mental actions sep 2009

[...]... are mental actions Gibbons argues that some, but not all, decisions are mental actions Hieronymi argues that while all intentions are subject to some form of agency, none are mental actions Hieronymi is unhappy with the suggestion that our decisions are mental actions, as she believes (contra Pink) that the form agency we exercise over our intentions is unlike the form of agency we exercise over our actions. .. ‘causalist’ conception of intentional actions, they are, essentially, events with a suitable causal history featuring pertinent mental events or states or their neural realizers In ‘Agency and Mental Action’ (Mele 1997), I argued that intentional mental actions pose no threat to causalism that turns on their being mental (as opposed to overt) actions (Overt actions are actions that essentially involve peripheral... be regarded as mental actions But are there any reasons to think that this assumption might be challenged? Are there any reasons to think that there might be significant differences between bodily and mental actions that don’t simply amount to the claim that the one variety is bodily and the other mental? In Chapter 8, O’Shaughnessy argues that at least in the case of a subvariety of mental action there... all bodily actions, when we affirm ‘A did x’, we are affirming that A was the agent of an act that we are entitled to designate as ‘the active generation of event x’ The ‘movement of the will’ and ¹⁰ Peacocke (2007) e.g is explicit that mental actions and bodily actions are actions in exactly the same sense, and that the differences between them are differences between the bodily and the mental Matthew... the case of bodily action, but for a variety of mental action this rule breaks down According to O’Shaughnessy then, the universal rule that applies to all action is that whenever we act the will is operative, but consideration of certain mental actions reveals that not all willings are tryings In defence of the claim that mental actions, unlike bodily actions, are not structurally all of one piece,... to Peacocke, the distinctive way in which a subject comes to know of his own actions is by taking such an apparent action awareness at face value Peacocke (Chapter 10) argues that this distinctive action awareness exists for mental actions, as well as for bodily actions, and as we have seen, Peacocke holds that one’s mental actions include judgings and decidings, as well as calculatings and reasonings... the role of mental action can, as Strawson puts it, ‘at best be indirect’ According to one line of thought, thinking about something involves the occurrence of mental acts individuated, in part, by their propositional contents, and these mental acts can be mental actions only if the particular contents that individuate them are ones that one intends to think However, in the case of many such mental acts... action I will explain why with the aim of shedding light on the nature of mental action With the same aim, I will explore the merits of various alternative ascriptions of (intentional) mental actions to a normal agent who succeeds at the animalnames task In section 4, I apply the results to some recent work on mental action 18 Mental Actions 1 M E N TA L AC T I O N A N D T RY I N G Gail completes the... made a distinctive contribution to the case for thinking that mental action should be of central concern to philosophers of mind in their attempts to understand the nature of consciousness In recent work Peacocke has also suggested both that much conscious thought consists of mental actions, and that an account of the nature of our mental actions, and our knowledge of them, can provide a clarification... one can try to bring it about that one falls asleep Applying this distinction to the domain of mental action, Mele suggests that in the case of many -ings that are not mental actions, the occurrence of the -ing may be explained, in part, by the fact that the subject of the -ing has engaged in the mental actions of trying to bring about that she s and bringing it about that she s For example, Mele argues . decisions are mental actions. Gibbons argues that some, but not all, decisions are mental actions. Hieronymi argues that while all intentions are subject to some form of agency, none are mental actions. Hieronymi. the topic of mental action a natural starting point is to focus on the question of the scope of mental agency. Just which aspects of our mental lives should be regarded as mental actions? This. e.g. is explicit that mental actions and bodily actions are actions in exactly the same sense, and that the differences between them are differences between the bodily and the mental. Matthew Soteriou,