88 CHAPTER THREE
son does or feels but also sensing and grappling with “relevant differences
in disposition, ability and character,” hurdles that cannot be overcome
without the use of more representational cognitive processes, if not actual
communication as well (Nelson et al. 2000; Saxe 2009; Wahman 2008).
In other words, theory of mind and empathy make multiple demands on
body- subjects and therefore draw from multiple kinds of resources; they
cannot be accomplished by mirror neurons alone. Jessica Wahman (2008)
points out that physiological responses to others’ actions are not necessarily
a reliable basis for knowing their intentions. In fact they may frequently be
responsible for misattributions of others’ intentions. “The automatic firing
of sensorimotor neurons may serve as a condition for the possibility of this
achievement [of communicating meaning]; but by itself, such activity not
only falls short of shared meaning: it can stand in the way of it as well” (178).
Further, shared meanings must be accomplished jointly, through interper-
sonal activity. “By this reasoning, mirror neurons, or even a whole neural
network that includes the limbic system and the insula, cannot achieve
something like empathy or inter- subjectivity in the absence of language”
(Pitts- Taylor 2012, 178).
One solution to this overreach within the mirroring literature is to allow
that the neurons enact only low-^ level or basic cognitive functions, rather
than more complex ones (Goldman 2009). For example, mirror neurons
might allow me to grasp only basic emotions (pain, disgust, anger) but not
more complicated ones (envy), or they might achieve the limited function
of allowing me to recognize another as a conspecific, but not the broader
one of generating empathy for her. Distinguishing between lower- and
higher- level processes is a common strategy for explaining how singular
biological mechanisms contribute to multifaceted psychic events. The dis-
tinction preserves the fixity and universality of those processes deemed
basic, allowing only “higher- level” processes to be dynamic. In the mirror
neuron literature this strategy leaves intact a precoded mechanism that
provides scaffolding for, and is a constraint to, more complex social cog-
nition, and it forecloses the question of how preconscious processes are
themselves modulated through experience. To take seriously the idea that
mirror neurons are plastic and situated is to address how they are entangled
with social practices. The focus must shift from measuring how much these