adopt a certain goal in the light of the considerations which make it seem
attractive.
On this account, low-level cognition is essentiallypassivein nature.
Beliefs get formed non-reXectively by a variety of sub-personal processes
of perception and inference. But this is not to say that low-level cognition is
incapable of entertaining quite sophisticated thought-contents. On the
contrary, in Frankish’s view anything which we can think consciously in
the virtual mind, we can also think non-consciously. And in the back-
ground to the virtual mind are language, imagination, and a mind-reading
system, whose co-ordinated interaction gives rise to the new level of
cognition, which is, by contrast,activein nature. At this level, we can
formulate a sentence in ‘inner speech’, using auditory, visual, or even
manual (for sentences of Sign) imagination. The occurrence and content of
that sentence is then available to us to reXect upon – we can wonder about
its likely truth, seek evidence in its support, andWnallymake up our minds
to accept or reject it.
High-levelacceptance, on this view, is a kind of policy-adoption. When I
decide to accept a sentence I have been considering, I thereby adopt the
policy of reasoning and acting exactly as if I believed it. In order to do this,
I need to have a conception of just how someone who believed it would
reason and act, which is why acceptance crucially implicates and depends
upon a theory of mind. This is not to say that Iconsciouslythink of myself
as adopting a certain policy, of course. It is the formation and execution of
the policy which constitutes the high-level, virtual, belief – which does not
mean that I have to conceive of myselfasforming and executing a policy.
On the contrary, I just think of myself as making up my mind. But to make
up my mindisto commit myself to a policy, on Frankish’s account. And it
is crucially dependent upon a capacity to image the sentences which I
accept – which is what gives natural language a constitutive position at the
heart of the ‘virtual mind’.
Suppose I think to myself, ‘I wonder whether P’. After reXection on
the content of ‘P’, and the evidence for and against it, suppose I then
decide to accept it, thereby committing myself to think and reason as I
believe a P-believer would. Provided that my beliefs about the inferences
and actions distinctive of P-believing are suYciently accurate; and pro-
vided, too, that I manage in the future to recall and execute my commit-
ments; then we can see how acceptance constitutes a kind of virtual
belief. For in acting out my commitments I shall mirror the states and
activities of someone who believes (low-level) that P.
Notice that this account of the place of natural language in conscious
thought is diVerent from – albeit compatible with – the previous one.
According to the account sketched in section 3.4, we learn to make certain
222 Forms of representation