Structuring embodied minds: Attention and perceptual agency

Jelle Bruineberg (Macquarie University)

Description: In this talk, I work through the consequences of endorsing two prevalent assumptions in the philosophy of attention: perceptual attention is a mental action, and canonical cases of perceptual attention (like sniffing) involve bodily activity. Drawing on recent developments in the literature on mental action, I will argue that the most parsimonious way of consistently holding both assumptions is to accept that perceptual attention involves a kind of mental action that is constituted, in part, by bodily activity.

This conclusion upsets current debates concerning the nature of perceptual agency: enactivists hold that perception is active in virtue of bodily action, while mental action theorists hold that perception is active in virtue of mental action. These positions are supposed to be mutually exclusive. The latter position is developed in great detail by Sebastian Watzl in Structuring Mind (2017). Drawing upon insights from Watzl’s activity view and from enactivism, I develop an embodied mental action route to theorizing perceptual agency, which provides an adequate analysis of perceptual agency but comes with significant commitments about the embodiment of attention.

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