I argue that the neural realizers of experiences of trying are not distinct from the neural realizers of actual trying . I then ask how experiences of trying might relate to the perceptual experiences one has while acting. First, I assess recent zombie action arguments regarding conscious visual experience, and I argue that contrary to what some have claimed, conscious visual experience plays a causal role for action control in some circumstances. Second, I propose a multimodal account of the experience (...) of acting. According to this account, the experience of acting is a temporally extended, co-conscious collection of agentive and perceptual experiences, functionally integrated and structured both by multimodal perceptual processing as well as by what an agent is, at the time, trying to do. (shrink)

Episodic memory is sometimes described as mental time travel. This suggests three ideas: that episodic memory offers us access to the past that is quasi-experiential, that it is a source of knowledge of the past, and that it is, at root, passive. I offer an account of episodic memory that rejects all three ideas. The account claims that remembering is a matter of representing the past to oneself, in a way suitably responsive to how one experienced the remembered episode to (...) be. I argue that episodic memory is active, in the way this view suggests. I clarify the idea that it is, as the view also implies, not a source of knowledge but an expression of knowledge the subject already has. And I suggest the view need not limit memories to states that are in any way experience-like. This position offers a way to articulate the relations between episodic memory and related phenomena: factual memory, generic memory, remembering-how and anticipation. And it allows us to explain how we know which aspects of our episodic memory states to take seriously and which (such as the shift to an observer perspective on the remembered events) to treat as merely incidental. (shrink)

Detecting conscious awareness in a patient emerging from a coma state is problematic, because our standard attributions of conscious awareness rely on interpreting bodily movement as intentional action. Where there is an absence of intentional bodily action, as in the vegetative state, can we reliably assume that there is an absence of conscious awareness? Recent neuroimaging work suggests that we can attribute conscious awareness to some patients in a vegetative state by interpreting their brain activity as intentional mental action. I (...) suggest that this change of focus, from the interpretation of motor behaviour as intentional bodily action to the interpretation of neural activity as intentional mental action, raises philosophical issues that affect the interpretation of the neuroimaging data. (shrink)

This is the first in a series of two articles that serve as an introduction to recent debates about cognitive phenomenology. Cognitive phenomenology can be defined as the experience that is associated with cognitive activities, such as thinking, reasoning, and understanding. What is at issue in contemporary debates is not the existence of cognitive phenomenology, so defined, but rather its nature and theoretical role. The first article examines questions about the nature of cognitive phenomenology, while the second article explores the (...) philosophical implications of these questions for the role of consciousness in theories of intentionality, introspective self-knowledge, and knowledge of the external world. (shrink)

Recently, many philosophers and psychologists have claimed that the explanation that grounds both passivity phenomena in the cognitive domain and passivity phenomena that occur with respect to overt actions is, along broad lines, the same. Furthermore, they claim that the best account we have of such phenomena in both scenarios is the “comparator” account. However, there are reasons to doubt whether the comparator model can be exported from the realm of overt actions to the cognitive domain in general. There is (...) a lingering worry concerning such explanations of thought insertion: the "What is compared to what?" problem. Here I examine two ways to tackle this problem. First: thought insertion consists of the misattribution of strings of inner speech which are not attenuated (thought insertion is thus another name for auditory verbal hallucinations). Second: thought insertion is misattributed inner speech which exhibits the same phenomenological characteristics as normal inner speech. After explaining the types of problem that each of these potential solutions faces, I conclude with a set of open questions that the comparator theorist has to tackle. (shrink)

In their article “Out of nowhere: thought insertion, ownership and context-integration”, Jean-Remy Martin & Elisabeth Pacherie criticize the standard approach to thought insertion. However, their criticism is based on a misunderstanding of what the standard approach actually claims. By clarifying the notions ‘sense of ownership’ and ‘sense of agency’, I show that Martin & Pacherie’s own approach can be construed as a refined version of the standard approach.

Among the phenomena that make up the mind, cognitive psychologists and philosophers have postulated a puzzling one that they have called ?epistemic feelings.? This paper aims to (1) characterize these experiences according to their intentional content and phenomenal character, and (2) describe the nature of these mental states as nonconceptual in the cases of animals and infants, and as conceptual mental states in the case of adult human beings. Finally, (3) the paper will contrast three accounts of the causes and (...) mechanisms of epistemic feelings: the doxastic account; the mental scanner account; and the heuristic mechanism account. The paper will argue in favor of the heuristic mechanism account. (shrink)

We very often discover ourselves engaged in inner speech. It seems that this kind of silent, private, speech fulfils some role in our cognition, most probably related to conscious thinking. Yet, the study of inner speech has been neglected by philosophy and psychology alike for many years. However, things seem to have changed in the last two decades. Here we review some of the most influential accounts about the phenomenology and the functions of inner speech, as well as the methodological (...) problems that affect its study. (shrink)

Given disagreement about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self‐knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and the scope of metacognition – the control of one’s cognition – is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self‐ascriptive view, has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing one’s own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read one’s mind. The main claims of this view are articulated, and (...) the difficulties that they raise are discussed. An alternative view of metacognition, the ‘self‐evaluative view’, is then examined. It is argued that this view provides an account of metacognition that is both empirically and conceptually more adequate than the self‐ascriptive model. Particular attention is given to the problem of transferring self‐evaluative judgments to the case of others. (shrink)

This article discusses the arguments against associating epistemic responsibility with the ordinary notion of agency. I examine the various 'Kantian' views which lead to a distinctive conception of epistemic agency and epistemic responsibility. I try to explain why we can be held responsible for our beliefs in the sense of obeying norms which regulate them without being epistemic agents.

Control consciousness is the awareness or experience of seeming to be in control of one’s actions. One view, which I will be arguing against in the present paper, is that control consciousness is a form of sensory consciousness. In such a view, control consciousness is exhausted by sensory elements such as tactile and proprioceptive information. An opposing view, which I will be arguing for, is that sensory elements cannot be the whole story and must be supplemented by direct contributions of (...) nonsensory, motor elements. More specifically, I will be arguing for the view that the neural basis of control consciousness is constituted by states of recurrent activation in relatively intermediate levels of the motor hierarchy. (shrink)

This paper develops a mechanistic account of basic mental agency by identifying similarities between two of its major exemplars: endogenous attention and imagination. Five key similarities are identified: i) that both capacities are driven by currently prioritised goals that are either person-level or apt to become person-level. ii) that both deliver their outputs to the working memory iii) that both range across all and only conceptual contents; iv) that both proceed under the guidance of norms and/or habits; and v) that (...) both directly activate rather than inhibit content. These five features are consolidated by proposing that basic mental agency is essentially the power to call for conceptual content and hold it within our working memories. (shrink)

I argue that cognitively mature human beings have an important sort of control or discretion over their own beliefs, but that to make good sense of this control, we must reject the common idea that it consists in a capacity to act on our belief-state by forming new beliefs or modifying ones we already hold. I propose that we exercise agential control over our beliefs, not primarily in doing things to alter our belief-state, but in holding whatever beliefs we hold. (...) Our beliefs are thus not normally things on which we act; they are themselves our acts, in a sense I seek to explicate. (shrink)

There are mental actions, and a number of epistemic attitudes involve activity. But can there be epistemic agency? I argue that there is a limit to any claim that we can be epistemic agents, which is that the structure of reasons for epistemic attitudes differs fundamentally from the structure of reasons for actions. The main differences are that we cannot act for the wrong reasons although we can believe for the wrong reasons, and that reasons for beliefs are exclusive in (...) a sense in which our reasons for actions are not. Epistemic agency is possible in the weak sense that we can be active, but not in the strong one in which we could have some elbow room for our epistemic reasons in reasoning leading to beliefs and other epistemic states. (shrink)

Although mind‐wandering research is rapidly progressing, stark disagreements are emerging about what the term “mind‐wandering” means. Four prominent views define mind‐wandering as (a) task‐unrelated thought, (b) stimulus‐independent thought, (c) unintentional thought, or (d) dynamically unguided thought. Although theorists claim to capture the ordinary understanding of mind‐wandering, no systematic studies have assessed these claims. Two large factorial studies present participants (N = 545) with vignettes that describe someone's thoughts and ask whether her mind was wandering, while systematically manipulating features relevant to (...) the four major accounts of mind‐wandering. Dynamics explains between four and 40 times more variance in participants' mind‐wandering judgments than other features. Our third study (N = 153) tests and supports a unique prediction of the dynamic framework—obsessive rumination contrasts with mind‐wandering. Our final study (N = 277) used vignettes that resemble mind‐wandering experiments. Dynamics had significant and large effects, while task‐unrelatedness was nonsignificant. These results strongly suggest that the central feature of mind‐wandering is its dynamics. (shrink)

Two main theories about metacognition are reviewed, each of which claims to provide a better explanation of this phenomenon, while discrediting the other theory as inappropriate. The paper claims that in order to do justice to the complex phenomenon of metacognition, we must distinguish two levels of this capacity—each having a different structure, a different content and a different function within the cognitive architecture. It will be shown that each of the reviewed theories has been trying to explain only one (...) of the two levels and that, consequently, the conflict between them can be dissolved. The paper characterizes the high-level as a rationalizing level where the subject uses concepts and theories to interpret her own behavior and the low-level as a controlling level where the subject exploits epistemic feelings to adjust her cognitive activities. Finally, the paper explores three kinds of interaction between the levels. (shrink)

In a pair of recent papers and his new book, Christopher Peacocke (2007, 2008a, 2008b) takes up and defends the claim that our awareness of our own actions is immediate and not perceptually based, and extends it into the domain of mental action.1 He aims to provide an account of action-awareness that will generalize to explain how we have immediate awareness of our own judgments, decisions, imaginings, and so forth. These claims form an important component in a much larger philosophical (...) edifice, with many implications for the philosophy of mind and for epistemology. The present paper advances multiple criticisms of Peacocke's account. In particular, it shows that he has given insufficient grounds for thinking that we have non-perceptual awareness of our own actions; and it shows that the account of action-awareness that he provides does not, in any case, generalize to mental actions of the sort that he intends. (shrink)

In this paper I argue on two fronts. First, I press for the view that judging is a type of mental action, as opposed to those who think that judging is involuntary and hence not an action. Second, I argue that judging is specifically a type of non-voluntary mental action. My account of the non-voluntary nature of the mental act of judging differs, however, from standard non-voluntarist views, according to which ‘non-voluntary’ just means regulated by epistemic reasons. In addition, judging (...) is non-voluntary, I contend, because it is partially constituted by the exercise of a non-reason-governed skill. This skill, which I call ‘critical pop-out’, consists of an unreflective, often unconscious, ability to detect the kind of situations in which the reflective abilities that also partially constitute our acts of judging should be deployed. We are responsible for our judgments, I conclude, because in identifying such reflection-inviting situations, we reveal the kind of epistemic agents we are. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a reductive account of intentions which I call a gate-based reductive account. In contrast with other reductive accounts, however, the reductive basis of this account is not limited to desires, beliefs and judgments. I suggest that an intention is a complex state in which a predominant desire toward a plan is not inhibited by a gate mechanism whose function is to assess the comparison of our desires given the stakes at hand. To vindicate this account, (...) I rely on several considerations: the similarity between epistemic feelings and the feeling of being decided that tells us that we have an intention, the necessity of postulating a gate mechanism to explain our hesitating behavior, and the tight link that exists between the realization of our actions and our desires. In agreement with non-reductivists, I nevertheless acknowledge that intentions encompass plans, although I emphasize that the planning capacity must also be dependent on our motivational life and the general evaluative mechanisms that explains our emotions. (shrink)

The standard approach to the core phenomenology of thought insertion characterizes it in terms of a normal sense of thought ownership coupled with an abnormal sense of thought agency. Recently, Fernández (2010) has argued that there are crucial problems with this approach and has proposed instead that what goes wrong fundamentally in such a phenomenology is a sense of thought commitment, characterized in terms of thought endorsement. In this paper, we argue that even though Fernández raises new issues that enrich (...) the topic, his proposal cannot rival the version of the standard approach we shall defend. (shrink)