Movements of the mind: a theory of attention, intention, and action wayne wu download pdf
Movements of the Mind: A Theory of Attention, Intention, and Action Wayne Wu
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Introduction
Claims by Section
PART I. THE STRUCTURE OF ACTION AND ATTENTION
The Structure of Acting
Appendix 1.1
Attention and Attending
PART II. INTENTION AS PRACTICAL MEMORY AND REMEMBERING
Intention as Practical Memory
Intending as Practical Remembering
PART III. MOVEMENTS OF THE MIND AS DEPLOYMENTS OF ATTENTION
Automatic Bias, Experts and Amateurs
Deducing, Skill and Knowledge
Introspecting Perceptual Experience
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
This work would not be possible without my wife, Alison Barth, so at its beginning, I want to thank her. In our youth, we had a “public” debate on a train from Oxford to London, neurobiologist versus philosopher. As we pulled into our stop, an older English gentleman sitting across from us leaned over and said, “I agree with her.” That sums up a lot.
There was a difficult period after I left science, lost and unsure of what to do. Alison patiently weathered the storm with me. Since then, we have shared the ups and downs of a rich, wonderful life together, raising two daughters who remind me every time I am with them how their strength, intelligence, and beauty reflect their mother’s.
So, Alison, thank you for your companionship and your love. This book is inadequate to all that, but it is the best I can produce. I dedicate it to you with all my love.
0.1 A Biologist’s Perspective
The title, MovementsoftheMind, plays on the default conception in science and philosophy of action as bodilymovement. On that view, there are no mentalactions. This leaves out much. Pointedly, I focus in what follows on mental movements such as attending, remembering, reasoning, introspecting, and thinking. There are general features of agency seen more sharply by avoiding the complexities of motor control. Focusing on mental actions facilitates
explanation. That said, my arguments apply to movements in their basic form, that presupposed in discussions of free, moral, and skilled action. To understand these, we must understand basic agency, an agent’s doing things, intentionally or not, with the body or not.
I aspire to a biologyof agency, writ large where philosophy plays a part. Such a broad view theory aims to integrate different levels of analysis: a priori argument, computational theories of mental processes, psychophysics, imaging and electrophysiology of neurons, and, though not here, the genetic and molecular. To systematically understand agency as it is livedwe must understand it from multiple levels. The link to biology is necessitated when philosophical theories posit psychological processes and causally potent capacities that in us are organically realized. Such theories are enjoined to impose empirical friction, to show that claims generated from the armchair about the living world make contact with the actual world as we live it.
Philosophical psychology is replete with causal claims about subjects and their minds derived from thought experiments, dissected by introspection, or informed by folk psychology and ordinary language. Yet rigorous inquiry into specific causal claims is the provenance of empirical science. Philosophical psychology should not theorize about what happens mentally in the complete absence of empirical engagement. The requirement is not that philosophers should do experiments. Rather, where philosophical inquiry postulates causal features of mind, we philosophers should delve into what is known about relevant biology. Well, Ihave felt obligated to do so. I see engaging in empirical work as a way of keeping my own philosophical reflections honest to the way the world is as we empirically understand it. This is not to say that the engagement is only in one direction. Ultimately, science and philosophy of mind should work together as part of biology, for they share a goal: to understand the world.
I hope to provide a detailed outline of what agency as a biological phenomenon is. This is a deeply personal project. I began academic
life as an experimental biologist. In college, I gravitated to organic chemistry which describes the movement of molecules that join and alter in principled ways to form other molecules. A course on genetics introduced me to DNA and the central dogma, a chemical transition: DNA to RNA to proteins. Biology conjoined with chemistry promised to explain life through principles of organic interaction and recombination. Inspired, I took every biology and chemistry course I could.
Graduate school followed. A professor waxed nostalgic of the old days when he and his colleagues would argue about the mechanisms of life over coffee. Occasionally, someone would leave to start a centrifuge for an experiment then return to continue debating. That sounded like the good life, but the reality of biological research felt different. Centrifuging samples once illuminated important principles (see Meselson and Stahl), but for me, it was one more tedious part of life at the lab bench. It was theory that grabbed me, not bench work. After two unhappy years of experimental tinkering, I dropped out. It was a devastating loss of an identity I had cultivated. Skipping over the lost years, I simply note that I found my way to philosophy.
So here we are. This book reflects the distant aspirations of my younger self though I have inverted my prior explanatory orientation. While my younger self believed in working from the bottom up, from molecules to life, this book works initially from the top down, from philosophical reflection on an agent’s doings toward the activity of neurons. Still the same goal remains, the systematic illumination of living things. Accordingly readers will find many empirical details in what follows. They are essential. How else can we achieve a systematic understanding of lived agency? Indeed, ignoring empirical work closes off opportunities for new insights as I hope to show by intersecting working memory with intention (Part II, Chapters 3 and 4). I have focused on research at the center of current empirical work and have worked hard to make the details clear and accessible. Please don’t skip them.
That said, the empirical work should not obscure the fact that the central level of philosophical analysis concerns an agent who is a subject who perceives, thinks, is consciously aware, loves and hates, is bored or engaged, aims for good and ill. Most of the empirical work I draw on focuses on the algorithmic, psychological, and neural processes that constitute subject-level phenomena so lie at levels below subject-level descriptions. The difficult challenge facing cognitive science is how to bridge these “lower” levels of analyses with the subject level we care about in deciding how to live. We should not kid ourselves that these bridges are simple to construct. The overreliance on folk-psychological vocabulary, and corresponding lack of a technical vocabulary (here’s looking at you, attention), makes building such bridges seem deceptively simple. Yet agency as a subject’s doing things is not explained just because cognitive science sometimes uses subject-level vocabulary in describing basic processes (consider the concept of decisionmaking).
Scientists, who I hope will read this book, might respond to Part I by noting there are already detailed theories about action and attention in the empirical literature. Yet despite the subject-level terms that literature deploys, the related empirical studies I adduce explicate the mechanisms underlying the subject attending and acting. The challenge that remains is to deploy empirical accounts of the brain’s doing things to inform understanding an agent’s doing things intentionally or not, skillfully or not, reasonably or not, angrily or not, automatically or not, freely or not, and so on. To do so requires that we properly characterize the ultimate target of explanation: an agent’s acting in the basic sense. This book aims to explicate that subject-level phenomenon, and if successful, to sharply delineate a shared explanandum for cognitive science and philosophy. A model for the bridging project I have in mind is David Marr’s (1982) emphasis on a computationaltheorywhich provides a unifying principle to link other empirical levels of analysis. The analysis of action, attention, and intention that I aim for is of that ilk. I hope scientists and philosophers will through this book find common ground.
0.2 Central Themes
I argue for four central themes about action. The first is this:
Action has a specific psychological structure that results from solvingaSelectionProblem.
Parts I and II delineate and detail this structure while Part III shows how the structure illuminates three philosophically significant forms of mental agency: mental bias, reasoning, and introspection. These topics are often investigated without drawing substantively on philosophy of action, yet drawing on the right theory of action advances understanding. Specifically, the structure of action unifies the three phenomena as forms of attention. The structure of action allows us to provide an analysis of automaticity and control motivated by solving a paradox (Section 1.4). These notions are crucial because intentionalactionischaracterizedbyautomaticityandcontrol.
Control is at the heart of intentional agency, but automaticity is a feature of all action, indeed necessarily so (Section 1.4). Crucially, we must not infer the absence of agency from the presence of automaticity (cf. talk of reflexes as a contrast to action; Section 1.2). This fallacy results from overly casual, non-technical use of these notions in the philosophical literature. To understand agency, we must use the notions of control and automaticity technically, notions crucial to understand learning, skill, and bias (Chapters 5 and 6). Here is a challenge to my friends and colleagues: If clear technical notions of central theoretical concepts are given, why not use them? Why persist in drawing on mere folk-psychological conceptions in a philosophical psychology that aims to be serious psychology?
Philosophers have doubted that we have got action right. Philosophical discussion has focused on a causal theory of action. Yet the persistent problem of deviant causal chains shows that we
have not adequately explained agency in causal terms. I draw a specific lesson from the failure: crucial parts of the psychological picture are missing from the causal theory. Specifically,
you can’t get action right if you leave out an essential component:attention.
Action theorists have largely ignored attention (check the index of any book on action). Sometimes they mention it, but it cannot be merely mentioned. That yields an incomplete psychology of action. You can’t act in respect of Xif you are not attending to it. Attention guides. Lack of attention promotes failed action. So, ignoring an agent’s attention is akin to ignoring her belief or desire in the traditional causal theory. If one fails to discuss central psychological components of action, one will fail to explain action. Attention illuminates action. It is not a mere appendage in action but an essential part.
Finally, even for those aspects of agency that we have discussed since the beginning, the engagement with biology opens up new avenues for illumination. Drawing on the biology shifts our thinking about intention in the following way:
Intention is a type of active memory: practical memory for action.
This is, perhaps, the most substantial shift in the theory of agency that I argue for in this book (Part II, Chapters 3 and 4). It is motivated by the biology, specifically by research on working memory, along with a philosophical argument that the coherence and intelligibility of intentional action from the agent’s perspective depends on memory in intention (Section 4.2). Intention reflects an agent’s activeness that regulates the agent’s solving what I call the Selection Problem, the need to settle on a course of action among many. In action, intention constitutes the agent’s remembering (thinking about) what to do as she does it, and in such
remembering, the agent’s intending dynamically biases the exercise of her action capabilities as she acts. Indeed, her thinking about what she is doing in her intending to act keeps time with her action through continued practical reasoning. It provides her a distinctive access to her intentional doings.
0.3 The Book’s Parts
The book is divided into three parts. Part I establishes the structure of action, explicating its components with emphasis on attention and its interaction with a bias. Here’s a mantra:
An agent’s action is her respondingin light of how she is taking things, given her biases.
Takingthings, a term of art, picks out a myriad mental phenomena that serve as action inputs such as her perceptually taking things to be a certain way. Accordingly, an action’s geometry is characterized by three aspects: (1) the agent’s taking things such as her perception or memory of things, (2) the agent’s respondingsuch as her body’s moving or her mental response in applying a concept or encoding a memory, and (3) a bias, a factor that explains the specific couplingwhich is the causal link between (1) and (2). A bias is the psychological factor that explains the expression of action. This yields the basic structure:
Figure 0.1 The structure depicts an agent’s acting, each node standing in for a feature of the agent quasubject, say a state, event, process, capacity, etc. Each solid arrow indicates an actual causal link between nodes. Such depictions of action structure will be used throughout the book. In acting in the world, the agent is responding(the output), guided by how she takesthings (the input) given her beingbiasedin a certain way. Action’s structure is given in the tripartite form, each node a constituent of action. Here, the agent responds to a stimulus S1. The input’s guiding response is a process that takes time, so the structure depicts a dynamic phenomenon.
Note that the structure is a blunt way of representing a complicated, dynamic phenomenon characteristic of a subject as agent. It is not a depiction of parts within the subject. Rather, it is a structural description that isolates different aspects of the agent’s being active, each analytically pulled out from an amalgam of her exercised capacities that normally blend into her acting. It sketches, coarsely, a dynamical integration of the subject’s different perspectives, say in herintending and perceiving, and herexercised abilities to respond.
When the agent acts intentionally—in this book that means acting with an intention—the structure involves intention as a specific type
of bias:
Figure 0.2 As in Figure 0.1 but here the agent’s responding to S1 is guided by how she takes S1 given her intendingtoactin a certain way.
The amalgam of the three nodes is the agent’s intentionally acting. Crucially, intention and the input are in action, not numerically distinct from it. Other actions, intentional actions without intentions as when one is driven by emotion or needs, slips and flops as well as habitual, skilled, expert, incompetent, moral, immoral, passive, and pathological agency (among others) are explained through and by building on this structure. In particular, the identity of the bias provides a crucial differentiating node, individuating different types of action. Accordingly, the geometry provides a unifying explanatory frame. This book shows how applying it illuminates disparate agentive phenomena.
Part I summarizes, elaborates, and integrates many of my published articles, with a greater emphasis on the notion of a biasas well as (hopefully) clearer presentation of my views which (I believe) have remained mainly unchanged in essentials (of course, I might be wrong). This first part identifies action as the solution to a Selection Problem, a problem that must be solved in every action. The
Problem arises in light of an actionspacethat identifies the different actions available to an agent at a time and in a context. To act, an action among possible actions must be selected. We can embed the geometry of intentional action in the agent’s action space constituted by action possibilities, each possibility constituted by an input linkableto an output, a possible causal coupling(see Figure 0.3).
Figure 0.3 Intention solves the SelectionProblem, given an action spacethat presents multiple possible actions. The intention solves the Problem by engendering the action it represents, here the action Φwhich is constituted by responding (R1) to how the subject takes the stimulus S1. Solid arrows indicate actual causal connections, dotted arrows identify possible ones. The downward solid arrows from intention directed at both input and output nodes identify relations of biasing, explicated in the text as cognitiveintegration (Section 1.7). Intentional action is an amalgam of (1) the intention, (2) the input taking, and (3) the response guided by the input. This is the triangular structure in darker lines, top portion of the figure. Both input states (indicated as active by black circles) are activated by stimuli in the world (S1 and S2), but only one guides a response. Response R2 is inactive (lighter gray circle), but it could have been coupled to the subject’s input states. Downward gray arrows indicate additional inputs and outputs.
The structure depicted in Figure 0.3 explains the agent’s guidance and control in intentional action. Control is explicated in terms of intention’s role in solving the Selection Problem. The intention represents an action that is one of the paths in the action space and brings about that action. Agentive control is constituted by the agent’s intention biasing solutions to the Selection Problem, specifically through biasing the input and output capacities to facilitate their coupling. The concept of automaticity is precisely defined in contrast to control to resolve a conceptual paradox in the theory of automaticity. The resolution sets down a technical analysis of these crucial notions, crucial because intentional agency exemplifies a pervasive tug of war between automaticity and control (Section 1.4). Guidance is explained as the function of the input state set by the agent’s bias. The input state informs the output response and in doing so constitutesthe agent’s attentioninaction. While attention in intentional action is set by intention, I argue that attention is a constituent of every action, intentional or not. Attention is always biased(Chapter 5).
Part II explores intention as an active memory. It is a practical memory, the agent’s remembering to act (Chapter 3). Intention’s mnemonic activity is partly expressed in how it regulates attentional phenomena in light of the agent’s conception of what is to be done. I argue that empirical work on working memory probes the activeness of intention. As I will put it, where the agent is immanently about to act or is acting, in intending to so act, the agent is beingactive. While acting, the subject continues to actively remember, that is to think about, what she is doing. Intendingis the action of practical remembering, exercised in keeping track of action (Chapter 4). This active remembering involves sustained practical reasoning as the agent acts (Section 4.5) and is the grounds of the agent’s distinctive and privileged non-observational access to what she is intentionally doing (Section 4.6) and how she can keep time with her action (Section 4.7).
Let me enter a special plea. The approach to intention will, I think, jar many readers since it will clash with certain philosophical intuitions and frameworks, with how we ordinarily speak about intention, with folk psychology, and perhaps with introspection. The plea is that missing from all this has been a biological perspective that should be given at least equal weight, indeed I think more. I hope to show that cognitive science has been doing detailed investigation of intention though not always with use of that concept/term. What that work reveals is the dynamics of an agent’s intending, and when the work is bridged to philosophical concerns, there is remarkable cohesion and illumination.
Having established action’s psychological structure, Part III draws on the theory to investigate three specific movements of mind much discussed in the philosophical literature: (a) implicit, better automatic, bias in actions of ethical and epistemic concern, (b) deductive reasoning, and (c) introspecting perceptual experience. While my theory applies to any movement, I choose these three because they identify central topics of philosophical investigation as well as salient features in philosophical practice itself. Notably, each is a distinctive way of attending. I urge readers to work through
each of these chapters even if they do not work on the topics covered. Many of the basic themes in Parts I and II are further developed in Part III.
First, automatic biases reflect a complex diachronic and synchronic modulation on attention in agency. Experience and learning are common sources of bias critical to understanding the many positive and negative biases of epistemic and ethical concern. What drives much biased behavior is biased attention. Bias often reflects a more or less skilled deployment of attention. This engages normative assessment of attention: when the agent acts in a negatively biased way, they are often attending amateurishly or, worse yet, viciously and incompetently. In isolating historical influences on attention, I provide a new way of understanding the causal structure of automatic biases, including many implicit biases, and this structure provides a map of precise targets for normative assessment (see Figure 5.1).
In deductive reasoning, the subject sharpens cognitive attention in moving from premises to conclusion where premises serve as attentional cues for logically relevant contents, leading to increased cognitive focus in drawing logically entailed conclusions. In symbolic logic, a capacity to construct proofs depends on attention to logical form, this inculcated on the basis of developing attentional skills through joint attention with an instructor in light of the norms of reasoning. Hence, deductive action is regulated by rules of inference that, through intention, bias cognitive attention in reasoning. Importantly, rules are not targets of cognitive attention as premises. Instead, they regulate reasoning by setting attention as a bias. We can thereby avoid the regress of rules (Carroll 1895) while providing rules an explicitrole in action (Section 6.4).
Finally, I close with introspection, a crucial source of data for many philosophical and empirical theories. While the use of introspection is central to philosophy and in arenas that appeal to how things subjectively seem such as the science of consciousness or medicine, we have no adequate theory of introspection as a psychological phenomenon. For all we know, introspective
deliverances are typically and systematically inaccurate. Whether this is so is an empirical question. Claims about introspective accuracy or inaccuracy should be informed by understanding introspection as action, hence by the biology. There is a philosophical consensus that introspection involves attention but with few details regarding attention’s role. Philosophers often postulate a distinctive type of “internal attention” for which we have no good empirical evidence. The final chapter draws on the theory of attention to explain introspective action. This provides a concrete basis for justifying introspection’s use in specific contexts and for rejecting its deliverances in others, some surprising. There is much work to do to improve our introspective practices, and this begins with understanding intentional introspection as attention.
0.4 Chapter Summaries
Let me summarize each chapter. A list of propositions argued for in each section is presented at the end of this introduction and can be read as a detailed summary of the book.
Chapter 1 establishes action’s psychological structure as an input guiding an output in solving a necessary challenge facing all agents, the Selection Problem. Where the agent acts on an intention, intention solves the Problem, establishing agentive control. The automaticity of action is defined by resolving a paradox of automaticity and control.
Chapter 2 establishes that attention constitutes guidance in action and that every action involves attention. Three basic attentional phenomena are identified: vigilance as a readiness to attend, attentionas guiding action, and attendingas action. Attention as the activity of guiding output response has explanatory priority. It is guidance in action.
Chapter 3 establishes that intention is a type of memory for work and that the literature on working memory reveals the dynamics of intention as the source of agentive control. Drawing on the biology, intention is construed as an agent’s beingactive, an active memory that works to establish vigilance and maintains steadfastness in action, preventing distraction and slips.
Chapter 4 identifies intendingas an actionof thinking about what one is doing in active remembering. Intending-in-action keeps time with action by updating its content through continued practical reasoning: fine-tuning of intention’s content. This explains the agent’s distinctive, privileged, non-observational access to her action.
Chapter 5 explains that many biased behaviors of epistemic and ethical concern are rooted in biased attention set by experience and learning. That negative and positive biases in attention are learned
places biased attention within a context of normative assessment such as the standards for skill and expertise in a given practice. Negative biases reflect an undesirable amateurism, incompetence, or viciousness.
Chapter 6 explains deductive reasoning as the development of the agent’s cognitive attention where premises serve as cues for logically relevant guiding features. As capacities for reasoning are learned, the development of abilities to attend to logically relevant properties is an acquired skill and type of attentional expertise. The exercise of these abilities can be explicitly controlled by the agent’s grasp of inferential rules.
Chapter 7 explains introspection of perceptual experience as the distinctive deployment of attention in accessing the conscious mind. Conditions for reliable and unreliable uses of introspective attention in accessing perceptual consciousness are detailed. Salient cases of introspection in philosophy and psychology are shown problematic. Principles for improving introspective practice are presented.
0.5 Acknowledgments
I have many intellectual debts. I am grateful to Steve Lippard, Amy Rosenzweig, and the late Vernon Ingram for teaching me, years ago, to be a scientist. My work bears the imprint of their mentorship. Mike Botchan, Barbara Meyer, Don Rio, and Robert Tjian were among my teachers in graduate school and, at the end, tried to help me find my way before my exit from science. I appreciate their efforts. I am grateful to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for a predoctoral fellowship. My career didn’t pan out the way expected, but I hope that this book shows the fruits of that investment in a budding biologist.
The transition from science to philosophy was rough. One of my first philosophy courses was Martin Thomson-Jones’s graduate seminar at Berkeley, taken right after I dropped out of science.
Having never studied philosophy as an undergraduate, I was in over my head. Martin read one of the worst seminar papers, written by yours truly, but kindly gave feedback and encouragement over coffee. Edward Cushman, whom I only knew at the time as one of the philosophy grad students, stopped by while I was working in the departmental library to encourage me after I had given an amateurish presentation in Martin’s class. It was a random, deeply appreciated act of kindness. I am sure many of us have felt imposter syndrome or uncertainty whether we belong. Moments of encouragement can make a difference, so I want to thank Martin and Eddie in print for those moments. They aren’t the only ones who helped over the years, but they did so at a sensitive time.
There are too many people to list, conversations with whom have shaped the ideas in this book. Many of you are perhaps reading this now. Though you are unnamed, I hope you’ll know that I’ve learned from all those conversations and that I look forward to more in the future.
There are many relevant works that I do not discuss in detail. To write a shorter book (I know, this isn’t that short…), I focus on selective points of clash and contrast. Regretfully, much is left unsaid. To pick just two topics: on mental action and cognition, there is important work by Peter Carruthers, Chris Peacocke, Lucy O’Brian, Joelle Proust, and Matt Soteriou among others (see also a recent book edited by Michael Brent and Lisa Miracchi Titus 2023) and on attention, work by Imogen Dickie, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Jonardon Ganeri, Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor, Chris Mole, Declan Smithies, and Sebastian Watzl among others. I apologize for the lack of sustained engagement and aspire to do so in print in the future.
John Searle and Jay Wallace advised my dissertation where many of these ideas began. Hong Yu Wong’s group at many points engaged with the ideas expounded in the following pages, so thanks to him, Chiara Brozzo, Gregor Hochstetter, Krisz Orban, and Katja Samoilova for making Tübingen an intellectual focal point for me. A reading group at the Center for the Philosophy of Science (University
of Pittsburgh) provided helpful feedback. Thanks to Juan Pablo Bermúdez, Arnon Cahen, Philipp Hauweis, Paola Hernández-Chávez, Edouard Machery, and Adina Roskies. In London, I worked through the manuscript with Zijian Zhu, Matthew Sweeney, Jonathan Gingerich, Eileen Pfeiffer Flores, Chengying Guan, and Seth Goldwasser in an on-line class during the lockdown. Thanks also to Bill Brewer, David Papineau, Barry Smith, and Matt Soteriou for their help in making London a great place to write a book, and for discussions.
I presented the material in various places in the US, UK, and Europe during the pandemic. Thanks to Anita Avramides, Will Davies, Chris Frith, Anil Gomes, Alex Grzankowski, Patrick Haggard, Zoe Jenkins, Mike Martin, Matthew Parrot, Chris Peacocke, Harold Robinson, Jake Quilty-Dunn, Nick Shea, Sebastian Watzl, and Keith Wilson for feedback. Francesca Secco worked through the material with me and organized a class in the University of Oslo that I taught on the book. I am grateful to her and the students for comments.
I have benefited greatly from philosophers at the Human Abilities Project, Berlin. Barbara Vetter and Carlotta Pavese had their reading group dissect Chapter 5 and Sanja Dembić and Vanessa Carr and their group worked through an earlier paper on which Chapter 2 is based. Sanja and Vanessa organized an on-line workshop on my manuscript. I am grateful to the commentators: David Heering, Vanessa Carr, Helen Steward, Sarah Paul, Chandra Shripada, Carlotta Pavese, and Christopher Hill. Thanks to Denis Buehler, Steve Butterfill, Kim Frost, Thor Grünbaum, Aaron Henry, Liz Irvine, Matthias Michel, Myrto Mylopoulos, and Josh Shepherd for comments. Dan Burnston and Mike Roche later weighed in. Aaron Glasser and Malte Hendrickx organized a reading group at Michigan to work through the book, and Gabe Mendlow, Catherine SaintCroix, Jonathan Sarnoff, and Laura Soter gave helpful feedback. Recent discussions with Denis Buehler, Liz Camp, Piera Maurizio, Tom McClelland, Jesse Munton, Susanna Siegel, Sebastian Watzl, and Ella Whiteley on salience helped me bring Chapter 5 into shape.
I thank two referees for helpful feedback, especially reader “X” for detailed and generous comments that provided timely encouragement. Years ago, Peter Momtchiloff asked some questions of a young philosopher wandering around the APA, jotted down a few things in his notebook and would ask about my proposals on later crossing paths. This book is tenuously related to those grandiose plans. My thanks to Peter for following up and for supporting this project, to Tara Werger who helped me prepare the manuscript and deal with pesky permissions with an occasional tidbit about the London theater scene, and to Rio Ruskin-Tompkins for a fantastic cover (more on that in a moment).
0.6 Family
My wife and I, with our youngest daughter, travelled to London, U.K. to sabbatical in February of 2020. It was not the sabbatical we planned for. Still, there were blessings. The U.K. lockdown had unexpected benefits in providing space and time to write a book in a quiet, subdued London. Our oldest daughter, forced out from college due to the pandemic, came to stay as well. We endured the lockdown together as a family.
In thinking about family, let me complete the circle at last but most assuredly not least: to my beloved daughters, Madeleine and Eleanor (Pei and Mei), thank you for making this actual timeline the best possible one. I am also grateful to Madeleine for the image that graces the cover. Providing a glimpse of a quiet London Underground station during the pandemic as a train slips by, her photograph perfectly captures the book’s title and the mood of London during the time in which much of this work was written. Ok, let’s begin.
Claims by Section
An agent’s acting intentionally has a psychological structure: an agent responds guidedby how she takes thingsgiven her intending to act.
Action as a structured phenomenon arises from a Selection Problem, a necessary challenge facing agents, one set by an action space constituted by paths that link inputs, the agent’s taking things, to outputs, the agent’s capacities for response, where a path implemented is the agent’s acting.
The agent’s intentionally acting is a solution to the Selection Problem due to her intending to act in the relevant way serving as a bias that explains why the Problem is solved in the way that it is.
Automaticity and control pervade intentional action and can be rigorously defined: features are controlled by being intended, and those that are not intended are automatic.
Bias is a necessary feature of action and can be tied to control or automaticity. Control in intention is revealed behaviorally, biologically, and computationally in biasing relevant input and output states in accord with the content of the intention.
Biasing by intention involves the intention cognitively integrating with input states to solve the Selection Problem consistent with the intention’s content.
In learning to act, acquiring the appropriate biases, a subject comes to directly intendto act in shifting the balance between automaticity and control.
As theories that identify actions in terms of their causes make the subject qua agent a target of control, not in control, the agent’s causal powers, tied to her intending and to her taking things, must be internal, not external, to her action.
The mental elements of the agent’s action identify the agent’s being active though short of acting, for her being active partly constitutes her acting.
There are three salient modes of attention: vigilance, attentional guidance, and attending as action.
Attention is mental guidance in action, the agent’s taking things informing response.
Attention as guidance, a necessary part of a solution to the Selection Problem, is present in every action.
Attention is not a mechanism modulating neural activity; rather it, as a subjectlevel activity of guiding response, is constituted by specific neural modulations.
Attending as an action is guided by attention, often with improved access to its target.
Attention can be both automatic and goal-directed by being sensitive to the agent’s many biases.
Attentional capture is a form of passive agency but is distinct from the passivity of perceiving, a behavior that is never an action.
Attention is everywhere, largely automatic, mostly unnoticed. When a subject attends to a target, she is acting on it.
Central cases of causal deviance involve the disruption of attention, hence the absence of appropriate agentive guidance, a necessary feature of action.
Intention sets the standard for appropriate attentional guidance in intentional action.
Intention is practical memory for work, actively regulating and maintaining actionrelevant capacities.
The agent’s remembering is her cognitively attending to mnemonic contents.
Working memory is memory for action, specifically for the control of attention and its central executive component is the basis of the agent’s intention.
Empirical investigation of working memory as an executive capacity explicates the activity of intention in setting attention.
Intention proximal to action is an active memory for work that modulates vigilance, a propensity to attend.
Intention-in-action keeps the agent steadfast, sustaining attention against distraction and preventing slips.
Acting on an intention involves the agent’s intending, a simultaneous action of practical reasoning as she acts.
Practical memory is the basis of the agent’s conception of her action that renders it intelligible to her.
Intending-in-action is constituted by fine-tuning of practical memory in practical reasoning.
Fine-tuning is practical memory at work, its dynamics revealed in the dynamics of working memory.
As the agent acts, keeping track of what she is doing involves the exercise of practical reasoning as part of her developing her intending to act, as she acts.
Intending-in-action maintains distinctive, authoritative, and non-perceptual access to action through practical reasoning.
By practical reasoning, the agent keeps time with her action in intending.
Bias is a critical factor explaining acting well or poorly, and accordingly, attention is a critical factor in such explanations.
A central source of bias on attention is revealed in the setting of priority, including that set by historical influences.
Epistemic bias often begins with biased attention.
Every movement involves a mental guide in attention, so no action is “purely bodily” including overt visual attending.
Virtuous automatic bias in visual attention can be learned through practice and training as demonstrated in epistemic skill in medicine.
Gaze is a good whose distribution is automatically biased in ways that can have negative consequences in academic and social settings.
Perception and cognition operate over a biased field, the set of inputs in an action space, its structure revealed by automatic perceptual and cognitive attention.
Attention is a target of normative assessment, and the panoply of biases on attention provides a map for such assessments.
Reasoning is the deployment of skilled cognitive attention.
Deducing, on semantical accounts, is constituted by sharpening cognitive attention in moving from premises to conclusion where said premises provide cognitive cues for attention.
Rules typically contribute to control, rather than to guidance, and in this way a reasoner can explicitly invoke rules.
Taking premises to support a conclusion is grounded in the acquisition of recognitional capacities through rule-based control during learning that avoids Carroll’s regress of rules.
Knowing how, understood as what we acquire in learning and practice, involves the acquisition of schemas.
Learning shapes the agent’s knowledge of how to act, and this knowledge provides a developmentally based bias on the agent’s action, one often coordinated with the agent’s intention to act in the way learned.
Introspecting is like any action: there are contexts in which it is reliably successful and contexts in which it reliably is not.
As an action, introspection’s reliability is sensitive to task instructions.
Introspecting perceptual consciousness is guided by perceptual attention.
Simple introspection draws solely on perceptual experience as constituting introspective attention, and its reliability is a function of the reliability of the components of perceptual judgment.
Complex introspection, typically used in philosophy, can be reliable, but it is challenged by multiple sources of noise.
It is not clear that introspection can adjudicate metaphysical debates about perceptual consciousness.
