Agencia y Actividad Mental Cognitiva

LAWLER, DIEGO

Mérida

Congreso; I Congreso Latinoamericano de Filosofía Analítica. Asociación Latinoamericana de Filosofía Analítica; 2010

Asociación Latinoamericana de Filosofía Analítica

This paper discusses the following question: How could we make sense of a mental activity (i.e. theoretical deliberation) that aims at acquiring true beliefs about the world, but at the same time has its source in the subject’s agential condition -a realm that seems to be governed by the exercise of her freedom? My general aim is to focus on delineating different ways of thinking about theoretical deliberation as a mental activity in the context of a belief acquisition. Although my general purpose is to encourage some intuitive support for the notion of theoretical deliberation within a cognitive context, I hope to extract a sense in which the subject is active in the process of deliberation, and to discuss also in what sense this kind of activity can be regarded as a case of rational agency. This paper is organized in four sections. In the first section, I diagnose two intuitions we find ourselves with when we reflect on the process of deliberation or making up our mind on a question. Even though both intuitions give a rational description of this process of belief formation, they prima facie characterise it differently. Broadly speaking, the first intuition suggests that although the mental activity of deliberating over whether p is a case of agency, the acquisition of a belief that p or not p does not. The second intuition, however, suggests that the activity of judging that p or not p is part of the mental activity of the deliberation belief-forming process; and in this precisely sense, forming a belief is a case of exercising our agency. In the second and third sections, I advance two models for cashing out these two different intuitions: the Crystallisation Model and the Active Model. As far as I know, the main lines of the Crystallisation Model have been put forward by Brian O’Shaughnessy (1980, 2001); meanwhile the Active Model has been recently defended, among others, by Gary Watson (2004). The pivotal claim of the Crystallisation Model says that a belief is acquired as a result of an event of cognitive crystallisation that takes place in the subject’s mind. The Active Model claims says that I reach an answer to a question by freely judging that something is the case on the basis of the available evidence, and that this active making of a judgement involves the acquisition of the respective belief. That is, what a subject is to believe is up to her. Finally, I attempt a diagnosis of the respective weaknesses and strengths of these two models for thinking about theoretical deliberation and the respective sense of rational agency involved. My purpose is to pave the way for adjudicating between these two models. Taking as a point of departure the elaborations of these two models on how human rational agency functions in our theoretical deliberative activities, I suggest, however, that we should conclude against our ordinary intuition. In fact, these two models can be reconciled in just one model with different, but complementary, dimensions.