Abstract
I examine an argument proposed by Tye and Wright (2011), inspired by Geach (1957), which holds that a correct understanding of how conceptual thought occurs in time demands we expel it from experience. This would imply—pace William James— that the “stream of consciousness” is not, even in part, a “stream of thought.” I argue that if we closely examine what seems to support crucial premises of their argument, we will find this undermines its other assumptions, and points us to a way of placing thought in time that they neglect. Ultimately, attention to the phenomenology of language comprehension and production not only undercuts (what I’ll call) their “temporality argument” against including thought in experience; it prepares the ground for a case in favor of inclusion. In critiquing their argument I hope not just to disarm an objection to a view I espouse, nor even just to discover new support for it, but also to shed some light on the temporality of thought and its relation to self-expression.
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Notes
Someone might say I shouldn’t assume we ever have access in reflection to truly unpremeditated self-expression. What we take for this is always preceded by some reflectively inaccessible planning of just what to say, wherein lies the only genuinely unpremeditated self-expression—buried in the cognitive unconscious. (This, I take it, would be the view of Carruthers (2015).) It’s true that I have not been taking this perspective explicitly into account. I will say that I don’t, as a matter of fact, believe there is good reason to entirely displace unpremeditated self-expression into some reflectively inaccessible compartment of mind, and declare reflectively accessible self-expression a cognitive illusion. But arguing this now would take me too far afield. For present purposes it’s not necessary. We could leave undecided whether, prior to the experience of having something to say without reflectively accessible premeditation, there was nonetheless reflectively inaccessible premeditation of the relevant sort. Still the question would remain: to what time are we to assign the reflectively accessible occurrence of thought and understanding that (on some accounts) merely recapitulates some previous, hidden cogitation? We’d still have reason to think that this occurrence of sentential thought does not entirely precede its completed expression. For I still have to account for the contrast between self-expression with and without reflectively accessible premeditation, and what that is like for me. And still, it seems, I cannot place the thought here entirely before its completed expression in both cases without effacing this distinction. To simplify, I will leave aside this elaboration, and frame the argument in terms that take for granted the existence of reflectively accessible unpremeditated self-expression—recognizing that we could restate matters in the way just suggested, if called to do so.
References
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Siewert, C. On needing time to think: consciousness, temporality, and self-expression. Phenom Cogn Sci 19, 413–429 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09631-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09631-8