommunication.com
3.5.1 Naked Intentionality in Infants
The starting point of the Presence theory is the situation of infants at birth. There is a
large body of evidence underlying that infants, even in the first months of life, show a
special sensitivity to communication and participate in emotional sharing with the
caregivers [95].
To explain these processes, different authors underlined the innate ability of infants to
identify with conspecifics. As we have just seen, Meltzoff [76-79] suggested the
existence of a biological mechanism allowing infants to perceive others “like them”
at birth. Specifically, Meltzoff and Brooks suggest [96]:
“Evidently, infants construe human acts in goal-directed ways. But when does it
start? We favor the hypothesis that it begins at birth... The hypothesis is not that
neonates represent goal directdness in the same way as adults do. In fact, neonates
probably begin by coding the goals ofpure body acts and only later enrich the notion
ofgoals to encompass object directed acts.” (p. 188).
Trevarthen [97, 98] goes further, arguing that the infant is conscious, since birth, of
the others’ subjectivity: he is conscious of other’s mental states and react in
communicative, emotional ways so to link each other’s subjectivity. Extending this
vision, Tirassa and colleagues [99] suggest that infants are in a particular state that
they define “sharedness”: the infant’s capability to take it for granted that the
caregiver is aware of her mental states and will act accordingly. In this vision the
infant considers his own mental states as mutually and overtly known to the
caregiver.
Here we take a related but different position. We believe that infants have a direct
ability - “naked” intentionality - of recognizing intentional behaviors in their
phenomenological contents. We define “naked” intentionality as a primitive and
innate mental state type which can be characterized in the following terms: to be able
to recognize an intention without being aware of whose intention it is. Following this
point we claim that in humans, intentionality - the ability to recognize purposeful
actions - appears before intention - the agent’s mental state that represents such
actions. Specifically, is the need to separate between “internal” and “external”
intentions forcing the nervous system to identify a “self”.
Naked intentionality is allowed by the activity of “mirror neurons”, the functional
cluster of premotor neurons (F5c-PF) that, as we have just seen, are activated both
during the execution of purposeful, goal-related actions, and during the observation
of similar actions performed by another individual [48, 62, 63].
Apparently, the concept of naked intentionality is counterintuitive. However, it
includes - and can be considered the precursor of - the two different definitions of
intention found in literature [100]:
a) intention as a property of all mental states. In such a perspective any
subjective, conscious experience - no matter how minimal - is an experience
of something.
b) intention as an act concerning and directed at some state of affairs in the
world. In this sense, individuals deliberately perform an action in order to
reach a goal.
Further, the existence of naked intentionality is supported by the recent outcomes of