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Mental Muscles and the Extended Will

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Abstract

In the wake of Clark and Chalmers famous argument for extended cognition some people have argued that willpower equally can extend into the environment (e.g. Heath and Anderson in The thief of time: philosophical essays on procrastination. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 233–252, 2010). In a recent paper Fabio Paglieri (Consciousness in interaction: the role of the natural and social context in shaping consciousness. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 179–206, 2012) provides an interesting argument to the effect that there might well be extended self control, but that willpower does not lend itself to extension. This paper argues that Paglieri is right in claiming that previous attempts to extend the will are flawed. It then provides an argument for extending the will that does not fall foul of Paglieri’s argument and actually provides us with an even stronger case for extension than the one that Clark and Chalmers provide for cognition.

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Notes

  1. Clark and Chalmers famously argue that cognitive processes extend into the environment. In their Otto example, they argue that information stored in a notebook under the right conditions can be a cognitive vehicle in exactly the same way as a biological memory trace in the brain. This is the case whenever the vehicle inside the brain (biological memory trace) plays the same functional role as the external vehicle (information stored in notebook).

  2. A thought that I want to agree with.

  3. See Angela Smith (2005) for a similar argument on why tracking (or character formation arguments) does not work in cases like Karl’s.

  4. This is true, even though the therapist will presumably ask Karl to help in his therapy, so that Karl is not fully passive. Karl will learn to do many different things, which are not aimed at directly controlling the attitude, but at doing something else, which will bring it about eventually that the attitude disappears. So even in this case it is not Karl’s direct control of his attitude that brings about the change, but the things he does provide an environment which then in turn is causally efficacious in bringing about the change. Thanks to Jacq Cottrell and an audience member in Rome for pressing this worry.

  5. This difference between ordinary intentions and resolutions is crucial for Holton’s disagreement with Bratman’s account of resolution (see chapter 7, 2009). Holton thinks that resolutions work like intentions on a Bratman-like two tier model, but Bratman thinks that his model for intentions does not work for resolutions.

  6. See e.g. Velleman (1992).

  7. The whole debate in the mental agency literature really seems to be about the relative importance of intentional shepherding versus non intentional evaluative components. Moran (2001) and Strawson (2003) are here united in claiming that shepherding is not very central, Mele (2009) and Hieronymi (2009) are somewhere in the middle, while McGeer (2007), Vierkant (2012, 2013) and Vierkant and Paraskevaiedes (2012) hold positions that emphasize the intentional part of the mental (albeit for very different reasons).

  8. Hieronymi contends that this is the case for managerial control. She does allow for cases of simple imprinting as well, but uses the special term “manipulative control” for this form of attitude control.

  9. One reason to think that this might be the reading that Holton has in mind, in spite of my claiming that it is an implausible reading, is the fact that it seems to be what Baumeister (2008) thinks is correct, who clearly has been very influential for Holton’s position.

  10. In fact, countless people do worry exactly about this or similar points. See prominently e.g. Rupert (2004), Adams and Aizawa (2008), Sprevak (2009).

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Correspondence to Tillmann Vierkant.

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Vierkant, T. Mental Muscles and the Extended Will. Topoi 33, 57–65 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9188-5

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