Structuring embodied minds: attention and perceptual agency

Jelle Bruineberg*, Odysseus Stone

*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

Perception is, at least sometimes, something we do. This paper is concerned with how to account for perceptual agency (i.e., the active aspect of perception). Eilan divides accounts of perceptual agency up into two camps: enactivist theories hold that perceptual agency is accounted for by the involvement of bodily action, while mental theories hold that perceptual agency is accounted for by the involvement of mental action in perception. In Structuring Mind (2017), Sebastian Watzl aligns his ‘activity view’ with the mental action route and develops the view that the mental activity of attending infuses perceptual experience with agency. Moreover, Watzl claims that his view can accommodate enactivist intuitions, while rejecting their claims about embodiment. In this paper, we scrutinize the relevant notion of mental action involved in the mental action route. We analyze the involvement of the body in overt acts of attention (like sniffing and smelling) and argue that a constitutively embodied account of mental action provides a better analysis of overt attention than a conjunctive account in which overt attention involves a bodily and a (separate) mental action. Furthermore, we argue that the standard cases of covert attention (such as the Posner paradigm) involve the body in multiple ways. In closing, we discuss the relevance of our analysis for the debate on perceptual agency and the embodied mind thesis. We conclude that the embodied mental action route to theorizing perceptual agency provides the best analysis of perceptual agency but comes with significant commitments about the embodiment of attention.

Original languageEnglish
JournalPhilosophical Studies
Volume181
Issue number2-3
Pages (from-to)461-484
Number of pages24
ISSN0031-8116
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, Victor Lange, Lucy Osler, Tom Roberts, Dan Zahavi and the members of the Center for Subjectivity Studies’ peer review group for helpful comments on previous versions of the manuscript. We would also like to thank Sebastian Watzl, Søren Overgaard, and Thor Grünbaum for helpful discussion. The work has been supported by a Macquarie Research Fellowship (JB).

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.

Keywords

  • Affordances
  • Attention
  • Embodiment
  • Enactivism
  • Mental action
  • Perception
  • Perceptual agency
  • Phenomenology

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