Online research in philosophy

In my article I evaluate Searle's account of mental causation, in particular his account of the causal efficacy of unconscious intentional states. I argue that top-down causation and overdetermination are unsolved problems in Searle's philosophy of mind, despite his assurances to the contrary. I also argue that there are conflicting claims involved in his account of mental causation and his account of the unconscious. As a result, it becomes impossible to understand how unconscious intentional states can be causally efficacious. My conclusion will be that if Searle's conception of unconscious intentionality is to play a genuine role in the causal explanation of human action, it needs to be rethought.

A recent issue of Time magazine (March 29, 1999) was devoted to the twenty greatest "thinkers" of the twentieth century -- scientists, inventors, and engineers. There is one interesting omission: there are no cognitive psychologists or cognitive scientists. (Cognitive science is an amalgam of cognitive, neuro, and developmental psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, linguistics, biology, and anthropology.) Freud is there, to be sure. But, while he was very influential, it is not even clear that he was a scientist, let alone a cognitive scientist. There are those who regard Freud as somewhere between incompetent and a charlatan (see Glymour, 1988). In any case, though Freud's positive proposal for the mind's architecture -- namely, that it contains the unconscious -- seems correct as far as it goes, it does appear that all the details are wrong. For example: (1) there is a lot more to the mind than the mere unconscious; (2) it is doubtful that there is an id, ego, and superego; (3) most dreams may very likely be meaningless; and (4) human motivation, even unconscious motivation, is about a lot more than sex. In the end, because he was most interested in certain kinds of human mental malfunctioning, Freud is probably best thought of as a physician, a proponent and early explorer of human mental health; he was not an experimental cognitive psychologist.

In this paper I investigate the notion of an unconscious intention as it is discussed and defended in Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. I am concerned with two issues: first, whether the evidence that Freud adduces supports his conclusion that there are unconscious intentions, and, second, whether the notion of an unconscious intention is coherent. I call into question some of Freud's arguments to support the notion, and I present a case for the incoherence of the notion. Finally, I suggest how one might begin to reconcile my argument for its incoherence with an argument for the existence of unconscious intentions.

Freud's principal contribution to clarifying persons' relations to themselves lies in his exploration of the dynamic relations between conscious and unconscious processes. This paper addresses another aspect of Freud's ideas, one to which he himself and his followers accorded insufficient attention, namely, unconscious knowledge, in particular, unconscious knowledge of one's own mind and hence of one's own unconscious. First I show that Freud's idea of unconscious knowledge of one's own mind is epistemologically coherent and that it can be understood in different ways within the framework of his basic concepts. I then discuss select examples of such knowledge from his clinical and theoretical writings. In conclusion, I pose the question of the scope of these ideas for depth psychology.

Machine generated contents note: Introduction: the historiography of the unconscious; Part I. The Subject Before the Unconscious: 1. A general science of the I: Fichte and the crisis of self-identification; 2. Natural autonomy: Schelling and the divisions of freedom; Part II. The Romantic Unconscious: 3. Divining the individual: towards a metaphysics of the unconscious; 4. The historical unconscious; 5. Post-idealism and the Romantic psyche; Part III. The Psychoanalytic Unconscious: 6. Freud: the Geist in the machine; 7. The liberal unconscious; Conclusion.