Abstract

An attribution of mental agency is defined as the act of assigning the initiation or authorship of a first personal phenomenal thought to a specific agent. This type of attribution is fundamental for the production of the belief that human beings are rational agents not only in behavioral terms, but also, in a cognitive manner. The top-down approach –one of the dominant theories in current literature– suggests that attributions of mental agency arise as retrospective rational explanations for the occurrence of phenomenal thoughts. Thus, the agency of a thought would not be contained in its most fundamental phenomenal structure, rather, it would be an imposed category. After introducing the most fundamental elements of the debate, this paper evaluates the top-down model in order to identify its argumentative strengths and weaknesses. It is concluded that, although this model possesses a number of merits, it cannot deal in a plausible way with some fundamental conceptual challenges.