Online research in philosophy

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.

In this article, I am interested in answering two, relatively simple, but important questions: (a) Does Kant allow first-order consciousness without second-order consciousness, that is, does he allow for empirical consciousness that is not transcendentally apperceived, and so not accompanied by the 'I think', either in principle or de facto? (b) If Kant allows for unaccompanied first-order consciousness, what is the status of this consciousness? Is it in any way possible to be conscious of this consciousness? Or is this first-order consciousness in some way a consciousness of which we are and remain ex hypothesi unconscious? A related question which is independent of Kant's arguments regarding the conditions for self-consciousness, is whether Kant allows for unconsciousness strictius dicta, viz., the total lack of consciousness at all. I believe that transcendental apperception itself provides sufficient ground for establishing Kant's position on unaccompanied or non-apperceptive consciousness. An argument for the thesis that Kant either allows or doesn't allow for non-apperceptive consciousness can be gleaned from the positive argument for transcendental apperception as an analytic principle. We need only look at the logical ramifications of this principle to find such an argument.

Progressively Husserl started referring to the whole sphere of the life of intentional acts in terms of praxis. Perception, imagination, judgement, scientific consciousness, etc., are all seen as practices. What is the meaning of this move? A seemingly self-evident possibility is that intentionality is praxial, because even perception is not completely free from empty intending moments that demand fulfilment; and all fulfilment is attained by means of bodily activities that enable our senses to acquire the relevant contents. I reject this approach as insufficient and misguided. I argue that perception and intentionality in general is praxial because consciousness, in all of its constituting syntheses, is or becomes organized as a practice-structure. Intentional consciousness organizes its contents according to rules so as to accomplish the evident or true givenness of its intended correlates.

On the phenomenological view, a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience. For the phenomenologists, this immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena must be accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term, selfconsciousness is not something that comes about the moment one attentively inspects or reflectively introspects one's experiences, or in the instant of self-recognition of one's image in the mirror, or in the proper use of the first-person pronoun, or in the construction of a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through or undergoing an experience, i.e., whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, whenever I am thinking an occurrent thought, whenever I am feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and so forth.

In recent philosophy of mind, it is often assumed that consciousness and self-consciousness are two separate phenomena. In this paper, I argue that this is not quite right. The argument proceeds in two phases. First, I draw a distinction between (i) being self-conscious of a thought that p and (ii) self-consciously thinking that p. I call the former transitive self-consciousness and the latter intransitive self-consciousness. I then argue that consciousness does depend on intransitive self-consciousness, and that the common reasons for denying the dependence of consciousness upon self-consciousness apply only to transitive self-consciousness.

Discussions of the relationship between consciousness and language are troubled by simplistic views of both. Denying a central role of consciousness in linguistics is commonplace in generative linguistics, but self-contradictory. On the other hand, a defence of consciousness by some cognitive and functional linguists is marred by a conflation of consciousness with 'introspection'. I argue for the need to distinguish (at least) between three kinds of acts of consciousness: observation, introspection and intuition, where the last one is based on intersubjectively binding social norms. It is intuition that is the most fundamental form of consciousness for the study of language, from antiquity to the present. Furthermore, I show how the three modes of (linguistic) consciousness are related, by defining empathy (as used e.g. in typological explanations) as vicarious introspection, and intuition as conventionalized empathy.

My target in this paper is "theories of consciousness". There are many theories of consciousness around, and my view is that they are all misconceived. Consciousness is not a normal scientific subject, and needs handling with special care. It is foolhardy to jump straight in and start building a theory, as if consciousness were just like electricity or chemical valency. We will do much better to reflect explicitly on our methodology first. When we do this, we will see that theories of consciousness are trying to answer a question that isn't there.

This interdisciplinary work contains the most sustained attempt at developing and defending one of the few genuine theories of consciousness.

It is widely assumed that ‘consciousness’ (and its cognates) is multiply ambiguous within the consciousness literature. Some alleged senses of the term are access consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, state consciousness, creature consciousness, introspective consciousness, self consciousness, to name a few. In the paper I argue for two points. First, there are few if any good reasons for thinking that such alleged senses are genuine: ‘consciousness’ is best viewed as univocal within the literature. The second point is that researchers would do best to avoid the semantics of ‘consciousness’, since resorting to “semantic ascent” typically serves no clear purpose in the case of consciousness, and confuses matters more than anything else.

The notion of ‘givenness of consciousness’ needs further elucidation. On the one hand, I agree with Lyyra (this volume) that one sense for ‘givenness of consciousness’ is not enough to account for consciousness and self-consciousness. On the other hand, I will argue that Lyyra’s paper is problematic precisely because he fails to consider one basic sense for ‘givenness of consciousness’. Lyyra and I thus agree that there must be (at least) two senses for ‘givenness of consciousness’; we disagree, however about which modes of givenness are involved.