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ABSTRACT
There has been a resurgence of interest lately within the philosophy of mind and action in the category of mental action. Against this background, the present paper aims to question the very possibility, or at least the theoretical significance, of teasing apart mental and bodily acts. After raising some doubts over the viability of various possible ways of drawing the mental-act–bodily-act distinction, the paper draws some lessons from debates over embodied cognition which, arguably, further undermine the credibility of the distinction. The insignificance of the distinction is demonstrated in part by showing how the focus on “inner” acts hampers fruitful discussion of Galen Strawson’s skepticism of mental agency. Finally, the possibility is discussed that a distinction between covert and overt action should supplant the one between mental and bodily action.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the very helpful comments I received from audiences at the Mental Action and the Ontology of Mind conference at London’s Institute of Philosophy and a workshop on intentional action at Tel Aviv University. Special thanks to my respective commentators there, Maria Alvarez and Elvira Di Bona, for their careful and insightful remarks. Thanks also to John Hyman, Noa Leibowitz, Lucy O’Brien, Matt Soteriou, and an anonymous referee for comments and discussions that vastly improved this paper.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 It should be clear that the use of ‘externalism’ and ‘internalism’ in the text is independent of how these terms are commonly used in epistemology and moral psychology.
2 Compare Soteriou (Citation2009b, pp. 232–3), who briefly makes a related point.
3 The discussion so far may raise the possibility of drawing the distinction between mental and bodily acts in the following way: Perhaps bodily acts necessarily or constitutively involve motions of the body, whereas mental acts do not necessarily do so. This proposal essentially concedes the point that the mere lack of bodily movements is not a distinguishing feature of mental action. It also leads to the suspicion that the latter is not a deep feature of mental acts – a point argued for in Section 5 below.
4 There is a potentially significant issue concerning the formulation of ExM that rarely receives due attention in the literature. This is the question of the precise metaphysical relation that ExM claims holds between the mind and the environment: Is it constitution, supervenience, or something else? Clark and Chalmers (Citation1998) is itself not sufficiently clear on this matter. Chalmers (Citation2008) quickly dismisses the idea that ExM requires any substantial metaphysical commitments, while Shapiro (Citation2011, Chapter, p. 6) seems to opt for the constitution option without much argument. In what follows, I shall bypass this issue and invoke constitution or realization as the operative relation in the rough-and-ready formulations of ExM adverted to. However, when presenting the views defended here (which, as will become clear, are not equivalent to ExM), the relation invoked will be that of supervenience, which seems to be the more apposite suggestion.
5 Clark and Chalmers (Citation1998, p. 17) tentatively adduce a fourth criterion, discussed below.
6 One may wish to deny that these are genuine instances of mental acts, insisting that they are better understood as some amalgam of mental and non-mental processes, events, or acts. This objection is discussed in Section 4 below.
7 It is assumed here that decisions are bona fide acts. Even a staunch denier of (most) mental activity like Strawson (Citation2003) allows that this is true of at least some decisions. However, if the reader disagrees, she should feel free to delete this example from the present list of extended mental acts.
8 See n. 3 above.
9 Rupert (Citation2004) and Clark and Chalmers (Citation1998, p. 18) allow that the self may extend with the mind.
10 I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to clarify this point.
11 Some critics (Adams & Aizawa Citation2009; Rupert, Citation2004) complain that ExM renders the mind inapt for sustained scientific theorizing, undercutting the hugely successful research agendas in the cognitive sciences. This charge is not discussed here, since it particularly targets ExM with its focus on extended cognition, a focus not shared by Mod-ExM.
12 Demonstrating the possibility of such a break would not yet settle the matter at hand; there would remain the question of which of the rival pictures, the casual or the constitutive, actually provides the best understanding of the relevant phenomenon. However, demonstrating feasibility is a precondition for the objection to stick.
13 I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to clarify this.
14 Compare Wilson and Clark (Citation2008).
15 Strawson (Citation2003, p. 239). Strawson does briefly discuss the case of decisions, but there he seems happy to concede that at least some decisions are acts – for example, decisions made in scenarios of mere picking, where there is no reason to prefer one alternative over the other. See Strawson (Citation2003, pp. 243–4).
16 It should be emphasized that Soteriou does not offer this as a means of distinguishing mental from bodily action across the board but, rather, as a means of zeroing in on the particular variety of mental acts he goes on to discuss in his chapter.
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Yair Levy
Yair Levy is a lecturer in philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He works primarily in philosophy of mind and action, moral psychology, and normativity.