Joëlle Proust

What is a person, and how can a person come to know that she is a person identical to herself over time ? The article defends the view that the sense of being oneself in this sense consists in the ability to consciously affect oneself : in the memory of having affected oneself, joint to the consciousness of being able to affect oneself again. In other words, being a self requires a capacity for metacognition (control and monitoring of one's own internal states). This view is compatible with the hypothesis that the self is a dynamic representation emerging out of a higher level control system, - valuation control - whose articulation with control of plans and perceptual/motor control is discussed in the context of normal and pertrubed agency

Granting that various mental events might form the antecedents of an action, what is the mental event that is the proximate cause of action? The present article reconsiders the methodology for addressing this question: Intention and its varieties cannot be properly analyzed if one ignores the evolutionary constraints that have shaped action itself, such as the trade-off between efficient timing and resources available, for a given stake. On the present proposal, three types of action, impulsive, routine and strategic, are designed to satisfy the trade-off above when achieving goals of each type. While actions of the first two types depend on non-conceptual appraisals of a given intensity and valence, strategic intentions have a propositional format and guide action within longer-term executive frameworks involving prospective memory

Given disagreement about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self‐knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and the scope of metacognition – the control of one’s cognition – is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self‐ascriptive view, has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing one’s own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read one’s mind. The main claims of this view are articulated, and the difficulties that they raise are discussed. An alternative view of metacognition, the ‘self‐evaluative view’, is then examined. It is argued that this view provides an account of metacognition that is both empirically and conceptually more adequate than the self‐ascriptive model. Particular attention is given to the problem of transferring self‐evaluative judgments to the case of others.

An area in the theory of action that has received little attention is how mental agency and world-directed agency interact. The purpose of the present contribution is to clarify the rational conditions of such interaction, through an analysis of the central case of acceptance. There are several problems with the literature about acceptance. First, it remains unclear how a context of acceptance is to be construed. Second, the possibility of conjoining, in acceptance, an epistemic component, which is essentially mind-to-world, and a utility component, which requires a world-to-mind direction of fit, is merely posited rather than derived from the rational structure of acceptance. Finally, the norm of acceptance is generally seen as related to truth, which turns out to be inapplicable in a number of cases. We will argue, first, that the specific context-dependence of acceptances is derived from their being mental actions, each embedded in a complex hierarchy of acceptances composing, together, a planning sequence. Second, that acceptances come in several varieties, corresponding to the specific epistemic norm(s) that constitute them. The selection of a particular norm for accepting answers to considerations of utility – to the association of an epistemic goal with an encompassing world-directed action. Once a type of acceptance is selected, however, the epistemic norm constitutive for that acceptance strictly applies. Third, we argue that context-dependence superimposes a decision criterion on the output of the initial epistemic acceptance. Strategic acceptance is regulated by instrumental norms of expected utility, which may rationally lead an agent to screen off her initial epistemic acceptance.

Granted that a given species is able to entertain beliefs and desires, i.e. to have (epistemic and motivational) internal states with semantically evaluable contents, one can raise the question of whether the species under investigation is, in addition, able to represent properties and events that are not only perceptual or physical, but mental, and use the latter to guide their actions, not only as reliable cues for achieving some output, but as mental cues (that is: whether it can 'read minds'). The main aim of this article is to suggest that mindreading depends on two prior capacities : exercising simulation, as when one actively disengages from the present environment to imagine a counterfactual situation, and exploiting simulation, which implies that an imaginary situation is relocated within the real world. It is claimed that although apes have the first capacity, they don't have the second one, and therefore do not have access to mental attribution

The project of understanding rationality in non-human animals faces a number of conceptual and methodological difficulties. The present chapter defends the view that it is counterproductive to rely on the human folk psychological idiom in animal cognition studies. Instead, it approaches the subject on the basis of dynamic- evolutionary considerations. Concepts from control theory can be used to frame the problem in the most general terms. The specific selective pressures exerted on agents endowed with information-processing capacities are analysed. It is hypothesized that metacognition offers an evolutionary stable response to the various demands of the internal and external flows of information in a competitive environment. Metacognition provides a form of process-reflexivity that can, but does not have to be redeployed through metarepresentations. Finally the claim that rationality so conceived involves normativity is discussed.