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- Timothy Schroeder, Moravcsik and the Contents of Consciousness.There is a doctrine in the theory of consciousness known as representationalism, or intentionalism. According to this doctrine, what it feels like to be in a particular state of consciousness — the qualitative character of that state — is identical to the content of some mental representation(s) For instance, the state of consciousness I am enjoying just now as I see a pattern of sunlight and shadow falling on my wall is, in part, a state of consciousness that presents to me a patch of light grey shadow just there, straight ahead of me and just above eye-level. According to representationalism, what it is like to be in this very specific state of consciousness is for it to seem to me that there is a patch of light grey shadow there, straight ahead of me and just above eye-level. And for it to seem so to me is just for that to be the content of one of my mental representations.2 Representationalism gives a central role to content when explaining consciousness. What content is, though, is contested. For every theory of content on offer, there can be generated a corresponding representationalist theory of consciousness. In a series of publications, Julius Moravcsik has defended a novel theory of meaning that a representationalist can take as a theory of the content of consciousness.3 In this paper, I investigate the possibility of the representationalist doing just this. Is this a hostile co-optation of Moravcsik’s theory of meaning? Is it a friendly extension of Moravcsik’s theory to a new domain? Or something more equivocal? This particular question I leave to one side. But there are a number of interesting consequences of investigating the intersection of representationalism and his theory of meaning in any case, as I hope to show in what follows.
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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 ... According to the HOT theory of consciousness, a mental state is conscious just in case it is represented by an appropriate higher-order thought. Whereas according to the self-representational theory of consciousness defended by Kriegel, mental state M is conscious just in case it is a complex with suitably integrated proper parts, M1 and M2, such that M1 is a thought-like higher-order representation of M2, where M2 is either a representation of the world or a higher-order representation itself. According to Kriegel, conscious state M thereby “indirectly” represents itself. In this paper I raise two problems for Kriegel’s brand of self-representationalism.
First, I argue that in avoiding the self-representationalist’s claim that a consciousness-conferring HOT must be suitably integrated with its target, the HOT-theorist is in a much better position to explain why consciousness arose.
I then focus on Kriegel’s claim that conscious states represent themselves “indirectly”. Kriegel attempts to support this claim by appealing to what he regards as intuitive cases of indirect perceptual and pictorial representation. For example, Kriegel claims that in directly perceiving the front surface of an apple one indirectly perceives the entire apple itself. Cases such as this are supposed to provide intuitive support for the principle that if X represents Y, and Y is highly integrated into complex object Z, then X indirectly represents Z. I argue that we can explain what is going on in purported cases of indirect perceptual and pictorial representation without positing indirect representation.
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| | Scholar | More options ... : This paper advances an account of Twardowski as a representationalist. In particular, Twardowskian representationalism is a blend of what I call resemblance representationalism and mediator-content representationalism. It was not, I argue here, proxy-percept representationalism. Twardowski treated mental contents as "signs" or "quasi-pictures." Husserl was a well-known critic of this view. I additionally argue that Husserl's criticism is grounded in the claim that Twardowski conflated representational content with sensations. The distinction on which this Husserlian criticism rests is between the psychological and ideal contents of consciousness, the cornerstone of the early Husserlian phenomenology.
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| | Other links: muse.jhu.edu | Scholar | At my library | More options ... A further development of Tye's theory of phenomenal consciousness along with replies to common objections.
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| | Other links: mitpress.mit.edu springerlink.com jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Thomas Reid claims to share Locke's view that consciousness is a kind of inner sense. This is puzzling, given the role the inner-sense theory plays in indirect realism and in the theory of ideas generally. I argue that Reid does not in fact hold an inner-sense theory of consciousness and that his view differs importantly from contemporary higher-order theories of consciousness. For Reid, consciousness is a first-order representational process in which a mental state with a particular content suggests the application of recognitional concepts in forming beliefs or judgements to the effect that one is currently undergoing a state with that content. I take up the question of whether Reid's theory leads to a regress, and I argue that while the regress cannot be eliminated, it is mitigated by the non-hierarchical nature of Reid's theory of mind.
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| | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com ingentaconnect.com jstor.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... If the inner consciousness of a mental state is a part of the mental state itself, then one is forced to admit an 'inner consciousness of the inner consciousness'. This counterintuitive consequence can however be avoided, if we conceive of the inner consciousness of the mental state as a 'mode of giveness' of the state itself. This paper discusses Brentano's theory of inner consciousness from the point of view of Husserl's philosophy.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The representationalist theory of consciousness is the view that consciousness reduces to mental representation. This view comes in several variants which must explain introspective awareness of conscious mental states.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... One of the promising approaches to the problem of perceptual consciousness has been the representational theory, or representationalism. The idea is to reduce the phenomenal character of conscious perceptual experiences to the representational content of those experiences. Most representationalists appeal specifically to non-conceptual content in reducing phenomenal character to representational content. In this paper, I discuss a series of issues involved in this representationalist appeal to non-conceptual content. The overall argument is the following. On the face of it, conscious perceptual experience appears to be experience of a structured world, hence to be at least partly conceptual. To validate the appeal to non-conceptual content, the representationalist must therefore hold that the content of experience is partly conceptual and partly non-conceptual. But how can the conceptual and the non-conceptual combine to form a single content? The only way to make sense of this notion, I argue, leads to a surprising consequence, namely, that the representational approach to perceptual consciousness is a disguised form of functionalism.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... A representationalist-friendly introduction to representationalism which covers a number of central problems and objections.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... According to the self-representational theory of consciousness – self-
representationalism for short – a mental state is phenomenally conscious when, and
only when, it represents itself in the right way. In this paper, I consider how self-
representationalism might address the alleged explanatory gap between phenomenal
consciousness and physical properties. I open with a presentation of self-
representationalism and the case for it (§1). I then present what I take to be the most
promising self-representational approach to the explanatory gap (§2). That approach
is threatened, however, by an objection to self-representationalism, due to Levine,
which I call the just more representation objection (§3). I close with a discussion of
how the self-representationalist might approach the objection (§4).
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Timothy Schroeder, Moravcsik and the contents of consciousness
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