From an enactive perspective, one should be able to explain how perception and actions, constituted in patterns of interactions with the world, evolve into the capacities for social coordination and social understanding distinctive of human beings. Traditional accounts of our social understanding skills, focusing on the role of intentionality as the “aboutness” associated with the use of symbolic language, make this sort of explanation difficult to articulate. A satisfactory explanation should start with the recognition that intentionality is not a monolithic phenomenon and that more basic kinds of intentionality embodied in material culture have played a crucial role in allowing for the complexity of human social cognition. We argue for the importance of kinds of bottom-up intentionality, which arise from the world as it is experienced, dynamically structuring and directing our cognitive capacities toward possibilities of (joint) action. Musicality (our capacity for being musical) is a particularly rich kind of cultural expression, in which intentionality embodied in material culture can be studied and its significance for the structure of our deeply social cognition can be explored.
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