Affect, Rationalization, and Motivation

Unreflective cognitive processes — or mere information processing — takes place in ‘the space of causes’ while reflection occurs, instead, in the ‘space of reasons’. This characterization, of course, nicely encapsulates the perspectival shift I have been focusing on. Unreflective processes are naturally viewed from a third-person perspective, and so we see them in mechanistic terms: inhabitants of the space of causes. But when we view reflective processes, instead, from the first-person point of view, we now view our internal states, not as states which are causally related to one another, but, instead, as ones which may serve as reasons for one another: they thereby leave the space of causes and enter the space of reasons. The space of reasons thus becomes a mysterious realm, one which occupies a place devoid of event-causal and nomological connections. There is, of course, no such place. The temptation to believe in it only emerges as a product of the perspectival shift (Kornblith 2012, 160).