Abstract
The question I will address has to do with the conditions that characterize a system as intentional, and that are also occasionally used in specifying what properties accrue to a conscious system. In the case of intentionality, it is required of a representation — i.e., in Dretske’s terms, an indicator which has the function of indicating what it indicates — that it should not only be present in a system, but that it should have a meaning for that system. The same point is hammered in by Millikan (1993): The kind of natural sign that is used as an inner representation “must be one that functions as a sign or representation for the system itself’ 86). Proponents of intentional approaches for consciousness tend to reconduct an analogous requirement: the intentional content of a conscious state should be somewhat centrally available in order to be fit for controlling reasoning, rational action and verbal report1. I will call “globality condition” what is common to those two definitions.
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Notes
Cf. inter alia, Baars, (1988) and his notion of a “global workspace”; Schacter, (1989) and Dretske (1995).
The set of prerequisites posited by Dretske for some internal state to have causal content can be reconstructed through the following line of reasoning. 1) An internal state should be granted a causally efficacious meaning only if that meaning is “instrumental in shaping the organism’s behavior” (1990a, 14). 2) Three further conditions at least must be present for such a shaping to happen. a) Such a system must be able to pick up present information (1978, 115). This condition is fulfilled only in systems able to learn. Evolutionary solutions — such as tropisms, of fixed action patterns — lack this feature: they evolved as a result of past correlations between a type of system and a type of environment. Correlatively, causality in these processes is secured not by any informational content, but by evolutionary history and genes selection (1989, 12). b) Such a system can respond to information only if that information is available to it in some central way: “You earn no cognitive credits for the detective capabilities of your parts — not unless the results are made available to you for modulation of your response” (1978, 113). c) It must use that information to satisfy its various purposes, i.e. respond behaviorally to the content of its own internal states. I will comment here exclusively on conditions that involve the system’s point of view.
In Millikan’s words, on tokens belonging to the same “established family”. (Cf. Millikan, 1984).
Dretske (1988) uses the term “behavior” as referring not to overt movement, but to the whole process through which an internal state produces a bodily movement. I will not use this analysis in the present context, and will keep the usual meaning of behavior in my own presentation.
I will not develop here a full criticism of this way of defining the functional character of a representation. I will grant that, to qualify as cognitive states, internal states must indeed have some causal efficacy as a result of their informational content. Still the condition that an internal state has intentional causal powers only if it shapes behavior may be considered unnecessarily strong: it seems sufficient for an internal state to have causal efficacy as a result of its informational content, that it should be able to influence in some regular or principled way some other internal state of the same system, irrespective of its actual effect on behavior. I thank Georges Rey for suggesting this note.
Cf. Bigelow & Pargetter, 1987, Proust, 1995.
I borrow the following examples from Heyes & Dickinson, 1993.
Cf. Goodman, (1979).
I will not discuss at present the various possible formats in which information can be functionally dispatched for further processing and retrieval: protobeliefs, imagistic, subdoxastic representations may well contribute to cognition at various points of our mental activity and even interact.
This view is compatible with the claim that there are conscious states (phenomenalconscious states) that are not essentially tied to intentional states. cf. Nelkin (1993).
In fact, as Marcel shows, the notion of unity of consciousness decomposes into three notions of unity, depending on the sense of “consciousness” that is involved. 1) Various types of states can be said conscious: i) phenomenal experience, ii) beliefs and desires, and iii) second-order representations of i) and ii) can qualify as conscious states. The criterion for unity of consciousness refers in this case to the inseparable character of those three types of states. 2) One may also raise the question of unity of consciousness inside a particular level. At level i), one may ask whether there is, in Marcel’s words, “oneness in a particular sensation “. At level ii), one may ask; whether a belief or a desire is conscious in the unitary sense that there exists only one way of being conscious of it. At level iii) one may ask whether there is only one second-order representation for a primary conscious state. 3) Finally there is the sense of the global perspective which can be obtained at the subject level, and which constitutes the global subjective point of view on external conditions; this sense of the unity of consciousness refers to the existence of a “single subject of experience and action”. Although all these different notions of unity should be explored, we will concentrate here on the subject level.
Block (1995) hypothesizes that, in cases like blindsight or alexia, subjects can use information they don’t have conscious access to in a modular way (one specialized module directly influences the response); whereas “once the Executive system has more information, it ‘takes over’, preventing peripheral systems from controlling responses”.
When applying Rosenthal’s terminology to Marcel’s experiments, one faces a methodological difficulty in respect of the notion of a report. Is verbal report on a par with a blink — or a press-report ? Rosenthal remarks in a different context that whereas an intentional state is always conscious when it is expressed in speech, it need not be when it is expressed in a non-verbal way, for example in a facial reaction of distaste. If my “blinking for light” is simply a learnt association between a stimulus and a particular motor response, it is not clear that it qualifies as a report. It may not involve any higher-order thought, i.e. a conscious mental state. One can try to disambiguate those two types of responses (a report versus an associative one) through a proper emphasis in the instructions given to the subjects. One should also observe that non-speaking “higher’, animals should be granted conscious states even if they lack a verbal capacity.
This is not to say that phenomenal consciousness “really does something”; but that it is” correlated” with a computational function, or better that it should be identified “ with such a function. On this important caution in the ways of talking of a role for consciousness, see Block (1995), in part. p. 229.
Marcel does not seem to consider the possibility that, in a task where all three response modes are requested, the subject might have a strategy favoring a single dominant response mode, which may vary with the context of the task.
For evidence, see Gallistel (1980).
Such as Stich, (1983), Rey (1995). See also Dennett, (1978).
Refusing as Rosenthal does that a conscious mental state is one of which one is not immediately, but only inferentially aware (1993, 197), seems to pose problem at the level of thought-consciousness; characteristically, I become conscious of my beliefs and my desires by inferring them from my behaviors, or from my holding other beliefs and desires.
I thank Pierre Poirier and David Rosenthal for discussing parts of the present paper, and Georges Rey for his useful comments on a previous draft. Mistakes remain mine.
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Proust, J. (1999). Intentionality, Consciousness and the System’s Perspective. In: Fisette, D. (eds) Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_3
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