Abstract
What should advocates of phenomenal intentionality say about unconscious intentional states? I approach this question by focusing on a recent debate between Tim Crane and David Pitt, about the nature of belief. Crane argues that beliefs are never conscious. Pitt, concerned that the phenomenal intentionality thesis coupled with a commitment to beliefs as essentially unconscious embroils Crane in positing unconscious phenomenology, counter-argues that beliefs are essentially conscious. I examine and rebut Crane’s arguments for the essential unconsciousness of beliefs, some of which are widely endorsed. On the way I sketch a model of how belief states could participate in the stream of consciousness. I then consider Pitt’s position, arguing in reply, along Freudian lines, that we should posit not just dispositional but occurrent unconscious beliefs. This result, I argue, indeed requires advocates of phenomenal intentionality to posit unconscious qualia to fix these unconscious occurrent thoughts, and I defend the coherence of the notion of unconscious qualia against some common attacks. Ultimately, I claim, the combination of taking seriously the occurrent unconscious, and a commitment to phenomenal intentionality, should lead us to expand William James’s conception of the stream of consciousness to encompass, additionally, a stream of unconscious mental life—or, perhaps better, to posit a single partly conscious partly unconscious qualia-stream of mental goings-on.
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Notes
Crane (2014) reserves ‘qualia’ for sensory qualities, judging that these are too unlike the phenomenal character of thoughts for a useful grouping. But sensory qualities themselves are extremely varied, and it is not obvious what unifies them qualitatively, if anything. And what does unify sensory and cognitive qualia—if these exist—is their helping to fix what it is like to have experience with those properties, including thinking experience (cf. Lormand 1996: 246, §5 below). I do not commit to cognitive phenomenology, so for all I say thought’s phenomenal character is sensory; then thoughts will have qualia even in Crane’s restricted sense.
If thought is fixed holistically by a subject’s total mental state, P may need to be characterised in terms of a global qualia-profile for S at a time. Given the aspirations of proponents of phenomenal intentionality to capture the essence of the relevant mental phenomena, the modality here is likely metaphysical. By ‘thought’ I mean attitude-plus-content, though I focus mostly on belief contents. I bracket issues around wide contents.
Crane’s rich text does not lend itself to easy division, and I have extracted and present arguments in an order convenient to presentation, rather than as they occur.
Cf. Pitt’s (2016: 123) formulation of Crane’s argument.
Crane thinks we acquire beliefs via such processes as perception and conscious thought. Since these are conscious processes, one might surmise that one acquires a conscious belief, which becomes stored unconsciously. Pitt raises this as a problem for Crane, whose stated position implies a blanket rejection of conscious beliefs, including at the time of belief formation. But Crane can perhaps posit the formation of a conscious judgement (in his terminology) that p, simultaneous with the coining of an unconscious belief with identical content. Undoubtedly, however, Crane’s talk of acquired beliefs becoming ‘stored’ does suggest the interpretation Pitt rightly marks as problematic. It would therefore be worthwhile to know what Crane would say on this matter. He cannot say the perceptual process yields a judgement but not an unconscious belief, since that would not be belief-acquisition. Alternatively, if he says a belief is acquired without a corresponding judgement, this means the subject is unaware of acquiring the belief, or of endorsing the believed content. But this is surely not typical of belief-acquisition. Cf. §7 below.
Cf. Pitt’s rendering of P2 (Ibid.).
Crane and Pitt reject unconscious qualia, recall. Thus, given Crane’s endorsement of phenomenal intentionality about thought, the implied picture is one of qualia-rich conscious judgements, and qualia-free unconscious beliefs—quite a contrast.
See §§4–5, where he introduces the state/event distinction, James’s stream of consciousness, and says beliefs cannot figure in that stream, given their state-like nature.
For ease I interchange these terms below.
N.b., again, the unstated assumption that qualia cannot exist unconsciously.
Hence, perhaps, Geach’s remark (1957: 105) that ‘judgements’ have a ‘non-successive unity’.
Crane does not outright reject an analysis of the conscious stream as successive states, but claims James’s phenomenological description favours an event-based construal. James himself talks as if the stream features states, following the famous passage.
Pain seems another plausible case of state-like consciousness—even if I suffer pain for some time, arguably it is wholly present at a time.
Kim (e.g. 1976) construes events as property exemplifications at a time, but these are clearly states on the current understanding.
Cf. Lormand’s (1996) intriguing model.
1989: 99–100.
This provides a response to Tye and Wright, a way of maintaining that (i) The (conscious) thought is a-temporal, while (ii) the phenomenology of thinking it evolves.
On one reading it re-capitulates Crane’s first argument. I read the mention of states persisting as support for premise one, i.e. the claim in effect that events not states are the appropriate constituents of the stream of consciousness.
He also says the HOT’s ‘onset’ initiates consciousness (2005: 322), suggesting an event.
Modulo its allowing the inclusion of states in the relevant events. What, incidentally, about a version of Crane’s second argument with premise two strengthened, to say the stream of consciousness features events and no states, not even indirectly? That would work against HOT theory etc., granted, but the question arises of support for this premise. If states can be involved in suitable events in the stream of consciousness, presumably that would be consonant with consciousness’s stream-like phenomenology. But it is hard to see what apart from the phenomenology the advocate of this stronger version of premise two can appeal to, hence the strengthening will seem ad hoc and unmotivated.
I say ‘phenomenally conscious’ to stress that I am talking about so-called ‘inner awareness’ or consciousness, as opposed to the ‘outer awareness’ of red the perceptual state supplies (Kriegel 2009): for outer awareness can perhaps occur without (phenomenal) consciousness, as in blindsight.
1914: 443.
Self-representational HOT theories claim to capture the alleged awareness of awareness (Kriegel 2009). So even granting premise one Crane’s anti-HOT argument may still fail.
Some construe beliefs as personal-level dispositions, e.g. to profess that-p, act as if p is true, etc. But Crane’s reference to ‘other mental states’ suggests he does not view the dispositional construal of beliefs this way (the believer is not disposed to interact with other mental states, on Crane’s account). The relevant states/dispositions seem sub-personal, in the first instance. Cf. his discussion of access-consciousness.
Otherwise we just have a version of argument two, it seems. I criticised earlier the transition from ‘occurrent’ to ‘occurrence’ regarding conscious beliefs.
See, inter alia, Jorba (2016): 78–79 for similar reasoning.
With the proviso, once more, that occurrents needn’t be occurrences.
Following fn. 32 I discount, with Crane, the option of construing beliefs exclusively as dispositions of whole persons.
Some might consider option one unintelligible, as there must be something that is so disposed, something ‘categorical’. I bracket this point.
Endorsement may sound event-like: so an alternative phrasing is an ongoing mental state of commitment to a proposition. That said, sponsor endorsements of sports teams are occurrent, wholly present at a time, and last years. Political endorsements last some weeks.
N.b. when P2 says conscious items are non-dispositional this cannot mean, are not disposed to do anything, because arguably there is no such concrete item—anyway, no conscious item is plausibly like that, wholly inert (that might make it unreportable, even unknowable). If Crane’s argument depended on that reading of P2 it would fail straightforwardly. This phrase must mean, are not ontologically exhausted by such potentials, throwing the spotlight back to P1’s construal of beliefs.
Pitt (2016): 125.
Cf. Pitt forthcoming, Ch.6.
Freud’s realist approach to unconscious states manifests in his analogy of photo negatives—which literally share the shape of the positives.
They seem to be dispositions to believe, rather than dispositional beliefs (Audi 1994).
1992: 166.
Kriegel, a modern Searlian, accepts his (more sophisticated) account is tantamount to eliminativism about unconscious content (2011: 21).
I focused on Searle, but my points apply to the range of kindred accounts, e.g. by Horgan and Graham (2002), Kriegel (2011), Smithies (2019), which share the ostensible attempt to make unconscious content literally consist in a dispositional relationship to conscious phenomenal contents. Some advocates of these accounts are frank about their eliminative upshot (Mendelovici 2018; Strawson 1994). A host of older writers are clear, too, with Pitt and me, on the consequences of construing so-called unconscious beliefs (etc.) merely as tendencies to conscious beliefs (etc.) These are theorists who embraced this conception precisely to block Freud’s posit of genuine unconscious mental states. Instead of unconscious mentality, they maintained, there exist mere brain traces embodying dispositions to genuine, conscious mentality. This company includes Brentano, Mill, Fechner, Jackson, James, and early Freud. For an account see Wakefield (2018). For further argument against the Searlian strategy, see Coleman forthcoming a.
Cf. Hume (1739): 629, James (1890), Ch. 9.
Crane (2017): 09 rejects Searle’s approach to unconscious mentality as eliminativist.
C. I. Lewis introduced qualia as properties of sense-data, and on many views sense-data could exist outside consciousness.
N.b. Searle doesn’t see irreducible conscious qualia as dualism-entailing, for some reason. Below (fn 60) I do endorse the claim that qualia can profitably be viewed as irreducible properties for present purposes. But this has no connection to the issue of their possible unconscious existence.
Moreover, these are properties via which we make perceptual discriminations, and their resemblances must plausibly be isomorphic with those among detectable external stimuli—but this role does not clearly entail consciousness (Rosenthal 2015).
1874: 92–3. Brentano argues separately that though qualia are conscious via a relation, this is a relation they cannot escape. But the argument is weak—see Wakefield (2018).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer here.
Siewert 1998 is plausibly interpreted this way.
See e.g. Pitt (2004), Montague (2015), Strawson (2005).
Kripke (1972), see also Wakefield (2018).
What of the issue of the reducibility, or not, of qualia? Rosenthal, for example, is a pioneer of unconscious qualia, but on the other hand his construal of qualia such that they can be unconscious (his ‘quality space theory’, e.g. Rosenthal 2015) is deflationary enough to take some of the sting, and arguably interest, out of the notion. If qualia are (say) just representational properties amenable to physicalistic reduction then the claim that such properties can exist unconsciously hardly seems controversial (thanks to an anonymous reviewer here). However we can sidestep this issue, noting that proponents of phenomenal intentionality tend not to be reductionists about qualia (Kriegel 2011 toys with a reductive account, yet there is reason to think it is not viable within the context and aims of the ‘phenomenal intentionality program’—see Pautz 2013, Mendelovici 2018, Coleman forthcoming b). The default understanding among phenomenal intentionality theorists is that it is qualia as such, i.e. unreduced, that fix mental content (see e.g. Mendelovici and Bourget 2014, who argue that if naturalism should prove incompatible with such a view we must either reconstrue or relinquish naturalism). Hence my understanding of qualia, for the purposes of this paper, is as irreducible mental properties. How this squares with physicalism and naturalism are interesting questions beyond the scope of the present project (see Coleman forthcoming b for more on this issue).
Lockwood (1989), who also posits unconscious qualia, models phenomenal consciousness as ‘inner direct realism’, partly to exploit this analogy.
Why posit the desires? Admittedly, as is often noted, the belief-desire complex is posited as a holistic whole. That doesn’t obviate the point.
Dispositions are themselves occurrent: real and actual properties, potentials for some manifestation x. But in respect of x-ness—contentfulness say—the distinction stands sharply. Potential x is quite different to actual x.
Just as, what is on a CD lacks music’s effects, hence is not music (Strawson 1994: 165).
Freud is in disrepute, but his philosophical contribution is considerable—see Wakefield’s (2018) meticulous study.
1992: 166.
Searle’s account of the ontology of putatively unconscious intentional states, we noted, undercuts this ostensibly realist approach. Cf. Freud 1912/1958: 261.
Cf. Mellor’s (1978: 87) unconscious belief about traffic-flow that ‘guides my steps about the streets’, and Boghossian (2018: 66–7) on iPhone manipulation. Though routine, such cases are not all-pervasive. I have never believed, hitherto, that Obama has two lungs (Montague 2015). What we often have are dispositions to believe—to combine existing beliefs to yield new judgements—not unconscious beliefs (Audi 1994).
When to ascribe unconscious belief? Some worry that an arbitrariness around such ascriptions threatens any non-dispositional notion of belief (e.g. Mendelovici 2018: 171–2, following Schwitzgebel 2001: 76–7). But this seems a question about detection or epistemology, and my preoccupation—firmly distinguishing questions of belief ascription and the existence of beliefs—is what is there, and its nature. How many unconscious occurrent beliefs someone has is an empirical question, albeit not a straightforward one. If unconscious beliefs consist of qualia then they are as determinate as conscious beliefs/judgements, given PTHOUGHT.
Cf. Vollmer (2008): 329.
Jenkin (2020: 277–78) makes a similar argument.
See Boghossian’s Woody Allen-esque depressive, who goes from thinking ‘I am having so much fun’ to ‘But there is so much suffering in the world’. This is association, not inference, and the ‘taking’ condition explains why. No one would likely take the second thought to follow from the first inferentially (Boghossian 2018: 64).
2018: 66–7.
See also Mendelbaum (2015), §§4.4–5.
See Nelkin (1993): 233 for a parallel argument; Montague (2015): 334.
Many rejectors of unconscious content, from Brentano (1874, 2.2) to Strawson (1994, Ch. 6), place, in this context, an inhumanly high bar on proving or defending a thesis (James 1890, Ch.6 actually invokes systematic instantaneous forgetting of conscious qualia, even for creativity’s incubation period). I take the reasons adduced to make a strong case, that would sway many of the open minded. It is not a realistic test of an argument that ‘those who hold that all mental phenomena are experiential will be unmoved’ and will ‘insist’ on their view (Strawson 1994: 170). Any view can be insisted upon, if we are willing to bear the consequences (e.g. that dreamless sleepers literally lack minds—Ibid.: 167).
If no belief is conscious, no belief can gain consciousness, and no beliefs exist to lose it. If there are no unconscious beliefs, no beliefs exist to gain consciousness, and no belief can lose it.
2016: 123.
This isn’t to deny causation figures as a necessary condition of introspection.
It follows too that there are conscious beliefs: earlier I only showed Crane’s arguments against them failed, and though I offered a model I did not produce any positive arguments for their existence, however plausible that seems.
Cf. Farkas (2008): 40.
Cf. Montague (2015: 332) on unconsciously planning actions.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Torin Alter, Jakub Mihalik, Jerome Wakefield, David Rosenthal, Galen Strawson, David Pitt, Alberto Voltolini, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments and discussion, as well as to audiences at the University of Hertfordshire, and the University of Turin under auspices of the Mark of the Mental Project. This work was funded by Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship MRF-2018–141.
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Coleman, S. The ins and outs of conscious belief. Philos Stud 179, 517–548 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01669-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01669-2