David Barack
Angelica Kaufmann
Polaris Koi
In recent decades, philosophy of action and philosophy of mind have taken a decidedly naturalistic turn. As cognitive science has expanded, philosophers have engaged not only with abstract models of mind and agency, but also with concrete mechanisms of cognition, decision-making, and control. This convergence has been shaped by two major trends: the growing integration of neuroscience, which has foregrounded neural implementation and mechanistic explanation, and the rise of situated and embodied cognition. Within this evolving interdisciplinary landscape, philosophy contributes critical analysis of foundational constructs—such as intention, action, and control — that underlie empirical inquiry.
This symposium focuses on how conflict is detected, represented, and regulated across different domains of cognition: motivational conflict in cognitive and self-control, and the regulation of conflicting stimuli in foraging and inquiry. The three talks presented here investigate distinct yet complementary dimensions of conflict regulation, offering new insights for interpreting how agents navigate conflict, whether between competing motives, perceptual demands, and demands for social coordination.
David Barack explores search as central to executive processing for the control of cognition. He highlights how foraging, a kind of search in a certain kind of context, can outline a new source of optimal control. Foraging involves repeated, exclusive decisions between accepting and rejecting an item. Keeping track of average performance is central to foraging and circumscribes optimal decision policies under ignorance. Further, foraging-type search places special cognitive demands on organisms and, hence, on the evolution of executive control. Specifically, inquiry is often a type of foraging, requiring repeated accept or reject decisions in foraging-like internal environments. Based on this, Barack suggests a novel hypothesis for the origins of reasoning, inference, and other cognitive processes enlisted during executive processing: reasoning and inference evolved to keep track of progress during the goals of inquiry, using pre-existing cognitive machinery deployed in these new cognitive domains.
Angelica Kaufmann’s contribution presents a framework for understanding how different control mechanisms sustain the sense of commitment in both individual and social contexts. Commitment may take the form of "gritted-teeth" persistence, reliant on effortful executive processes such as inhibition, interference suppression, and working memory, or "engaged" persistence, arising from intrinsic motivation and diminished need for executive effort. Building on distinctions between hot/cold and wide/narrow control, Kaufmann proposes a compass of commitment that maps how proactive and reactive strategies, anticipation, and environmental structuring interact with motivational states to stabilise long-term goal pursuit, clarifying the mechanisms through which agents resist distraction, avoid temptation, and uphold joint actions.
Polaris Koi’s contribution focuses on self-control. While self-control is often studied through the lens of individual delay of gratification or productivity, Koi argues that its deeper function lies in enabling agents to navigate and regulate conflicts in socially structured environments. On this view, self-control allows the alignment of one’s behaviour with shared commitments, norms, and practices. Koi suggests that the focus of self-control research in the context of personal goal maintenance has obscured its fundamental role for sustaining forms of prosocial coordination such as care and cooperation. Reframing self-control in this way situates it alongside Barack’s inquiry on Foraging and Kaufmann’s work on commitment stabilisation, revealing it as a basic agential capacity through which agents manage competing demands—both internal and interpersonal.