# Judging and the Scope of Mental Agency ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article1.be68295a7e40.png) ## Metadata - Author: [[Fabian Dorsch]] - Full Title: Judging and the Scope of Mental Agency - Category: #books - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses how we experience judgements and deliberate mental actions as rationally motivated by reasons. It argues that while we may try to form judgements at will, our awareness of their reasonableness often comes from direct experience rather than inference. Ultimately, the way we perceive judgements prevents them from being simply products of our will, as they are always felt to be influenced by epistemic considerations. - Source File: Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory (eds Fiona MacPherson_ Fabian Dorsch -Oxford University Press, USA (2018).pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Another is that, while events of forming a judgement are often, or perhaps even always, instantaneous, the formed judgements may remain in continuous existence for a considerable amount of time. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jq497fcn3sedj5tas02w9bmr)) > This argument can be summarized as follows. Its starting point is the idea that we consciously experience our judgements always as epistemically motivated, while we consciously experience the straightforward results of our deliberate mental agency always as practically motivated. But, the reasoning continues, experiencing a mental episode as practically motivated rules out experiencing it as epistemically motivated—at least, if the episode concerned has been formed in a deliberate and straightforward manner. For experiencing such an episode as practically motivated means in fact experiencing it as immediately responding to the practical motives in question. And the phenomenal aspect reflecting this immediacy is incompatible with another potential aspect of experience, namely that aspect which reflects epistemic motivation. Hence, our judgements cannot result in a straightforward manner from our deliberate mental agency—which means that we cannot form them at will. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jq41tmpqhamqv8a67jq5c8vh)) > First, enjoying this kind of awareness need not require any specific conceptual capacities, even if describing it in terms of experiencing an episode as being a certain way might be taken to suggest just this. Saying that we experience certain mental episodes as responding to reasons does not mean more than saying that their phenomenal character shows a specific aspect, that the phenomenal character of other episodes lacks this aspect, and that this phenomenal difference somehow reflects the corresponding difference in origin and determination. In a similar way, we experience red-perceptions as representing a different colour than green-perceptions, or certain feelings as more pleasant than others. And although it should usually be possible for us to conceptualize such phenomenal differences in introspective higher-order judgements, such a conceptualization does not necessarily already happen on the phenomenal level. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jq420442sfr7z02hzzb9dmmc)) > Second, the form of awareness in question is minimal in the sense that we can experience a mental episode or event as rationally motivated without being aware of, or otherwise able to identify, the respective reasons. For instance, when asked what the capital of Ecuador is, we may form and rely on the judgement that it is Quito—say, as a manifestation of some previously acquired belief—without being able to remember when or how we learnt this fact (e.g. whether from listening to a teacher, from reading a book, or from looking at a map; cf. Wedgwood 2002: 20). And it commonly happens to us that we perform an action, such as entering a certain room, and recognize it as been done deliberately by us, although we have forgotten why we did it. Moreover, even when we are aware of the motivationally effective reasons and their specific nature, this awareness need not be experiential. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jq422h63yygvt452rmsn6y85)) > On the other hand, the failure may stem from the fact that we erroneously experience an episode or event, not as an instance of the mental type to which it belongs, but as an instance of another type. We may, for example, experience a judgement as being a supposition—that is, we may experientially mistake a judgement for a supposition—and thus fail to experience the judgement as epistemically motivated.¹⁸ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jq425qnvyp0y73j7h72kbjz6)) > The fact that our experience of the immediacy of the practical motivation of a given mental episode is incompatible with our simultaneous experience of the same episode as occurring in response to epistemic motivation is perhaps more fundamentally due to the fact that the respective two phenomenal aspects reflect incompatible features of our episodes. Since no episode can be both epistemically and straightforwardly practically motivated, it seems that, if one aspect of the experiential character of one of our episodes adequately reflects its epistemic motivation, another aspect cannot simultaneously adequately reflect the straightforward practical motivation of the episode. Similarly, that we cannot properly experience a perception both as representing red and as representing green is maybe primarily due, not to how such perceptions actually present themselves to us in phenomenal consciousness, but to the underlying fact that a red-perception cannot simultaneously (and with respect to the same part of an object) be a green-perception. Consequently, the incompatibility at issue may be located only derivatively in how we experience the respective mental episodes, and ultimately in which role these experiences play in our mental lives, namely to reveal the nature of the episodes concerned.³¹ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jq469qtth30scw73xhhsgvdp))