ÌÇÐÄTV

Tom McClelland (ÌÇÐÄTV) and (Valparaiso) with a response from Johannes Roessler (ÌÇÐÄTV).

Tom McClelland (ÌÇÐÄTV) - Mental Affordances in Psychopathology

The perception of opportunities for action – or ‘affordances’ – automatically readies the performance of the afforded action. Perceiving a water glass, for example, readies the motor process of gripping and drinking from the glass. This has had important applications in psychopathology. Patients suffering from Utilization Behaviour, for instance, are compelled to use items in their environment: presented with the water glass they will drink from it even when they aren’t thirsty. A promising explanation of this disorder is that patients’ frontal lobe damage leaves them unable to suppress the motor signals triggered by their perception of the glass. I suggest that besides perceiving opportunities for bodily actions like gripping, catching and walking, we also perceive opportunities for mental action like attending, counting and thinking. An important test of this ‘mental affordance hypothesis’ is whether it too can be fruitfully applied to pathological cases. I propose several such applications. First, some of the behaviours characteristic of UB, including compulsive counting, are mental actions plausibly explained in terms of subjects’ perception of mental affordances. Second, various disorders of attention indicate irregularities in how subjects perceive affordances to attend. Third, certain forms of OCD might be understood in terms of subjects compulsively acting upon perceived affordances of thought.

Pablo López-Silva (Valparaiso) - Affording Mental Agency (followed by a brief response from Johannes Roessler)

A self-attribution of mental agency can be defined as the act of attributing a thought to oneself as oneself being its author or initiator. The analysis of this issue is replete with conceptual and phenomenological disagreement. In the phenomenological domain, while some people refer to their own thoughts as something they actively do, others refer to them as something that merely happens in their mind. In the conceptual domain, the aforementioned phenomenological disagreement makes it very difficult to offer a correct characterization of the phenomenon. This paper argues that the phenomenology of thoughts is fundamentally passive, but at the same time, that it is characterized by a ubiquitous affordance of agentive attributability, i.e. the possibility of a thought to be internally or externally attributed in terms of agency. Based on this idea, it is suggested that attributions of mental agency are the result of the integrative interaction between second-order explanations and the endorsement of a first-order affordance of attributability contained in the basic phenomenology of thoughts.