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... more
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.
An important source of doubt about our knowledge of the "external world" is the thought that all of our sensory experience could be delusive without our realizing it. Such wholesale questioning of the deliverances of all forms of... more
An important source of doubt about our knowledge of the "external world" is the thought that all of our sensory experience could be delusive without our realizing it. Such wholesale questioning of the deliverances of all forms of perception seems to leave no resources for successfully justifying our belief in the existence of an objective world beyond our subjective experiences. I argue that there is there is a fatal flaw in the very expression of philosophical doubt about the "external world." Therefore, no such justification is necessary. The feature of skepticism which I believe renders it vulnerable is the assumption that each of us has a right to be certain of his own existence as a subject of conscious experience even in the face of comprehensive doubt about our empirical beliefs.
The article proposes a novel approach to mental agency that is inspired by Victoria McGeer’s work on self-regulation. The basic idea is that certain mental acts (e.g., judging that p) leave further work to be done for an agent to be... more
The article proposes a novel approach to mental agency that is inspired by Victoria McGeer’s work on self-regulation. The basic idea is that certain mental acts (e.g., judging that p) leave further work to be done for an agent to be considered an authoritative self-ascriber of corresponding dispositional mental states (e.g., believing that p). First, we discuss Richard Moran’s account of avowals, which grounds first-person authority in deliberative, self-directed agency. Although this view is promising, we argue that it ultimately fails to confront the empirical gap between occurrent judgments and dispositional beliefs. Second, we show how Victoria McGeer's account of self-regulation allows us to bridge this gap by emphasizing that avowals are only reliable and authoritative insofar as we take certain steps to live up to the commitments inherent in our self-ascriptions. Third, we address the question whether and to what extent self-regulation can be seen as a form of mental agency. Unlike the ‘pure’ deliberative form of mental agency advocated by Moran, which is direct, conscious and intra-personal, we follow McGeer and argue for a notion of mental agency as an (often) indirect, unconscious and inter-personal process of self-regulation.
