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Mental Actions
This volume investigates the neglected topic of mental action, and shows its importance for the metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology of mind. Twelve specially written essays address such questions as the following: Which phenomena should we count as mental actions -- imagining, remembering, judging, for instance? How should we explain our knowledge of our mental actions, and what light does that throw on self-knowledge in general? What contributions do mental actions make toour consciousness? What is the relationship between the voluntary and the active, in the mental sphere? What are the similarities and differences between mental and physical action, and what can we learn about each from the other?
- GenresPhilosophy
297 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 11, 2009
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January 10, 2022
I didn't quite get what I was looking for in coming to this book, but there are a number of ideas that I found to be interesting on their own, and moreover various chapters helped provoke my thought and refine my thinking. The introductory chapter was promising; it asked various questions that I take to be relevant to my research. The overall topic and questions go roughly like this. Our everyday and philosophical concepts of action tend to be based in the paradigm of physical or bodily action (e.g., flopping on the ground and making a snow angel). But it is intuitive that some of our mental events seem to be product of our agency, while others are not. For example, compare involuntarily undergoing a delusion v. critically scrutinizing an assumption one just realized one made. This suggests that it might make sense to think about certain mental events as actions.
This opens certain key questions. When we allow certain mental events to be counted as actions, how does this rewrite our basic concept of action itself? Does it contribute anything that the paradigm of bodily action leaves out? How are we to define mental action at all, so it might at least capture our intuitions regarding which are agential, and which are not? What are the implications of understanding certain mental events as actions for philosophy of mind and epistemology more broadly?
I found some of the chapters tedious. The first two parts (chapters 1-7) seem to focus, roughly, on arguing which mental events properly count as actions and why. I didn't like these as much because either I wasn't on board with various authors' starting assumptions, or I found flaws in their arguments. Overall, disagreements between the authors seem to boil down to differences in view of what is necessary or sufficient for something to count as an action. I wish these authors made their views on this fundamental matter more explicit, and provided reasons for preferring one view over another; but no, instead, these authors seem to presume their views and use them to argue against the others.
It was interesting seeing the various ways of defining action though. In chapter 2, Mele defines action as requiring that we have immediate control over some change, rather than have control over triggering the change or over some component that is instrumental for the change as a whole. In chapter 3, Dorsch defines action in terms of how much practical control we can have over the contents of a state; judgments are not mental actions for him because they must conform to epistemic norms, which we do not control. In chapter 4, Gibbons argues that a mental event is an action as long as it is motivated by reasons; so mental events which we lack immediate control over or which are epistemic in character may still count as actions. Authors across chapters 5-7 focus on ethical intuitions (i.e., which mental events we have responsibility over intuitively) to argue for their respective definitions of mental action; they seem broadly to agree with Gibbons.
Things got more interesting in part 3. In chapter 8, O'Shaughnessy lays out a nice framework of 3 ways by which we talk about action. He argues that for physical action, there is necessarily a gap between our bodily willing and the movement we actualize; action consists of two separable components. That we act simply by trying, independently of whether we achieve the movement we intended, is one use of the term 'action'. He argues that only for some mental actions this division applies. Some mental actions also involve products, which may or may not obtain (e.g., recalling someone's name), whereas others do not have this logical structure (e.g., free form imagination). This does not mean, however, that the ones that lack products ought to be discounted from the category of actions. O'Shaughnessy, however, doesn't go into detail on that overall point. This chapter was very valuable as a whole though: it shows that there are distinct ways we define action, and this may be applied for understanding the disagreements between the authors in the preceding chapters.
In chapter 10, Peacocke argues that we can have immediate, infallible awareness of our mental actions; and he proposes an explanation of this that avoids committing to a perception model and that maintains consistency with externalism about mental contents. For Peacocke, we have a prereflective, conceptually-laden awareness of what our minds are doing, whenever we perform any mental action. This awareness is not the result of a judgment, nor does it consist in belief. It basic, like a feeling but with intentional content. It is analogous to our awareness of what we are perceiving when we make perceptual contact with the world. But it is not perception, since the object of it is our own mental activity, not objects out in the world. I found this proposal interesting, but his arguments for it not as interesting. He doesn't explain through which processes this awareness is made possible; and instead he just focuses on showing that this proposal doesn't entail certain commitments that'd be against its favor.
My favorite chapter is 12. Soteriou here argues for a philosophical account of how mental action works, which vindicates both O'Shaughnessy's and Peacocke's claims. This account is both plausible and fascinating. Soteriou argues that mental action should be understood as processes that involve transitions between mental states; these processes must necessarily be personal (rather than subpersonal) and accessible to us. They are accessible because they are necessarily conscious. What guarantees that they are conscious? They unfold over time in the medium of a representational vehicle whose purpose isn't to make public or to symbolize a mental content, such as a thought. Rather, the purpose of this representational vehicle is to ensure that the agent can grasp or be aware of her mental activity.
Of course we might take Soteriou as begging the question for how representational vehicles can guarantee that we are aware of their contents. He leaves that question open. But his proposal was convincing as it stands and touches upon really important issues. It amounts to supporting the broader thesis that thoughts and other non-perceptual mental activity is phenomenal (or has content that we are aware of, analogously to how we are aware of the perceptual world). It also shows that we have a special kind of access to our mental activity that differs from the ways by which we access other people's mental states. We don't need to observe our own mental activity, as we have to observe other people to get an idea of their inner worlds. But we also don't have a "Cartesian theater": there isn't some inner eye that directly witnesses what goes on in our minds. The exact representational vehicles that our thoughts end up occupying may be understood as culturally contingent and so susceptible to bias and inaccuracy.
In chapter 13, Proust argues that our sense of ownership over our mental actions is based in our capacity to control these actions, understood in a technical manner in accordance to control theory. There are feed-forward mechanisms in our cognition that make it the case that we anticipate how our mental event ought to unfold if it is to amount to a certain mental action; this anticipated event serves as a standard, against which we compare our actual cognitive activity. If it matches up, we take ourselves to have performed that type of mental action. This is another way of explaining Peacocke's claim that we have some primitive, pre-reflective awareness of our mental actions.
As a whole, I enjoyed reading this anthology. I think it's worth at least skimming through each chapter, and part 3 (out of the three parts) is the most theoretically rich and worthy of attention. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in philosophy of action. For those interested specifically in what exactly explains why certain mental activities more deliberate, or that seem to result from our own agency or voice, rather than be a happen chance event thrown at us -- this book will have some answers to that, but most chapters don't address that. Only Soteriou's and Proust's do.
Here are some side thoughts that reading this book provoked for me. I'm interested in that question of specifically what explains deliberateness when it comes to mental activity. Perhaps we could relate deliberateness with awareness. When we think or imagine deliberately, we are more aware of our mental contents, like becoming vigilant of our environment; more details show up. What explains increased awareness? We might make sense of this in terms of attending more carefully; and this might be made sense of in terms of imagining what is happening while looking at it. If it's fair to call this imagination at all, it'd be a very peculiar kind of imaginative activity; its object is in our immediate experience and it influences that experience concurrently as it represents it. Then, imagination is fundamentally a different kind of mental phenomenon than perception; they are marked by different functional possibilities (e.g., we automatically take whatever we perceive as part of reality, whereas the existential status of objects is malleable or open when we imagine those objects). When we imagine concurrently with and about a perception, we open ourselves to being more raw, responsive, changeable before the perception. We are capable of sliding between many different perspectives or frames, or we're more capable of being triggered or solicited by new details of the perception to slide into new frames. This is due to the dynamical coupling between self and world; it is more likely that something unexpected will show up in imagination, and that will show up with more "vividness" or whatever properties that give it greater power to affect a shift in our frame; and this will this shifted frame, ever more new details with this power are able to show up to us.
It is interesting how these authors do not focus on understanding action in terms of possibilities of creativity in this way. Instead, they all presume that action is controlled; there is a particular goal we have, and this helps orchestrate our mental events and perhaps also is part of the causal processes that allow us to become aware of these events. It seems that perhaps thinking about what it means to be an agent in terms of heeding to or executing goals is potentially limiting.
This opens certain key questions. When we allow certain mental events to be counted as actions, how does this rewrite our basic concept of action itself? Does it contribute anything that the paradigm of bodily action leaves out? How are we to define mental action at all, so it might at least capture our intuitions regarding which are agential, and which are not? What are the implications of understanding certain mental events as actions for philosophy of mind and epistemology more broadly?
I found some of the chapters tedious. The first two parts (chapters 1-7) seem to focus, roughly, on arguing which mental events properly count as actions and why. I didn't like these as much because either I wasn't on board with various authors' starting assumptions, or I found flaws in their arguments. Overall, disagreements between the authors seem to boil down to differences in view of what is necessary or sufficient for something to count as an action. I wish these authors made their views on this fundamental matter more explicit, and provided reasons for preferring one view over another; but no, instead, these authors seem to presume their views and use them to argue against the others.
It was interesting seeing the various ways of defining action though. In chapter 2, Mele defines action as requiring that we have immediate control over some change, rather than have control over triggering the change or over some component that is instrumental for the change as a whole. In chapter 3, Dorsch defines action in terms of how much practical control we can have over the contents of a state; judgments are not mental actions for him because they must conform to epistemic norms, which we do not control. In chapter 4, Gibbons argues that a mental event is an action as long as it is motivated by reasons; so mental events which we lack immediate control over or which are epistemic in character may still count as actions. Authors across chapters 5-7 focus on ethical intuitions (i.e., which mental events we have responsibility over intuitively) to argue for their respective definitions of mental action; they seem broadly to agree with Gibbons.
Things got more interesting in part 3. In chapter 8, O'Shaughnessy lays out a nice framework of 3 ways by which we talk about action. He argues that for physical action, there is necessarily a gap between our bodily willing and the movement we actualize; action consists of two separable components. That we act simply by trying, independently of whether we achieve the movement we intended, is one use of the term 'action'. He argues that only for some mental actions this division applies. Some mental actions also involve products, which may or may not obtain (e.g., recalling someone's name), whereas others do not have this logical structure (e.g., free form imagination). This does not mean, however, that the ones that lack products ought to be discounted from the category of actions. O'Shaughnessy, however, doesn't go into detail on that overall point. This chapter was very valuable as a whole though: it shows that there are distinct ways we define action, and this may be applied for understanding the disagreements between the authors in the preceding chapters.
In chapter 10, Peacocke argues that we can have immediate, infallible awareness of our mental actions; and he proposes an explanation of this that avoids committing to a perception model and that maintains consistency with externalism about mental contents. For Peacocke, we have a prereflective, conceptually-laden awareness of what our minds are doing, whenever we perform any mental action. This awareness is not the result of a judgment, nor does it consist in belief. It basic, like a feeling but with intentional content. It is analogous to our awareness of what we are perceiving when we make perceptual contact with the world. But it is not perception, since the object of it is our own mental activity, not objects out in the world. I found this proposal interesting, but his arguments for it not as interesting. He doesn't explain through which processes this awareness is made possible; and instead he just focuses on showing that this proposal doesn't entail certain commitments that'd be against its favor.
My favorite chapter is 12. Soteriou here argues for a philosophical account of how mental action works, which vindicates both O'Shaughnessy's and Peacocke's claims. This account is both plausible and fascinating. Soteriou argues that mental action should be understood as processes that involve transitions between mental states; these processes must necessarily be personal (rather than subpersonal) and accessible to us. They are accessible because they are necessarily conscious. What guarantees that they are conscious? They unfold over time in the medium of a representational vehicle whose purpose isn't to make public or to symbolize a mental content, such as a thought. Rather, the purpose of this representational vehicle is to ensure that the agent can grasp or be aware of her mental activity.
Of course we might take Soteriou as begging the question for how representational vehicles can guarantee that we are aware of their contents. He leaves that question open. But his proposal was convincing as it stands and touches upon really important issues. It amounts to supporting the broader thesis that thoughts and other non-perceptual mental activity is phenomenal (or has content that we are aware of, analogously to how we are aware of the perceptual world). It also shows that we have a special kind of access to our mental activity that differs from the ways by which we access other people's mental states. We don't need to observe our own mental activity, as we have to observe other people to get an idea of their inner worlds. But we also don't have a "Cartesian theater": there isn't some inner eye that directly witnesses what goes on in our minds. The exact representational vehicles that our thoughts end up occupying may be understood as culturally contingent and so susceptible to bias and inaccuracy.
In chapter 13, Proust argues that our sense of ownership over our mental actions is based in our capacity to control these actions, understood in a technical manner in accordance to control theory. There are feed-forward mechanisms in our cognition that make it the case that we anticipate how our mental event ought to unfold if it is to amount to a certain mental action; this anticipated event serves as a standard, against which we compare our actual cognitive activity. If it matches up, we take ourselves to have performed that type of mental action. This is another way of explaining Peacocke's claim that we have some primitive, pre-reflective awareness of our mental actions.
As a whole, I enjoyed reading this anthology. I think it's worth at least skimming through each chapter, and part 3 (out of the three parts) is the most theoretically rich and worthy of attention. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in philosophy of action. For those interested specifically in what exactly explains why certain mental activities more deliberate, or that seem to result from our own agency or voice, rather than be a happen chance event thrown at us -- this book will have some answers to that, but most chapters don't address that. Only Soteriou's and Proust's do.
Here are some side thoughts that reading this book provoked for me. I'm interested in that question of specifically what explains deliberateness when it comes to mental activity. Perhaps we could relate deliberateness with awareness. When we think or imagine deliberately, we are more aware of our mental contents, like becoming vigilant of our environment; more details show up. What explains increased awareness? We might make sense of this in terms of attending more carefully; and this might be made sense of in terms of imagining what is happening while looking at it. If it's fair to call this imagination at all, it'd be a very peculiar kind of imaginative activity; its object is in our immediate experience and it influences that experience concurrently as it represents it. Then, imagination is fundamentally a different kind of mental phenomenon than perception; they are marked by different functional possibilities (e.g., we automatically take whatever we perceive as part of reality, whereas the existential status of objects is malleable or open when we imagine those objects). When we imagine concurrently with and about a perception, we open ourselves to being more raw, responsive, changeable before the perception. We are capable of sliding between many different perspectives or frames, or we're more capable of being triggered or solicited by new details of the perception to slide into new frames. This is due to the dynamical coupling between self and world; it is more likely that something unexpected will show up in imagination, and that will show up with more "vividness" or whatever properties that give it greater power to affect a shift in our frame; and this will this shifted frame, ever more new details with this power are able to show up to us.
It is interesting how these authors do not focus on understanding action in terms of possibilities of creativity in this way. Instead, they all presume that action is controlled; there is a particular goal we have, and this helps orchestrate our mental events and perhaps also is part of the causal processes that allow us to become aware of these events. It seems that perhaps thinking about what it means to be an agent in terms of heeding to or executing goals is potentially limiting.
Displaying 1 of 1 review