A plea for mental acts

A prominent but poorly understood domain of human agency is mental action, i.e., the capacity for reaching specific desirable mental states through an appropriate monitoring of one's own mental processes. The present paper aims to define mental acts, and to defend their explanatory role against two objections. One is Gilbert Ryle's contention that postulating mental acts leads to an infinite regress. The other is a different although related difficulty, here called the access puzzle: How can the mind already know how to act in order to reach some predefined result? A crucial element in the solution of these puzzles consists in making explicit the contingency between mental acts and mental operations, parallel to the contingency between physical acts and bodily movements. The paper finally discusses the kind of reflexivity at stake in mental acts; it is shown that the capacity to refer to oneself is not a necessary condition of the successful execution of mental acts.