Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing (CUP, 2025)
Peter Carruthers
2. Mental actions
Yesterday I emphasized the wide range of actions that fall outside the standard belief-desire model. One payoff from recognizing this variety is that many more mental processes emerge as action-like, too. There are obvious cases that everyone can agree on, of course, such as mentally rehearsing actions while acquiring or being about to execute a skill, when engaged in inner speech, or when engaged in prospective reasoning about the future. But some are more surprising. Here I will focus on mind-wandering, which has been claimed by philosophers (as well as some cognitive scientists, it should be said) to be paradigmatically passive in nature (Irving 2021).
I argue that mind-wandering is just as active as is someone who is aimlessly wandering around an unfamiliar city. There is normally no overall goal in either case (although one can intentionally set oneself to mind-wander in the service of creative insight, just as one can decide to randomly explore a novel area). So the entire episode of mind-wandering is not an action. But each component of the episode is an action, nevertheless. This should be especially obvious when mind-wandering is partially composed of sequences of inner speech or other forms of action-rehearsal. Moreover, switches in the content of one’s mind-wandering, too, are action-like, resulting from unconscious decisions to switch the direction of one’s attention to currently-unconscious thoughts. This happens when those thoughts have been appraised within the ventral attentional network as being more relevant to one’s concerns than is the current focus of attention.
If mind-wandering is comprised of mental actions, however, then why does it feel passive, in a way that wandering around an unfamiliar city does not? Why doesn’t mind-wandering feel active, if it actually is active? Ultimately the answer lies in the limitations of common-sense psychology (as well as the limitations of forms of philosophy that rely on common-sense intuitions); but this will take a little unpacking.
When one wanders around a city one is fully aware that the component events are actions, of course. Walking is an action, and so is turning one way rather than another when one reaches a corner; and everyone knows this. In contrast, folk psychology doesn’t clearly recognize events of wondering, remembering, or imagining as forms of (mental) action. Indeed, it seems that even inner speech is sometimes experienced as a form of passive “inner hearing” as opposed to active inner speaking (Hurlburt et al. 2013). But it is still active for all that.
Moreover, when physically wandering one generally has some awareness of the factors that induce one to turn in one direction rather than another, including things on the walk that happen to catch one’s attention. (“I turned up that street because I was curious to see what the sign above the shop said.” “I turned down that one because I was struck by the design of one of the buildings.” And so on.) When mind-wandering, in contrast, one generally lacks such awareness. For the decision-making happens among unconsciously-activated representations in the ventral attentional network which compete with one another to re-direct top-down attention and for entry into working memory. Indeed, even when one can guess at the reason why one’s mind wandered to a particular topic (“I suppose I thought of Nebraska because I was soon going to be tested on US states”), this is not something one was aware of at the time in the way that one was aware of the shop-sign or the interesting piece of architecture. Rather, it is a bit of retrospective self-interpretation. The moral: don’t rely on introspective feelings and common-sense intuitions when making claims about the mind.
While a wide range of mental processes turn out to be active / action-like, one class of mental events that philosophers have claimed as clear cases of mental action are shown not to be (Peacocke 2021). These are decisions to do one thing rather than another. Consider a simple case. One is involved in an experiment where one is required to press one key if the overall motion in a random-dot stereogram is to the right, another if the movement is to the left (van den Berg et al. 2016). Activity builds in a pair of noisy competitive neural accumulators representing the two options. When one of them reaches criterion first (which has been set in light of a speed-accuracy trade-off, depending on the framing of the experiment) that constitutes a decision to press the key represented. The decision here is a boundary-crossing. Unlike any form of physical action, the boundary-crossing event has no significant temporal extension. Furthermore (and also unlike physical actions) it is uncontrolled. It is, in fact, paradigmatically passive, albeit resulting from competition among neural accumulators that represent one’s reasons.
Again the moral is: engage with the science to understand the mind.
Hurlburt, R., Heavey, C., & Kelsey, J. (2013). Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking. Consciousness and Cognition, 22, 1477-1494.
Irving, Z. (2021). Drifting and directed minds: The significance of mind-wandering for mental agency. The Journal of Philosophy, 1811, 614-644.
Peacocke, A. (2021). Mental action. Philosophy Compass, 16, e12741.
van den Berg, R., Anandalingam, K., Zylberberg, A., Kiani, R., Shadlen, M., & Wolpert, D. (2016). A common mechanism underlies changes of mind about decisions and confidence. eLife, 5, e12192.