What a Mental State Is
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Someone is sitting on a bench doing nothing. Write down everything true of their mind at that moment and the list gets long fast. A mild ache in one knee. The thought that the bus is late. A wish to be somewhere else. The belief that Lisbon is in Portugal, which they were not thinking about and would have affirmed if asked.
These are all called mental states, and the word covers items that behave very differently. This article sorts them along the two divisions that most of the subject's arguments depend on.
The general category
Definition
Mental state
A condition a subject is in that is characterised in psychological terms: believing something, wanting something, being in pain, attending to something. Mental states are the items a psychological description of a person is made of.
The definition is deliberately thin, because saying what makes a state mental rather than merely physical is the substance of the whole field rather than something to settle in a first article. Notice also that state is being used loosely. Some items on the bench list are conditions a person is in for a while, some are events that happen at a moment, and some are processes that take time. The literature uses state for all of them and reaches for finer vocabulary only when the difference matters.
States that are about something
Most of the items on that list have a curious feature. The belief about Lisbon is about Lisbon. The wish is a wish that something be the case. The thought about the bus points beyond itself at a bus that may not even exist, if the route was cancelled last month.
Franz Brentano pressed this in 1874 as the feature that marks off the mental from everything else, arguing that mental phenomena are directed at objects in a way physical phenomena are not. The claim in that strong form has been disputed ever since, and the intermediate tier takes up both the feature itself and the case against Brentano's thesis. What is uncontroversial is that a great many mental states have it.
Definition
Propositional attitude
A mental state consisting of an attitude taken toward a proposition: believing that the bus is late, hoping that the bus is late, doubting that the bus is late. The state divides into a mode and a content.
The decomposition is what makes the category useful, because it gives two dimensions along which mental states vary independently.
Hold the content fixed and vary the attitude. Believing that it will rain, hoping that it will rain, fearing that it will rain, and remembering that it rained are four different states with the same thing at their centre. Whatever explains what they have in common has to be something about the proposition, and whatever explains their differences has to be something about the relation the subject bears to it.
Hold the attitude fixed and vary the content, and you get the ordinary variety of a person's beliefs. This is why psychological explanation is systematic rather than a list. Someone who wants a coffee and believes the shop is around the corner will go around the corner, and the explanation works for any pair of contents you substitute in. That productivity is one of the things any theory of mental states has to account for.
Definition
Desire
A propositional attitude whose content specifies a way the world is to be made, rather than a way the world is taken to be. Desires motivate action, and they are satisfied or frustrated rather than true or false.
The contrast with belief is not just that one is warmer than the other. Elizabeth Anscombe drew it with a case in Intention in 1957. A man shops from a list, and a detective follows him writing down what he buys. Both end up with a list and a basket, and the lists can fail to match the basket in either case. The difference is where the fault lies. If the shopper's basket does not match his list, the error is in the shopping. If the detective's list does not match the basket, the error is in the list.
Belief works like the detective's record and is at fault when it fails to match the world. Desire works like the shopper's list and is not at fault when the world fails to match it; the world is what has to change. The label direction of fit came into use later and the point is Anscombe's. It matters here because the two-way distinction runs through the whole subject, and any account of what mental states are has to explain how a single kind of thing can come in both varieties.
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States that are not obviously about anything
The knee ache resists this treatment. It does not seem to be about the knee in the way the belief is about Lisbon; it is in the knee, or is at least felt there, and there is no proposition it takes an attitude toward. Moods behave similarly. A person can be anxious without being anxious that anything.
Two responses are on offer and the choice between them shapes a great deal downstream. One holds that the mental divides into content-bearing states and merely qualitative ones, so that pains and moods are a separate category with no content to speak of. The other holds that the appearance is misleading and that a pain does represent something, namely a disturbance in a part of the body, so that the whole mental realm is contentful after all. The second position is a live and well-developed one, and the advanced tier examines the theories built on it. At this stage the thing to carry forward is that the phenomenal states of the previous article and the contentful states of this one are not obviously the same category, and that whether they are is a real question rather than a bookkeeping detail.
A different cut entirely
Definition
Occurrent state
A mental state that is currently active in the subject: a thought being entertained, a pain being felt, a desire currently operating on behaviour.
Definition
Dispositional state
A mental state a subject has without it being currently active: a standing belief or preference the subject would produce or act on given the right occasion, but which is doing nothing at present.
The person on the bench believed that Lisbon is in Portugal while thinking about a bus. That belief was not occupying them, showing up in introspection, or influencing anything they were doing. It was still theirs, and had they been asked they would have answered without hesitation and without feeling they were forming a new opinion.
This division cuts across the previous one. Beliefs come in both varieties, and so do desires; a standing preference for one brand over another is dispositional most of the time and occurrent in the shop. Sensations arguably do not come in both, since a pain nobody is feeling is not obviously a pain at all, which is another sign that the two categories are behaving differently.
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What the categories are for
None of this is filing for its own sake. The categories are the joints at which theories in the field are cut.
An account of the mind that handles propositional attitudes well may say nothing usable about pains, and an account built around felt quality may have no resources for states that are about things. When you meet a theory in the intermediate tier, the first question to ask is which of these categories it was designed for, and the second is what it says about the others. A striking number of the standing objections in the field have the form of a theory built for one category being applied to another.
Objection
The taxonomy is inherited rather than discovered. Beliefs and desires come from ordinary talk, which developed for predicting neighbours and not for describing brains, and there is no reason to expect the categories of a prescientific practice to correspond to anything in the machinery. Other prescientific psychological categories, such as the humours, turned out to name nothing. Building a science on beliefs and desires may be like building chemistry on earth, air, fire, and water.
Reply
The argument is a real position in the field, and the view that our everyday psychological categories will be superseded rather than vindicated has serious defenders. The intermediate and advanced tiers take it up properly, along with the theory of ordinary psychological explanation it attacks.
Three things can be said at this stage.
The predictive record is unusually good. Ordinary psychological explanation lets people anticipate the behaviour of other people with an accuracy nothing else approaches, across cultures and without training, and a framework that wrong would be an odd thing to be that useful. The comparison with the humours is a comparison with a framework that did not work.
The categories are also not purely folk products any more. Working psychology and cognitive science use representational states with contents throughout, in accounts of memory, language, and decision-making, and those accounts are answerable to evidence in the ordinary way. Whatever survives will not be exactly the folk category, and it is unlikely to be nothing.
The last point is a reason for care rather than for confidence. Even a defender of the taxonomy should hold it as a working scheme rather than a set of natural kinds established in advance. The right attitude is to use the distinctions where they do work and to notice when a theory has trouble precisely at one of the seams, because that is often where the seam turns out to be in the wrong place.
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Next
One kind of mental state has been mentioned repeatedly and never examined. Perception is where the mind meets the world, it is the source of most of what anyone believes, and the philosophical difficulties in it start immediately. The next article takes it up.
Further reading
- G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (1957), section 32, for the shopping list and the detective.
- Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), for the claim that directedness is the mark of the mental.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Intentionality".
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Propositional Attitude Reports", for the logical complications the category creates.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Desire".
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