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268 WEBER & VOSGERAU
Understood in terms of constitution conditions, “grounded” means that ability A is grounded
in ability B if B is necessary to possess ability A.
For example, Held and Hein (1963) showed that self-produced movement is necessary for the
development of vision (in cats). In their experiment they divided kittens into two groups: the
kittens in one group pulled a carriage around a room in a horizontal rotating carousel; kittens
in the other group rode the carriage. Both groups of kittens had the same visual stimuli, but
the riding kittens did not develop certain normal perceptual abilities (e.g. depth perception).
These kittens were not able to integrate their visual experiences with movement in their own
bodies, which caused visual deficits in the long run (see also Gibson 1969). In short, selfgenerated
change in sensory stimuli is an acquisition condition for certain perceptual
abilities. In some cases though, once we have acquired A on the basis of B, B can be lost
without disturbance of A. In the case of the kittens this means that a kitten that has already
acquired normal sight will not lose its ability to see if we hindered its active movement. Active
movement is thus necessary to acquire certain perceptual abilities, but not necessary to
maintain them. This latter contrast is precisely the contrast between acquisition and
constitution. Understood in terms of constitution conditions, “grounded” means that ability A
is grounded in ability B if B is necessary to possess ability A. Whenever B is lost, A is lost as
well (or at least severely impaired). The ability to move the legs is, e.g., constitutive of the
ability to walk (it is necessary but obviously not sufficient).
Whereas some conditions are only necessary for the acquisition of mental abilities but are not
relevant anymore once the ability is acquired, other conditions have to be fulfilled each time
the ability is put into practice. Only the latter conditions will qualify as constitutive for the
ability in the narrow sense. Whereas acquisition conditions could be viewed as mere
contingent factors of mental development, constitution factors are part of the ontology of the
abilities and are thus necessary in a metaphysical sense.
Regarding the different possible cases of constitution – entire, partial, and no constitution –
we distinguish between three theses of grounded action cognition, which we label as “strong”,
“moderate” and “weak” (for details see Weber and Vosgerau 2012):
(1) Strong thesis: basic motor abilities are constitutive for all processes within the
domains of action cognition and action perception.
In other words: action cognition (and action perception) would be nothing but a subclass/a
kind of motor abilities. This also implies that a complete breakdown of motor abilities ought
to automatically result in a breakdown of action cognition and action perception. In sum, the
strong reading of the thesis is equivalent to recent “motor theories” of thoughts (e.g.,
Campbell 1999; Ito 2008; Schmahmann 2004), which conjecture that thoughts are (a kind of)
motor processes. Moreover, it implies that the classical boundaries between the domains of
motor control and higher cognition are meaningless, and consequently that the whole idea of
modular processing (for these abilities) has to be given up. If this thesis is correct and is taken
seriously, it will drastically reshape our conception of the architecture of the mind.
(2) Moderate thesis: motor abilities are constitutive for certain processes within the
domains of action cognition and action perception, but not of others.
A breakdown in motor abilities would impair both action cognition and action perception; but
it would not, on this view, lead to a complete breakdown of action cognition and action
perception. Accordingly, there should be cognitive abilities that are not easily classifiable as
part of the motor control domain or the action cognition domain as they can be counted in
both classes (the classes overlap to a certain degree). Therefore, this thesis implies that that
the boundaries between these different domains are blurred; however, it does not imply that
we have to give up the distinction between different domains completely. If this moderate
thesis turns out to be empirically adequate, the classical modular picture of the mind is
seriously undermined.