Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A
Epistemic consciousness
Section snippets
The background: ordinary psychology and our knowledge of mind
We have a rich set of mental concepts which we are able to use in making ascriptions of mental states. We conceive of human behaviour, speech and thought as informed by, shaped by, and caused by a complex network of states and events which, like utterances, are taken to be about objects, properties and states of affairs. If our conception of mentality did not have this systematic causal side to it then we would have no general right to ascribe mental states on the basis of observed patterns of
The epistemic conscious/unconscious contrast
The remarks above serve to introduce some of the distinctive features of our ordinary psychology and, in introducing them, we have marked certain assumptions about the distinctive nature of self-knowledge, at least as it is manifested in mental self-ascriptions. I now want to use this ordinary psychological background to show how the introduction of the notion of unconscious mental states is motivated and justified. The first step is to show how certain explanatory contexts require the
Subjective experiential consciousness
The strongest objection to the idea of epistemic consciousness is that it cannot really be a notion of consciousness, insofar as a mental state’s being conscious consists in its being like something for a subject to be in it or have it. Rather than fixing on this experiential notion of consciousness as the most obvious and intuitive one, let us turn matters on their head for a moment. Given the above story about the generation of a legitimate topic of interest for psychology it might seem
Epistemic consciousness and access-consciousness
I have been arguing that there are at least two distinct, legitimate notions of mental state consciousness. The concept of a conscious mental state is not a univocal one. Ned Block has argued that mental state consciousness is a mongrel concept (Block, 1995, Block, 1997). Block insists that ‘the word “consciousness” connotes a number of different concepts and denotes a number of different phenomena’ (Block, 1997, p. 375). How does the distinction between epistemic consciousness and the
Epistemic consciousness and constitutive higher-order representation conceptions of consciousness
Epistemic consciousness is not the same as access-consciousness. It may now seem that the notion of epistemic consciousness is, or provides grounds for the acceptability of, some kind of higher-order representation conception of mental state consciousness. We should keep apart (a) the view that when a mental state is conscious (either in the epistemic or the subjective experiential sense) the subject can form a higher-order representation of it from (b) the view that a mental state’s
Reasons for keeping epistemic consciousness in play
The epistemic notion of consciousness allows us to effect a partition within the class of mental states by way of how they stand, epistemically, in relation to psychological subjects. This notion of consciousness emerged out of a background assumption that there is a distinctive way in which we know our own minds. The second line of thought, the one which led to the idea that consciousness is a matter of its being like something to be in a mental state, derived from the distinctiveness of having
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Peter Lipton, David Bain, Martin Kusch and Tim Crane for helpful comments and objections.
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