Metamental Ascent: Beyond Belief and Desire

Abstract

I feel very honored to address you as the President of this outstanding Division of the American Philosophical Association which has always been, even before I became a member of it, my favorite Division. The openness of the meetings and lack of philosophical pretentiousness are salient. I should like to take this occasion to pay a special tribute to Anita Silvers for the leadership she has supplied throughout the years to the Division. She leads us and she nurtures us and we are grateful. I wanted to take this opportunity to say so. In this lecture, I want to combine something new with something old to sketch a philosophical system implicit in my diverse philosophical writings over a quarter of century.1 When I was young, I thought that any philosopher who abandoned minute analytical method to construct a philosophical system was done for. But I feel all right. So here is the unification of what I have done, am doing, and will do. Philosophers have focused on the task of constructing a theory of the human mind. They have constructed accounts of the nature of sensation, thought and emotion to tell us what is unique about these mental states and how they are nomologically connected with each other and the external world. What is important about the human mind, however, is not that it contains sensations, thoughts and desires but that it contains something beyond those states. What is important is that it contains mental states beyond beliefs and desires. First order beliefs and desires are the materials for metamental processing. What is special about human mentality is our capacity for metamental ascent and the conceptually explosive consequences thereof.