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There is no single version of physicalism. There is no single argument for physicalism. There is, accordingly, no standard answer concerning the implications of physicalism for the causation of human action by mental states. This chapter begins by describing a preferred version of physicalism and its implications about the connection between subjects' mental states and what they do, and thereby for the determination and predictability of our actions. This serves as a precursor for a short discussion of the implications of physicalism for the possibility of free action. The chapter also discusses an anomalous physicalism that holds it is a mistake in principle to identify the mental and the physical, in the sense of identifying mental and physical kinds. At first blush, this kind of physicalism might seem good news for those who worry about the implications of physicalism for freedom. However, it is shown that the good news is not that good.

This chapter introduces the distinction between a pure mental state, which is an idealized (prototype) location in the state space that is never perfectly visited, and a probabilistic mental state, which is the region surrounding that location, often functioning like an attractor basin that “pulls” the system toward itself. With some simple simulations and visualizations, this chapter more richly explicates how the concept of a pattern of neural activation changing over time is equivalent to a continuous trajectory through a state space. As the trajectory settles into one attractor basin, the landscape changes (due to adaptation, new sensory input, and feedback from motor commands) so that the trajectory then moves on toward other attractor basins.

This chapter explores the diverse attempts to render “mind” thinkable by means of images. Advances in clinical medicine from the nineteenth century onward went hand in hand with the penetration of the gaze of the doctor into depths of the body itself. There are now many examples of analogous advances linked to the structural imaging of the brain—in the detection of tumors, the identification of lesions, and the mapping of the damage caused by injury or stroke. Thanks to such images, the mind of the neuroscientist, the neurologist, and the psychiatrist now seem able to “walk among the tissues themselves.” Yet, however similar the images of brain function are to those of brain structure, they mislead if they seem to allow the mind of the neuroscientist to walk among thoughts, feelings, or desires. Technology alone, even where it appears to measure neural activity, cannot enable the gaze to bridge the gap between molecules and mental states.

In Knowledge and its Limits (KAIL) chapters 1 and 2, Timothy Williamson argues for what he rightly advertises as a surprising thesis: that knowing is a mental state (KMS). This chapter aims to show, first, that Williamson's case for KMS is not proven: while he removes some obstacles to accepting knowing as a fully mental state, he has no argument that compels KMS. Secondly, it argues that despite this removal of some obstacles, others remain: there are still strong grounds to resist KMS, which are not merely an expression of inertial prejudice in our thinking about the mental, and about knowing.

This chapter begins with a survey of the sorts of states and capacities to be found in typical human minds, focusing on the differing extents to which these have phenomenal aspects or manifestations. Addressing the question: ‘do zombies have minds?’ proves to be a useful way of clarifying this issue. The C-theory is augmented so as to accommodate the non-experiential aspects of mind. Two types of self are distinguished: phenomenal and non-phenomenal. This distinction proves useful when considering the question: ‘what matters in survival?’ It is argued that when psychological and experiential continuities diverge, our deepest identity-related concerns remain locked on to the latter. The same distinction also sheds useful light onto the intuitions evoked by imaginary scenarios featuring teleportation.

This chapter explores the neurobiological self. It argues that the emerging neuroscientific understandings of selfhood are unlikely to efface modern human beings' understanding of themselves as persons equipped with a deep interior world of mental states that have a causal relation to their action. Rather, they are likely to add a neurobiological dimension to human beings' self-understanding and their practices of self-management. In this sense, the “somatic individuality” which was once the province of the psy- sciences, is spreading to the neuro- sciences. Yet psy is not being displaced by neuro: neurobiological conceptions of the self are being construed alongside psychological ones.

This chapter shows that mindmelding is metaphysically possible, i.e., that it does not violate any laws governing the metaphysical nature of reality. Metaphysical issues are fundamental and lie at the core of the most difficult parts of the problems of privacy and the mind-body problem itself. There is nothing stopping us from placing the idea of mindmelding on clear, unproblematic, and plausible metaphysical foundations. It is argued that the position of privacy is the one on shaky metaphysical grounds. Two metaphysical theses are examined: the thesis of privacy, and the idea that all conscious states must have a subject, which is called ‘inseparability’ because it posits that the subject is inseparable from the conscious state.

This chapter focuses on the nature of conceptual awareness. Reid characterizes the type of conceptual awareness of interest to his theory of perception as a special subspecies of conception, what he calls apprehension. Apprehension is responsible for the presentation of mind-independent objects directly to the mind. Reid describes the conceptual state that apprehension produces as an ‘immanent act of the mind’. This is an intentional state because it necessarily takes objects. Apprehensions thus differ from other mental states, such as moods, which are not intentional.

The final chapter explains how the Neo-Expressivist account developed meets the theoretical desiderata outlined in the introduction. It then offers reflections on possible implications of the account of avowals defended in the book for certain metaphysical issues in the philosophy of mind. In particular, the author addresses the issue of the reality of mental states, and the extent to which mental states are ontologically independent of expressive behaviour.

Humans are a species. We are guided by representations in everything we consciously do. Thinking, remembering, imagining, and decision-making involve not just the random play of thoughts and images in our minds. These mental states are about events in the world. The thoughts and images represent real people and events the vast majority of the time. This chapter addresses the question: What is the relation between representation and consciousness? It sets off the alternative picture against views centered around the claim of privacy. It shows that the alternative approach gives a natural and coherent account of how mental states, events, and processes can represent events and things in the world. This provides an additional test of the coherence and effectiveness of the approach to consciousness, to self, and to mindmelding. Neuroscience can also shed light on what representing the world requires. The chapter also investigates cases in which brain damage has affected representational ability.

The chapter proposes the view that knowing is a mental state. It is a factive mental state, in the sense that only truths are known; by contrast, believing is a non‐factive mental state, because both truths and falsehoods are believed. Knowledge is the most general factive mental state, of which perception and memory are sub‐species. Knowledge cannot be given an analysis as a combination of belief, truth, and other factors. Rather, belief is to be understood in terms of knowledge in a way similar to what are known as disjunctive accounts of perception; to believe something is, roughly, to act as though one knew it; a successful belief is knowledge.

Human social cognition is largely driven by the theory of mind (ToM), that is, our ability to think about others in terms of the mental states (feeling, wanting, knowing, etc.) that underlie their behaviour. The effects of language on ToM can be seen in terms of children's exposure to conversations with parents and other partners — conversations that appear to be crucial to children's acquisition of mental state concepts and theory of mind vocabulary. But mental states are notoriously slippery concepts — they are subjective, abstract, and invisible. This chapter reviews correlational and training studies on the link between parents' mental state talk and young children's ability to pass ToM tasks. It reports work that highlights the extent to which some mothers, in particular, tailor their conversation to match and promote their children's knowledge in this domain. It shows that the richness of mothers' talk about mental states during the preschool years is linked to their children's emerging ToM. Specifically, mothers who regularly explain thought processes and how these cause behaviour often have children who are particularly advanced in their responses on stories designed to test ToM. The chapter proposes a clarifying analogy between the ‘motherese’ qualities language used by mothers in facilitating children's language development and mothers' mental state talk as a facilitating factor in acquiring mental state concepts and promoting reasoning about the causal links between mental states and people's actions.

Most animals have mental states of one sort or another, but few species share our capacity for self-awareness. We are aware of our own mental states via introspection, and we are aware of the mental states of our fellow human beings on the basis of what they do and say. This chapter is concerned with the prospects of a rather different and significantly more recent ‘mindreading’ capacity: the capacity to ascribe mental states to a creature based on information derived from neuroimaging. It analyzes the foundational issues that are likely to confront the use of any neuroimaging technology to read minds, no matter how sophisticated it may be.

Are there some mental phenomena for which insight is necessarily inexistent? The Freudian ‘Id’, and Schopenhauerian ‘Will’, have been joined in latter days by certain cerebral phenomena, all of which have been claimed to be both necessarily inaccessible and mental. General principles of insight are sought whereby we may assess such claims. The main truth emerging is that all known mental phenomenal types are normally immediately insightable in states of proper waking consciousness, and that the only phenomenon that defies the rule is constituted out of insightables. While many mental causal relations are naturally and even necessarily inaccessible, it seems unlikely that any mental phenomenal processes could be. As a test case, the formation of the visual experience is investigated, to discover whether it includes such a mental process. No evidence for such is encountered. All mental processes seem in principle to be accessible to their owner, whether immediately qua experience or inferentially through their constituting state. The conditional‐Cartesian thesis seems intact.

This essay defends the analysis that music is expressive of an emotion or other mental state insofar as it induces one to hear it as the personal or personlike expression of that mental state. Various competing theories of musical expressiveness, notably those of Malcolm Budd, Stephen Davies, Robert Stecker, and Roger Scruton, are submitted to critical examination.

This chapter explores the relation between beliefs and motivating reasons. In it, an unusual interpretation of the claim that motivating reasons are beliefs is defended. On this interpretation, motivating reasons are true beliefs, that is, they are things that we believe that are true—that is to say, they are facts. In short, motivating reasons are facts. The chapter also disarms several objections associated with this view: that it cannot apply in cases where we are motivated to act by a false belief; that beliefs cannot motivate; etc. In particular, it is argued that although false beliefs can motivate, they are not motivating reasons: false beliefs, that is, apparent facts, are only apparent reasons.

An important corollary of the claims about motivating reasons defended in this and the preceding two chapters is that, contrary to what the orthodoxy holds, motivating reasons are not mental states, for they are neither ‘believings’ nor ‘desirings’.

Mindmelding is achieved when we allow one person's executive processes to interact with the conscious states of another person. Mindmelding does not require exotic metaphysical hypotheses, or unheard-of physical processes in the brain. It can be described using existing mental verbs, such as ‘aware’ and our existing notions of causality, matter, and truth. Indeed, not only is the alternative conception consistent with ordinary ways of speaking, but this chapter shows that uncovering the rich internal structure of folk psychology reveals deeper correspondences with the alternative view. The chapter also shows that sentences such as, ‘Jack is experiencing Jill's mental state,’ or, ‘Jill is aware of Jack's conscious state,’ can be true. More fundamentally, we need to know how to tell when sentences like these are true. Contemporary philosophers have undertaken extensive analyses of mental state terms and the sentences containing them. The chapter presents an account of the existing approaches.