things that turn thought into action – they are the mental states that make things happen. Some hold that this concept of volitions overcomplicates matters. They argue that intentions can cause actions and that there’s no need for a third kind of mental state mediating between the two. For our purposes, we can remain neutral on whether we really have volitions.
The states we’ve considered have all been conscious mental states – states of which Mindy is aware. But there are good reasons for thinking that our conscious mental life is just the tip of the iceberg, and that below the surface there are countless unconscious mental states. Some unconscious mental states can easily be brought into consciousness. You have the unconscious belief that Paris is the capital of France, but now that I’ve raised the topic of France’s capital, that belief will have become conscious. Other unconscious mental states are much harder to retrieve. You might have an unconscious desire to murder your neighbour that only becomes conscious after months of psychotherapy. There might even be mental states that can never enter our consciousness. Your visual experience is the product of many stages of sensory processing and what goes on in the early stages of this process could well be inaccessible to us.
Many of the mental states we’ve considered come in conscious and unconscious varieties. The propositional attitudes offer some clear cases. Although Mindy is conscious of some of her beliefs, countless others of her beliefs are unconscious. She has beliefs about the history of the World Cup, beliefs about what’s on her bookshelf at home, beliefs about the capitals of European countries, and so on. The same goes for desires. Mindy has a desire to get new football boots, a desire to learn to juggle and a desire to go travelling, but none of these desires are conscious while she’s taking the penalty kick. Memories are another good case. Mindy has memories of her childhood, memories of last week’s training session and memories of this morning’s breakfast, but these memories are all unconscious. What about imagination? Can Mindy unconsciously imagine that she’s going to be made captain? The answer’s not so clear, but it’s at least a live possibility that there are such unconscious imaginings.
Moving on to perception, psychological research has revealed that some perceptual states occur unconsciously. In subliminal perception, your mind registers a stimulus without you being aware of it. Let’s say that the big screen at the football ground quickly flashes an advert for Jaffa Cakes. Mindy could perceive this advert, without even consciously experiencing it. Later on, she might even find herself with an inexplicable craving for Jaffa Cakes! The sensation of pain is an interesting case. It’s tempting to say that you can’t be in pain without that pain being conscious. But what if Mindy were to say, ‘I didn’t notice the pain in my ankle’? Should we conclude that Mindy had an unconscious pain or that the pain only started when Mindy started to have a conscious experience of pain? To answer this, we’d need to refine our understanding of what it is to be in pain and, indeed, our understanding of what it is for a mental state to be conscious.
Can you have emotions you aren’t conscious of? We can imagine Mindy saying, ‘It was only after the final whistle that I realized how nervous I’d been’. Perhaps this describes an unconscious emotion of nervousness. If you’re angry at someone all day, must you be conscious of your anger all day or can your anger sometimes be bubbling away unconsciously? The answer will again depend on how we understand the nature of emotions and the nature of consciousness, but it’s certainly an open possibility that our unconscious mind is populated by emotions.
What about volitions? On the one hand, you could argue that volitions have to be conscious. It’s not clear how something could be an act of will if it’s unconscious. On the other hand, there are lots of actions we perform without any conscious volition. When absentmindedly driving a familiar road, for example, perhaps each change of gear is the result of an unconscious volition. Again, it’s an open question.
1.3 The Mark of the Mental
The foregoing demonstrates the sheer diversity of what happens in the mind. Pains are as different to beliefs as beliefs are to perceptions. We bundle these diverse phenomena under the heading of ‘mental’, but what is it that makes a state mental? To say that Mindy has a certain ‘state’ is just to say that Mindy has some property at a particular time. And there are countless non-mental properties that Mindy has, such as having a body temperature of 37.1° Celsius. But why don’t they qualify as mental?
Consider the table on the following page. This looks like an intuitive way of organizing Mindy’s states. Although states like Mindy’s muscle fatigue can cause mental states like the feeling of achy muscles, it remains clear that muscle fatigue itself is non-mental. So what determines whether a state goes in the first column or the second? We can ask the same question about the processes Mindy is undergoing. A process is a sequence of states that unfolds over time. For instance, Mindy is in the process of reasoning about where to aim her shot and in the process of digesting her lunch. But what makes the former process mental and the latter nonmental? To answer this, we need to find some defining feature of mentality – a feature possessed by everything in the mental column but nothing in the non-mental column. This elusive feature is known as the mark of the mental.
Table 1.1 Mental and Non-Mental Properties
| MENTAL | NON-MENTAL |
|---|---|
| Perceiving the football | Having a temperature of 37.1° Celsius |
| Feeling an ache in her muscles | Having a heart rate of 125 beats per minute |
| Feeling excited | Having a blood pressure of 100/70 |
| Believing that the goalkeeper will go left | Having muscle fatigue |
| Desiring that she will score | Being well hydrated |
| Remembering that the goalkeeper went left before | Being 6ft tall |
| Having an intention to kick the ball | Being in good physical health |
A tempting proposal is that mental states are distinguished by being states of the mind. Notice that everything in the first column is a state of Mindy’s mind while everything in the second column is a state of Mindy’s body. The problem with this proposal is that it just relocates the question we were trying to answer. Now we face the question of what makes something a state of the mind rather than a state of the body and we’re no better off than we were. Another possible response is that there is no mark of the mental. We apply the label ‘mental’ to some states and not others, but our groupings are more or less arbitrary. On this view, there’s no interesting feature that marks out all the states in the first column. One difficulty with this proposal is that grouping mental states together seems far from arbitrary. Intuitively, there is something these states have in common, even if that ‘something’ is hard to pin down. The sceptical response would also be bad news for our theorizing about the mind. We want to understand what mental states are, how we know about them and which things possess them. Anyone claiming that the category ‘mental’ is spurious will have to deny that these are worthwhile questions to investigate because they employ arbitrary categories.
A more promising proposal is that the mark of the mental is intentionality. The word ‘intentionality’ sounds like it should have something to do with a person’s intentions, but this appearance is misleading. The word is derived from medieval Latin, and to have intentionality is to be about something. Mindy’s perceptual experience, for example, is a perception of the football. So although her perceptual state is something in her mind, that state
