ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein (1958) famously asked, “What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” (§621). Meltzoff , Gopnik, and Repacholi’s (1999) answer to his question is “intention” (p. 24). Meltzoff and colleagues (1999) go on to assert that, “Intentions are mental states and bodily movements are physical events in the world. Th e two have an intimate relation because intentions underlie and cause bodily movements.” Or, again, Meltzoff (2002) in writing again about the relation between action and mental states, asserted, “Wittgenstein (1953) makes it clear with a blunt question: ‘What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?’ Answer: intention” (p. 17). Although Meltzoff and his colleagues assume that the obvious answer is “intention,” in fact, Russell (1996) pointed out that Wittgenstein’s question was “intended to dramatize the absurdity of answers such as ‘my intending to raise my arm’ and thus the absurdity of the picture of a purely mental willing entity trapped, as it were, inside the body, able, if it pulls the right levers, to cause the body to move as it intends it to move” (p. 173).
