Concept
Mental state
Overview
A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain/pleasure experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory.
There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term. According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs. Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental. According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties. Some philosophers deny all the aforementioned approaches by holding that the term "mental" refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas without an underlying unifying feature shared by all.
Various overlapping classifications of mental states have been proposed. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious or occurrent. Sensory states involve sense impressions such as visual perceptions or bodily pains. Propositional attitudes, such as beliefs and desires, are relations a subject has to a proposition. The characteristic of intentional states is that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs. Conscious states are part of the phenomenal experience while occurrent states are causally efficacious within the owner's mind, with or without consciousness. An influential classification of mental states was created by Franz Brentano, who argued that there are only three basic kinds: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate.
Mental states are usually contrasted with physical or material aspects. For (non-eliminative) physicalists, they are a kind of high-level property that can be understood in terms of fine-grained neural activity. Property dualists, on the other hand, claim that no such reductive explanation is possible. Eliminativists may reject the existence of mental properties, or at least of those corresponding to folk psychological categories such as thought and memory. Mental states play an important role in various fields, including philosophy of mind, epistemology and cognitive science. In psychology, the term is used not just to refer to the individual mental states listed above but also to a more global assessment of a person's mental health.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Mental state is discussed.
_Another variety of the psychologist's fallacy is the assumption that the mental state studied must be conscious of itself as the psychologist is conscious of it._ The mental state is aware of itself only from within; it grasps what we call its own content, and nothing more. The psychologist, on the contrary, is aware of it from without, and knows its relations with all sorts of other things.
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
Though while attending to any single sensation, or any group of related sensations constituting the consciousness of an object, we seem to remain for the time in a persistent and homogeneous condition of mind, a careful self-examination shows that this apparently unbroken mental state is in truth traversed by a number of minor states, in which various other sensations and perceptions are rapidly presented and…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
There is a second, which is far more obvious and arises out of the first. When a mental state is depicted to us with the object of making it dramatic, or even merely of inducing us to take it seriously, it gradually crystallises into ACTIONS which provide the real measure of its greatness. Thus, the miser orders his whole life with a view to acquiring wealth, and the pious hypocrite, though pretending to have his…
Henri Bergson, Laughter
states what it is; names the idea
(2) The counterpart assumption to that of pure aboriginal “mental states” is, of course, that of an Absolute Reality, fixed and complete in itself, of which our “mental states” are bare transitory hints, their true meaning and their transcendent goal being the Truth _in rerum natura_. If the organ and medium of knowing is a self-inclosed order of existence different in kind from the Object to be known, then that…
John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought
names the idea; opens on it
Does not this case of extension now put us on the track of truth in the case of other qualities? It does; and I am surprised that the facts should not have been noticed long ago. Why, for example, do we call a fire hot, and water wet, and yet refuse to say that our mental state, when it is 'of' these objects, is either wet or hot? 'Intentionally,' at any rate, and when the mental state is a vivid image, hotness and…
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism
states what it is; names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Mental state
- Thomas Nagel
- Frank Cameron Jackson
- Jaegwon Kim
- Tyler Burge
- Jerry Fodor
- Robert Audi
- Richard Boyd
- William Lycan
Related ideas
- Belief
- Emotion
- John Searle
- Pleasure
- Intentionality
- Psychiatry
- Functionalism (philosophy of mind)
- Desire
- Mind
- Visual perception
- Qualia
- Property dualism
- Psychology
- Motivation
- Sense
- Physicalism
- Pain
- Perception
- Experience
- Memory
- Folk psychology
- World
- Natural science
- Multiple realizability
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.