Mental Action and Epistemology
Mental Action and Epistemology
This book is about non-basic mental action. When you do one type of thing intentionally in thought—say, J—by intentionally doing another type of thing in thought—say, K-ing—then you J by K-ing, and in so doing perform a non-basic mental action. Understanding non-basic mental action can help us understand how one and the same mental occurrence can have several contents or several attitudinal aspects under several (true) descriptions. I apply this framework to intentional judgment, creative conception of new artworks, phenomenal imagination, transparent self-attribution of belief, inference, and inquiry.
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In Epistemic Explanations, Sosa continues to defend a model of judgment he has long endorsed. On this complex model of judgment, judgment aims not only at correctness but also at aptness of a kind of alethic affirmation. He offers three arguments for the claim that we need this model of judgment instead of a simpler model, on which judgment aims only at correctness. The first argument cites the need to exclude knowledge-spoiling luck from apt judgment. The second argument uses the complex model to distinguish judgment from mere guessing. The third argument involves the assessment of suspension of judgment as a performance. This paper shows why none of these arguments succeeds, and so recommends adopting the simpler model of judgment.
Early in Movements of the Mind, Wayne Wu puts forth a foundational picture of action. On this picture, intentional action is necessarily a solution to a selection problem, a problem of choice among multiple causally possible alternatives. Forming an intention solves one selection problem; acting on that intention requires solving yet further selection problems about how to execute that intention. There are two serious issues with this picture of action. First: some intentional actions are causally necessitated. They can't be solutions to selection problems. Wu's argument for this claim, which contrasts reflex with action, does not succeed in showing that action must solve a selection problem — nor that reflex does not solve such a problem. Second: the requirement to solve further selection problems while acting on an intention leads to a vicious regress that threatens the possibility of action in general. If these two issues are addressed, Wu's groundbreaking scientific approach to mental action might offer us a powerful new theory of ongoing causal control over intentional action.
Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That’s because an intentional judgment, even one with content p, need not be intentional as a judgment that p. It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh- for some specific wh- question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p. This paper explains how this is possible by laying out the means by which you can perform such an intentional action. This model of intentional judgment does not stand in tension with the fact that judgment is causally regulated for truth, and that it is correct only if it is true. On the contrary, the structure of intentional action explains how an intentional judgment has these features. An extended example is developed, and sufficient conditions on intentional judgment are laid out.
This opinionated overview of historical and contemporary philosophy of mental action argues for its crucial importance in epistemology and the philosophy of mind.
Thoughts that are intentional mental actions can have several contents at once. Recognizing the content plurality of mental actions lets us ask better questions in epistemology—e.g. about self-knowledge, the relationship between judgment and decision, and the nature of inference. In this paper I give lots of examples and explain how mental action with content plurality is possible.
You can self-attribute a belief that p 'transparently' partly by judging that p. I argue that, in the relevant embedded context, an event of judging that p is also an event of self-attributing a belief that p. Seeing the numerical identity of these mental actions in this context solves an epistemological puzzle about 'transparent' self-knowledge of belief.
It’s plausible that conception of new ideas for aesthetic works involves intentional action: we ask how and why artists conceive of their works, and we give them great praise for conceiving them. But such creative conception can’t just involve acting on an intention to conceive the new idea in all its particularity, since having that intention in the first place already requires you to have conceived that idea. Then what is the content of a creative intention that can guide the process of creative conception? There are at least two existing models of creative intention: a value realization model endorsed by Nick Zangwill; and an inspiration/selection model set out by Monroe Beardsley, among many others. Each model fails to identify a way for a creator to be properly active in the origination of their own ideas. A better model, the refinement model, can combine the strength of both of these. On this model, a creator intends to do justice to some proto-work—a draft or component of a final idea which sets up a standard to be met in further refinement. The content of the creator’s intention is demonstrative in nature; an artist might have no insight into what she is trying to do except via her grasp on this proto-work. This model is illuminated by application to a real-world example of creative conception by the band Grizzly Bear.
It's clear that aesthetic properties like elegance, beauty, and wit must be grounded in lower-level non-aesthetic properties of an object. The grounding relation that links facts about aesthetic properties and facts about these lower-level properties is usually taken to be general: it relies on patterns, forms, or principles linking the relevant properties. This is part of why grounding is taken to enjoy a tight link with genuine explanation. But this can seem to make trouble for the (realist) particularist in aesthetics, she who denies that there are any such principles linking aesthetic properties to their grounds, while insisting that aesthetic properties are part of the fabric of the world as it is regardless of how we judge it to be. This paper makes sense of grounding for a realist particularist view in aesthetics. It proposes that the explanatory role that grounding plays can be supported by a special kind of aesthetic counterfactual, understood by a removal conception of support. An extended example (Kathleen Ryan's Bad Lemon) is discussed.
This broad historical overview offers a summary of the most influential work on the nature of aesthetic experience - its objects and its mental components.
A brief overview of my position on the nature of aesthetic value, which I call "liberalism" about aesthetic value.
The most provocative proposal in C. Thi Nguyen’s gripping and creative book Games: Agency as Art is the claim that there is a genuine aesthetics of agency. It is provocative in the implications it generates in conjunction with the further compelling claim that aesthetic appreciation and evaluation is properly centered on firsthand phenomenal experience. I consider the role of emotions of agency, patterns of attention, and affordances in making game experiences feel some way to their subjects, and argue that these genuinely phenomenal aspects of striving play are aesthetically significant.
Aesthetic hedonism meets four basic adequacy conditions on a theory of aesthetic value, but it is not the only view that can do so. In this paper I introduce and motivate an alternative to hedonism I call “aesthetic liberalism,” which counts more responses than pleasurable ones as crucially relevant to the aesthetic value of an object.
You can only phenomenally imagine what you have already experienced. But appreciating literary comparisons can nonetheless give you new phenomenal concepts, and thereby expand the range of what you can actively call to mind in phenomenal imagination. This fact explains poets’ optimism about the personal and moral importance of their work.