Mental action

This paper summarizes the historical and contemporary importance of mental action in philosophy. Not every piece of mental activity is a mental action. A mental action is something you do mentally, and something for which you as a whole person are responsible. It can be something you do as a means to doing something else, in the case of complex (i.e. non‐basic) mental actions. The fact that you can perform complex mental actions implies that some thoughts have several contents under the several descriptions under which they are intentional. The nature of mental action helps to explain how you have special self‐knowledge of your own mental states. It also helps to explain how certain kinds of norms, including epistemic norms, gain application to thought.