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- Neil Campbell Manson (2002). What Does Language Tell Us About Consciousness? First-Person Mental Discourse and Higher-Order Thought Theories of Consciousness. Philosophical Psychology 15 (3):221 – 238.The fact that we can engage in first-person discourse about our own mental states seems, intuitively, to be bound up with consciousness. David Rosenthal draws upon this intuition in arguing for his higher-order thought theory of consciousness. Rosenthal's argument relies upon the assumption that the truth-conditions for "p" and "I think that p" differ. It is argued here that the truth-conditional schema debars "I think" from playing one of its (expressive) roles and thus is not a good test for what is asserted when "I think" is employed in making an assertoric utterance. The critique of Rosenthal's argument allows us to make explicit the intuitions which shape higher-order representation theories of consciousness in general. Consciousness and first-person mental discourse seem to be connected primarily because consciousness is (and was) an epistemic term, used to denote first-person knowledge of minds. Higher-order thought theories of consciousness draw upon this epistemic notion of consciousness, and because self-knowledge seems to involve higher-order representation, the higher-order theorist can deploy what is in effect an "error theory" about conscious experience disguised as a kind of conceptual analysis of our ordinary concept of a conscious mental state. The conclusion reached is that there is unlikely to be a simple or direct path from considerations about mental discourse to conclusions about the nature of consciousness.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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This interdisciplinary work contains the most sustained attempt at developing and defending one of the few genuine theories of consciousness.
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| | Other links: benjamins.nl benjamins.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The terminology surrounding the dispute between higher-order and first-order theories of consciousness is piled so high that it sometimes obscures the view. When the debris is cleared away, there is a real prospect.
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| | Other links: books.google.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... For nearly a decade, David Rosenthal has proposed that a mental state M of a creature C is conscious just in case C has a suitable higher-order thought directed toward M. While this theory has had its share of criticism in recent years, I believe that the real difficulties have been ignored. In this essay, I show that the presence of a higher order is insufficient for conscious experience, even if we suppose that the thought satisfies the constraints that Rosenthal lists (i.e. that it is assertoric in nature, that it is had occurently, and that it is non-inferentially formed). The only way Rosenthal's view could possibly yield sufficient conditions is by requiring that the higher-order thought be suitably causally related to its object. Yet, as I also show, the only causal constraint strong enough to do the job is not only ill-motivated but probably false.
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| | Other links: tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Philosophers, especially in recent years, have engaged in reflection upon the nature of experience. Such reflections have led them to draw a distinction between conscious and unconscious mentality in terms of whether or not it is like something to have a mental state. Reflection upon the history of psychology and upon contemporary cognitive science, however, identifies the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states to be primarily one which is drawn in epistemic terms. Consciousness is an epistemic notion marking the special kind of first-person knowledge we have of our own mental states. Psychologists have found it expedient, for explanatory reasons, to ignore or reject the assumption that we have exhaustive first-person knowledge of our mental states and, in doing so, use the term 'unconscious' to indicate the peculiar epistemic status of certain mental states.It is argued that epistemic consciousness is distinct from the subjective-experiential notion of consciousness, from 'access-consciousness' and from higher-order thought conceptions of mental state consciousness, and that epistemic consciousness has an important role to play in philosophy of mind and in the history of psychology.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... p0005 The term ‘consciousness’ is used in several ways: to describe a person or other creature as being awake and sentient, to describe a person or other creature as being ‘aware of ’ something, and to refer to a property of mental states, such as perceiving, feeling, and thinking, that distinguishes those states from unconscious mental states. Distinguishing these different concepts of consciousness is crucial in evaluating the major theories of what it is for a state to be conscious. Among those are first-order theories, on which a mental state is conscious if being in that state results in one’s being conscious of something; global-workspace theories, on which a state is conscious if it’s widely available for mental processing; inner-sense theories, on which a state is conscious if one senses or perceives that state by way of a special inner faculty; and higher-orderthought theories, on which a state is conscious if one is aware of that state by having a thought about it. We will consider the advantages and shortcomings of these theories and variants of them.
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| | Scholar | More options ... David Rosenthal is a well-known defender of a particular kind of theory of consciousness known as the higher-order thought theory (HOTT). Higher-order theories are united by what Rosenthal calls the Transitivity Principle (TP), which states that a mental state is conscious iff one is conscious of oneself, in some suitable way, as being in that mental state. Since there are various ways to implement TP and HOTT commits one to the view that any mental state could occur unconsciously it seems to predict that a mental state’s being conscious doesn’t have any significant function to perform. An unconscious mental state, according to the theory, has most of its causal connections already, as evidenced by priming studies, subliminal perception, and other empirical findings. Given this, one early objection to HOTT was to emphasize this consequence of the theory. Since consciousness does have a function any theory which predicts that it doesn’t must be suspect. Rosenthal’s primary goal in this paper is to defend HOTT against this objection. In fact he argues that if we could establish that consciousness has no function independently of HOTT we would then have an analogous argument for it: Since consciousness doesn’t have any significant function any theory which predicts that it doesn’t fares be.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... David Rosenthal and Fred Dretske agree that creature consciousness should be used to give a reductive explanation of state consciousness. They disagree, however, over what type of creature consciousness will do the job. Rosenthal, defending a higher-order thought (HOT) account, argues that higher-order creature consciousness is what is needed. Dretske, defending a first-order (FO) account, argues that first-order creature consciousness is what is needed. I attempt to advance this debate by presenting a case for a third creature-conscious account of state consciousness. what I call the same-order (SO) account. I show that bydefining a conscious mental state as a mental state whose possessor is conscious of what it represents, we are offered a unique creature-conscious account of state consciousness that avoids some of the problems that have plagued both the HOT and FO accounts.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Philosophers, especially in recent years, have engaged in reflection upon the nature of experience. Such reflections have led them to draw a distinction between conscious and unconscious mentality in terms of whether or not it is like something to have a mental state. Reflection upon the history of psychology and upon contemporary cognitive science, however, identifies the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states to be primarily one which is drawn in epistemic terms. Consciousness is an epistemic not ion marking the special kind of first-person knowledge we have of our own mental states. Psychologists have found it expedient, for explanatory reasons, to ignore or reject the assumption that we have exhaustive first-person knowledge of our mental states and, in doing so, use the term �unconscious� to indicate the peculiar epistemic status of certain mental states. It is argued that epistemic consciousness is distinct from the subjective-experiential notion of consciousness, from �access-consciousness� and from higher-order thought conceptions of mental state consciousness, and that epistemic consciousness has an important role to play in philosophy of mind and in the history of psychology.
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| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: ingentaconnect.com eprints.lancs.ac.uk sciencedirect.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: ingentaconnect.com eprints.lancs.ac.uk sciencedirect.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In a series of closely connected papers, Rosenthal has defended what has come to be known as “the higher-order thought theory of state-consciousness.” According to this theory, a mental state which one instantiates is conscious if and only if one is conscious of being in it in some relevant way, and one’s being conscious of being in the state which is conscious consists in one’s having a contemporaneous thought to the effect that one is in that state. The main aim of this paper is to disarm a Searle-style objection to Rosenthal’s account of state-consciousness, one that takes mentality, in particular intentionality, to presuppose state-consciousness. It is argued that the Searlean attempt to convict Rosenthal’s hypothesis of circularity fails, because the postulation of what Searle called “subjective ontology,” as well as the requirement that there be an uncancelable connection between mode of representation and state-consciousness, is unreasonable. While defending Rosenthal against Searle, this paper also aims to develop a fresh objection to the higher-order thought conception of state-consciousness.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this commentary I criticize David Rosenthal’s higher order thought theory of consciousness (HOT). This is one of the best articulated philosophical accounts of consciousness available. The theory is, roughly, that a mental state is conscious in virtue of there being another mental state, namely, a thought to the effect that one is in the first state. I argue that this account is open to the objection that it makes “HOT-zombies” possible, i.e., creatures that token higher order mental states, but not the states that the higher order states are about. I discuss why none of the ways to accommodate this problem within HOT leads to viable positions.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Neil Campbell Manson, What does language tell us about consciousness? First-person mental discourse and higher-order thought theories of consciousness
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