Mental Action

There has been a resurgence of interest lately within philosophy of mind and action in the category of mental action. Against this background, the present paper aims to question the very possibility, or at least the theoretical significance, of teasing apart mental and bodily acts. After raising some doubts over the viability of various possible ways of drawing the mental act/bodily act distinction, the paper draws some lessons from debates over embodied cognition, which arguably further undermine the credibility of the distinction. The insignificance of the distinction is demonstrated in part by showing how the focus on 'inner' acts hampers fruitful discussion of Galen Strawson's skepticism of mental agency. Finally, the possibility is discussed that a distinction between covert and overt action should supplant the one between mental and bodily action.

Our successful engagement with the world is plausibly underwritten by our sensitivity to affordances in our immediate environment. The considerable literature on affordances focuses almost exclusively on affordances for bodily actions such as gripping, walking or eating. I propose that we are also sensitive to affordances for mental actions such as attending, imagining and counting. My case for this ‘Mental Affordance Hypothesis’ is motivated by a series of examples in which our sensitivity to mental affordances mirrors our sensitivity to bodily affordances. Specifically, subjects perceive opportunities to perform a mental action and their doing so leads, under the right conditions, to the automatic preparation of that action. I conclude by sketching a mental affordance research program that would reinforce my case for the Mental Affordance Hypothesis and establish its ramifications for a number of debates across philosophy and psychology.

This chapter contributes to the ongoing debate over how to understand attention. It spells out and defends a novel account according to which attending is the most general type of mental act, that which one performs on some object if one performs any mental act on it at all. On this view, all mental acts are (to a first, rough approximation) species of attending. The view is novel in going against the grain of virtually all extant accounts, which work by identifying the purported unique functional role of attention. It is inspired by Timothy Williamson’s account of knowledge as the most general factive mental state (Williamson, 2001: ch. 1). Beyond the Williamsonian thin explanation of knowledge, the account of attention as the most general mental act is animated by two striking pre-theoretical features of attention, dubbed Ubiquity and Heterogeneity. The hope of accommodating these twin features seems to drive at least two other extant accounts of attention, very different from the one proposed here, offered by Mole and Wu, respectively. However, as the chapter explains, both Mole’s and Wu’s accounts fall short, leaving room for the novel account defended here, which does adequately capture both features.

Edward Witherspoon distinguishes Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense from Rudolf Carnap’s.  The latter does not fully take into account the fact that, if something really is nonsense, it has no more meaning than ‘Ab sur ah’ and therefore cannot have any logical properties.  He finds the Carnapian conception even in professed Wittgensteinians such as Peter Hacker and Gordon Baker who think of themselves as rejecting it.  My question is where this leaves the notion of PHILOSOPHICAL nonsense.  Could anything that was utterly devoid of content play the crucial deceptive role that nonsensicalists, including Wittgensteinians, assign it?  Could it ever be detected if it did?

In this paper, I describe and discuss two mental phenomena which are somewhat neglected in the philosophy of mind: focused daydreaming and mind-wandering. My aim is to show that their natures are rather distinct, despite the fact that we tend to classify both as instances of daydreaming. The first difference between the two, I argue, is that, while focused daydreaming is an instance of imaginative mental agency (i.e. mental agency with the purpose to voluntarily produce certain mental representations), mind-wandering is not – though this does not mean that mind-wandering cannot involve mental agency at all. This personal-level difference in agency and purposiveness has, furthermore, the consequence that instances of mind-wandering do not constitute unified and self-contained segments of the stream of consciousness – in stark contrast to focused daydreams. Besides, the two kinds of mental phenomena differ in whether they pos­sess a narrative structure, and in how we may make sense of the succession of mental episodes involved.

Although mind-wandering occupies up to half of our waking thoughts, it is seldom discussed in philosophy. My paper brings these neglected thoughts into focus. I propose that mind-wandering is unguided attention. Guidance in my sense concerns how attention is monitored and regulated as it unfolds over time. Roughly speaking, someone's attention is guided if she would feel pulled back, were she distracted from her current focus. Because our wandering thoughts drift unchecked from topic to topic, they are unguided. One motivation for my theory is what I call the "Puzzle of The Purposeful Wanderer". On the one hand, mind-wandering seems essentially purposeless; almost by definition, it contrasts with goal-directed cognition. On the other hand, empirical evidence suggests that our minds frequently wander to our goals. My solution to the puzzle is this: mind-wandering is purposeless in one way---it is unguided---but purposeful in another---it is frequently caused, and thus motivated, by our goals. Another motivation for my theory is to distinguish mind-wandering from two antithetical forms of cognition: absorption (e.g. engrossment in an intellectual idea) and rumination (e.g. fixation on one's distress). Surprisingly, previous theories cannot capture these distinctions. I can: on my view, absorption and rumination are guided; mind-wandering is not. My paper has four parts. Section 1 spells out the puzzle. Sections 2 and 3 explicate two extant views of mind-wandering--the first held by most cognitive scientists, the second by Thomas Metzinger. Section 4 uses the limitations of these theories to motivate my own: mind-wandering is unguided attention.

According to Husserl's phenomenology, the intentional horizon is a general structure of experience. However, its characterisation beyond perceptual experience has not been explored yet. This paper aims, first, to fill this gap by arguing that there is a viable notion of cognitive horizon that presents features that are analogous to features of the perceptual horizon. Secondly, it proposes to characterise a specific structure of the cognitive horizon-that which presents possibilities for action-as a cognitive affordance. Cognitive affordances present cognitive elements as opportunities for mental action (i.e., a problem affording trying to solve it, a thought affording calculating, an idea affording reflection). Thirdly, it argues that postulating cognitive affordances helps to unfold a rational dimension of thinking by conceiving of them as motivating reasons for action, something that in turn provides an argument for the experienced character of cognitive affordances.

Cognitive agency - the idea that our judgments and beliefs are manifestations of agency on our part - is a deeply entrenched aspect of our self-conception as persons. And yet it has proven hard to give a satisfying account of what such agency might consist in. In this paper I argue that getting clear about Kant’s notion of spontaneity might help us make progress in that debate. In particular, I argue that the very same assumption - namely, that agency must be understood on the model of production - has been holding us back in both areas.

Affordances are possibilities for action. As you wander through a park, a football might afford kicking, a bench might afford sitting and a tree might afford climbing. The term ‘affordance’ was introduced by ecological psychologist J.J. Gibson. He explains ‘[t]he affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.’ (1979, p. 127). Gibson put forward a rich set of claims about affordances and their theoretical significance. I will be building on two of those claims in particular. The first claim is that affordances have a constitutive connection to the acting agent. Gibson explains ‘[t]he verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.’ (1979 p. 127). The football, for example, affords kicking by me - its being kickable is a property it has relative to my capacities for action. The second claim is that affordances are perceptible properties. Gibson states that this is ‘…a radical hypothesis, for it implies that the “values” and “meanings” of things in the environment can be directly perceived.’ (1979, p. 127). On this view the football’s property of being kickable, for example, is not something you explicitly infer on the basis of what you perceive but rather something you see directly.

Husserl famously retracted his early portrayal, in Logische Untersuchungen, of phenomenology as empirical psychology. Previous scholarship has typically understood this transcendental turn in light of the Ideen's revised conception of the ἐποχή, and its distinction between noesa and noemata. This essay thematizes the evolution of the concept of mental acts in Husserl's work as a way of understanding the shift. I show how the recognition of the pure ego in Ideen I & II enabled Husserl to radically alter his conception of mental acts, coming to understand them all in terms of genuine *acts* (doings or performances) in a way that had been essentially precluded for descriptive psychologists (Brentano, Natorp, and the early Husserl) so long as the pure ego was denied. This reading challenges a widespread assumption in the secondary literature that "mental act" is a merely technical term or misnomer.

We take it that we can exercise doxastic agency by reasoning and by making judgments. We take it, that is, that we can actively make up our minds by reasoning and judging. On what I call the 'Standard View' this is so because judgment can yield belief. It is typical to take it that judgments yield beliefs by causing them. But on the resultant understanding of the Standard View, I argue, it is unclear how judgment could play its role in doxastic agency in the way we take it to. I therefore offer an alternative understanding of how judgment yields belief. Drawing on Ryle (2009) I argue that when one comes to believe by judging the event which is one's judging is token identical to the event which is one's coming to believe. This paves the way for version of the Standard View capable of explaining how we can actively make up our minds despite that we cannot believe or come to believe at will.

To perceive an affordance is to perceive an object or situation as presenting an opportunity for action. The concept of affordances has been taken up across wide range of disciplines, including AI. I explore an interesting extension of the concept of affordances in robotics. Among the affordances that artificial systems have been engineered to detect are affordances to deliberate. In psychology, affordances are typically limited to bodily action, so the it is noteworthy that AI researchers have found it helpful to extend the concept to encompass mental actions. I propose that psychologists can learn from this extension, and argue that human subjects can perceive mental affordances, such as affordances to attend, affordances to imagine and affordances to count.

The paper argues that group attitudes can be assessed in terms of standards of rationality and that group-level rationality need not be due to individual-level rationality. But it also argues that groups cannot be collective epistemic agents and are not collectively responsible for collective irrationality. I show that we do not need the concept of collective epistemic agency to explain how group-level irrationality can arise. Group-level irrationality arises because even rational individuals can fail to reason about how their attitudes will combine with those of others. In some cases they are morally responsible for this failure, in others they are not. Moreover, the argument for collective epistemic agency is incoherent because reasons-for-groups are ipso facto reasons-for-individual(s). Instead of talking about reasons-for-groups, we should therefore distinguish between self-regarding reasons and group-regarding reasons. Both kinds of reasons are reasons-for-individuals. These conceptual considerations in favour of moderate individualism are strengthened by an analysis of our moral practice of responding to collective shortfalls of rationality and by the unpalatable moral implications of collectivism about epistemic agency. There is no need to change the subject. Groups can be rational or irrational, but they do not reason.

You can come to know that you believe that p partly by reflecting on whether p and then judging that p. Call this procedure " the transparency method for belief. " How exactly does the transparency method generate known self-attributions of belief? To answer that question, we cannot interpret the transparency method as involving a transition between the contents p and I believe that p. It is hard to see how some such transition could be warranted. Instead, in this context, one mental action is both a judgment that p and a self-attribution of a belief that p. The notion of embedded mental action is introduced here to explain how this can be so and to provide a full epistemic explanation of the transparency method. That explanation makes sense of first-person authority and immediacy in transparent self-knowledge. In generalized form, it gives sufficient conditions on an attitude's being known transparently.