Consciousness: Philosophical Issues
Volume 1, edited by E. Villanueva
Matthew Elton
Department of Philosophy
University of Stirling
Stirling FK9 4LA
UK
matthew.elton@stir.ac.uk
Copyright (c) Matthew Elton 1994
Received: July 1, 1994; Accepted: November 3, 1994
PSYCHE, 1(16), January 1995
Previously held: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v1/psyche-1-16-elton.html
Keywords: consciousness, philosophy of consciousness, reductionism,
qualia.
Review of: Enrique Villanueva (Ed.) (1991): Consciousness:
Philosophical Issues, 1. Atascedero, California: Ridgeview Publishing
Co. 276 p. Price: US $25 pbk. ISBN: 0-924922-01-x.
1. Outline
1.1 The twelve essays in this collection are diverse, and, by the
editor's own admission, five of them are not about consciousness at all.
Nonetheless, taken together, and with one notable exception, they
illustrate an emerging consensus on how to approach consciousness from a
philosophical perspective. In this review, my general strategy will be
to interleave an exposition of what I shall call the
reductive account
of consciousness with a commentary on the papers in the volume.
Importantly, the reductive account moves away from the pessimism
promoted by such authors as Nagel (1974), Jackson (1982), and McGinn
(1991).
1.2 I shall begin my discussion with the papers by David Rosenthal and
Daniel Dennett. These papers set out the key tenets of the reductive
account, viz. that we can get a grip of intentional states of mind
that is independent of consciousness, and that we can understand
consciousness as a structure built out of such intentional states.
Georges Rey and John Biro have rather different agendas, but their best
arguments contribute to the reductive project. On the other hand,
John Searle's paper is set fiercely against it.
1.3 Brian O'Shaughnessy's important contribution deserves special
treatment. It is not clear quite where he stands with respect to
reduction, but he offers an intriguing analysis of the structure of
consciousness, of what the reductionist would seek to reduce. I shall
close with some general comments on the volume and how it contributes to
the evolving literature on the philosophy of consciousness.
2. Reductive Approaches
2.1 Rosenthal has been promoting his higher-order thought account of
consciousness for some years now (e.g. 1986, 1993), and the paper in
this volume is part of his on-going campaign. One of his main agenda
items is that consciousness is not the mark of the mental. Rather,
consciousness is what you get when mental states exhibit a certain
structure. His account then introduces consciousness as "an extrinsic
property of mental states" (p. 30). The story goes like this: a
mental state, p, is conscious if the subject has an (occurrent)
thought (that is based neither on observation nor on inference) to the
effect that one is in mental state p. The presence of the higher-order
thought makes the first-order mental state conscious. Of course, in
the normal run of things, the higher-order thought is not conscious,
but it can be if there is an occurrent thought directed upon it.
2.2 Now, some might regard Rosenthal's theory as providing a good
account of self-consciousness or of introspection, but deny that it
could account for phenomenal consciousness, for our everyday perceptual
experience that is so full of life, character, and supposedly intrinsic
'raw feels.' So in this paper, 'Consciousness and Sensory Quality,'
Rosenthal directly addresses the question of phenomenal consciousness.
His aim is to show that states that are about sensory qualities,
states representing red or pain, etc., need not be intrinsically
conscious. We can, he claims, make good sense of the mind entertaining
qualities of red or of pain quite independently of our being conscious
of such qualities. And, of course, what it is for us to be conscious of
such sensory qualities is to have a thought that we are in a mental
state with the given sensory quality.
2.3 Rosenthal's argument turns on revealing an equivocation in the use
of the expression "sensory quality" (or any of its many cognates:
qualia, raw feel, phenomenal character). The expression is taken to
mean both (i) what it is like to have a sensory state and also, on other
occasions, (ii) the discriminatory role of the sensory state. If you
run these two senses together, then, suggests Rosenthal, you will find
it hard to accept his claim that there can be unexperienced sensory
qualities. But for Rosenthal, it is quite proper to characterize the
quality of mental states as a quality of pain or of red, even under
reading (ii), the discriminatory role of the sensory state. Reading (i)
only comes into play when we have a higher-order thought about being in
the given sensory state. That the state has this quality, he urges,
does not require that this quality be brought to the attention of
consciousness. This seems plausible. We do speak of having the same
headache all afternoon, even though the awareness of our pain is
intermittent. And Rosenthal provides a good model for this. Throughout
the afternoon the sensory state with the 'headaching' quality endures,
but sometimes we have a higher-order thought directed at that state and
sometimes we do not.
2.4 In his positive commentary on Rosenthal's paper, Dennett drives
the point home when he remarks that "if there can be unfelt pains,
there can be unconscious sensations of red" (p. 38). It is hard to
find a natural example of unconscious colour perception, so Dennett
suggests an artificial one. A video-game player may learn to
associate a certain flashing red spot with danger. Now we can imagine
that the player's attention is distracted in such a way that if the
red spot flashes the player is unable to report this fact.
Nonetheless, we may be able to gather evidence that 'red spot'
information has been acquired on the basis of a galvanic skin response
(which provides a measure of anxiety). I'm sympathetic to this
approach. In fact, I'm sometimes surprised at how hard both Rosenthal
and Dennett feel they need to work to establish the point, viz. that
we can make sense of sensory quality independently of conscious
apprehension of such qualities (though this may place me in the
minority). However, this leaves a couple of areas of concern.
2.5 First, Rosenthal does not say enough about what having the
higher-order thought does for the subject. If an unconscious pain can
make you turn over in your sleep, why have conscious pains at all? If
the unconscious state can influence behaviour, what is added by making
it conscious? Looking at the neuropathology of blindsight (Weiskrantz,
1986) can be helpful here. Blindsight subjects fail to have visual
experiences in a part of their visual field. But some information
about the contents of this part of the visual field is clearly getting
through, since if you ask a patient to make guesses about the field's
contents they do much better than chance. Now, Rosenthal can explain
this by suggesting that the sensory state concerned with the 'blind'
part of the field is present, but, because of damage to the brain,
that sensory state cannot engender a higher-order thought. What this
seems to mean is that the role such sensory states can play in
behaviour is severely curtailed. Blindsight patients cannot
spontaneously respond to stimuli in the blind region -- they need to
be prompted to guess. They cannot recruit information about that
region in the planning of actions, and they can only come to learn of
the sensory state by indirect means. Clearly there is plenty of scope
for Rosenthal to extend his analysis of higher-order thoughts and to
show how they relate to certain kinds of mental activity. In
particular, higher-order thoughts seem to be central to a capacity to
report sensory qualities, to exploit them in making plans, to
responding spontaneously to (non-urgent) stimuli, and perhaps even to
constructing one's own self-narrative or mental biography.
2.6 Rosenthal does begin to address some of these issues towards the end
of his paper, where he discusses the relationship between higher-order
thoughts and personhood. (See, Frankfurt, 1971, for a good discussion
of this relationship.) He also claims that "[relatively] weak conceptual
resources will suffice for a higher-order thought to refer to one's own
sensory states" (p. 32). This allows Rosenthal to grant sensations to
animals and neonates. But his generosity has limits as he claims that
"we have no reason to suppose that animals other than persons1> are
aware of whatever higher-order thoughts they may have" (p. 35). And,
for Rosenthal, it is these 'higher-higher-order' thoughts along with
"some measure of rational connectedness" that are crucial to personhood.
These kinds of issues are critical but, sadly, Rosenthal displays only
his intuitions and gives us no firm argument to back them up.
2.7 My second worry I raise on behalf of the traditional pessimist,
who may claim Rosenthal has just left something out of his account.
He has only discussed the psychological aspects of consciousness, only
talked about what Block (in print) calls "access" consciousness and
not talked about what really matters, "phenomenal" consciousness, the
home of qualia and raw feels. Surely phenomenal consciousness does
not simply amount to an occurrent thought that one is in the kind of
mental state typically caused by smelling the scent of a rose? Surely
the content of the mental states is one thing and the quality another.
Content alone cannot suffice to account for experience. Rosenthal,
and his co-conspirator Dennett, are clear on this point. The
position is spelled out by the latter in the following bold statement:
Don't our internal discriminative states also have some special
"intrinsic" properties, the subjective, private, ineffable properties
that constitute the *way things look to us* (sound to us, smell to
us, etc.)? No. The dispositional properties of those discriminative
states already suffice to explain all the effects: the effects on
peripheral behaviour (saying "Red!", stepping the brake, etc.) and
"internal" behaviour (judging "Red!", seeing something as red,
reacting with uneasiness or displeasure if, say, red things upset
one). Any additional "qualitative" properties or qualia would thus
have no positive role to play in any explanations, nor are they
vouchsafed to us "directly" in our intuition. Qualitative properties
that are intrinsically conscious are a myth, an artifact of misguided
theorizing, not anything given pretheoretically (p. 40).
2.8 I'm eager to agree with these sentiments. As it happens, I do think
that episodes of consciousness can be explained by reference to episodes
of thought, thoughts which have content, but which do not have some
additional character or intrinsic quality. Experiences of red, for me,
just are judgements that there is something red out there along with
something like a judgement that I've made just such a judgement (that
there is something red out there). So I subscribe to the broad class of
views that attempt to reduce claims involving consciousness to claims
involving content. The worry here and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere
(Dennett, 1991) is finding a positive argument for this reductionist
view.
3. Arguing for Reduction
3.1 Actually, it is hardly surprising that there is no positive argument
for reductionism. The arguments of the pessimists, if they show
anything, show that such is not available. Recall the 'knowledge
argument' developed by Jackson (1982). If Mary were an expert on
hydrogen, oxygen, and chemistry, then she would be able to find out all
about the macroscopic properties of water. But, from the point of view
of explanation, consciousness is not like that. Give Mary all the facts
there are to know about neurophysiology and psychology (including the
content of judgements entertained by subjects) and Mary, merely in
virtue of having these facts available, won't come to have new
experiences. And, because of this logical point (but see Lewis 1990),
there is some kind of explanatory gap in the case of consciousness.
(This interpretation of the knowledge argument is rehearsed by Rey
(p. 102)
and Biro (p. 128).) What the reductionist tries to show is
that there is no gap in ontology. Just because a certain set of facts
does not obviously entail consciousness, does not mean that those very
facts do not fix consciousness, does not mean that they don't explain it
as best it can be explained.
3.2 So the reductionist strategy goes something like this:
(1) Provide an account of the mental that explains the phenomenology
of experience or, at the very least, explains verbal reports and
behaviour.
(2) Show how this account predicts the kinds of concerns raised by
the pessimists, e.g. the explanatory gap.
(3) Show how alternative accounts that call for extra ingredients are
false or, at least, very unattractive. (By extra ingredients I mean
something over and above mental states with content, e.g. mental
states with intrinsic character or biological properties of a
cognitive mechanism.)
(4) Claim that, after all this work, the reductive account wins by
default.
This is not the most forceful of argumentative strategies, but, in the
case of consciousness, it looks as though it is the best you can get.
3.3 In their contributions to this volume, Rosenthal and Dennett go some
way to addressing the first and third points, but say very little about
the second. Meeting the first two points involves meeting what can be
dubbed the 'polemical challenge':
A polemically successful answer to the [problem of consciousness] and
the knowledge argument must explain the intuitive appeal of the
contention that what it's like is irreducibly non-physical
information about experience (Nemirov, 1990, p. 495).
And for "non-physical" we can read "non-psychological" as well, since
the knowledge argument clearly stands against what I am calling the
reductive account. Fortunately for the reductionist, however, the
papers by Biro and Rey forcefully address the polemical challenge. (Rey
is a reductionist, I think. This is less clear in the case of Biro.)
3.4 Let's take a look at these two papers. Rey's "Sensations in a
Language of Thought" comes in two parts. First Rey defends a modified
version of the language of thought hypothesis (Fodor, 1987) which is
carefully tweaked to cope with perceptual experience as well as
linguiform thinking. This account is Rey's take on naturalizing the
intentionality of perceptual judgements. I've nothing to say about that
here, although I do have grave doubts about such approaches. The second
part deals with various aspects of the polemical challenge. Rey shows
how a special class of inner sentences (specialized for dealing with
perceptual information) can account for phenomenology and will give rise
to "privacy", "unanalyzability", "lack of grain", and "ineffability."
For example, privacy is accounted for by the fact that a subject's own
sensory systems are intimately involved in the production of the
relevant special inner sentences (pp. 97-98). And "the "ineffability"
of sensory experience is a consequence of the fact that no expressions
in a natural language come close to playing the specific role that the
[special sensory-sentences] play in a system's internal language"
(p. 99).
3.5 Rey's arguments strike me as effective, if not entirely novel (see,
for example, the bracing discussion of these issues in Dennett, 1969,
chapter 7, and 1978); but I do find it strange that he feels the need to
link them to his language of thought based account of content. The two
issues seem to be largely orthogonal. The arguments he makes for
special sentences is equally applicable to sub-personal content (see
below) that is not identified with representations in a computational
account of cognitive function. What can be said, however, is that he
shows quite clearly that what is not wrong with language of thought
based accounts is that they cannot account for consciousness.
3.6 Biro's paper, "Consciousness and Subjectivity", aims to address the
following complaint:
Consciousness is essentially theory-resistant: this is because
its essence is bound up with subjectivity, something that by
its very nature must elude theorizing, since the latter's
essential aim is to give an objective account of its phenomena
(p. 115).
3.7 Biro notes that the expression 'point of view' often seems to do
most of the work in arguing for the irreducibility of the subjective;
especially in Nagel's work. What does the expression 'point of view'
mean? Biro offers us three suggestions. First, it can refer to "the
beliefs, conceptual framework or even values of some subject or group"
(p. 117). Second, it can be taken to denote a location or vantage
point, as in the view from the top of the tower. Biro calls this the
'fixed' reading and contrasts it with a third suggestion, the
'portable' reading. This reading indexically refers to the point of
view of the subject, wherever the subject happens to be right now. It
is portable since it moves as the subject moves.
3.8 The first and second reading clearly present no special problems for
objective theorizing. The third does present a problem but, argues
Biro, it is a trivial one:
If what matters about my experience is its mine-ness..., its being so
does indeed seem to be the sort of things that cannot be included in
any description of the experience, and thus it may really make
experience theory resistant. The trouble is that it does so in a
merely trivial way... Mere ownership does not in general contribute
anything to the nature or character of the thing owned, and there is
no reason to think that it does so when that thing is experience
(pp. 121-122).
3.9 Biro neatly shows how Nagel slides between the portable and fixed
readings, and argues that once the distinction is made clear Nagel's
dramatic conclusions fall. (He also makes some interesting remarks
about types of point of view, e.g. about the differences between bat and
human points of view. Here I think Biro underestimates the importance
of the difficulty in drawing a line between a cognitive and perceptual
system -- this difficulty, I would suggest, is conceptual rather than
empirical.) The overall conclusion is that although different subjects
do have different points of view on the world, this does not license
pessimism with respect to objective theorizing. An individual's point
of view is highly specific (as informed by background beliefs, type
of cognitive and perceptual system, etc.) and rich with indexically
specified content, but it does not comprise any "inexpressible
additional content ... that is in principle unknowable by another
individual" (pp. 130-131).
4. Against Reduction
4.1 The reductive account turns on making good sense of the attribution
of intentional states without first invoking the concept of
consciousness. Searle thinks this is just daft:
The attribution of any intentional phenomena to a system, whether
"computational" or otherwise, is dependent on a prior acceptance of
our ordinary notion of the mind, the conscious "phenomenological"
mind (p. 47).
4.2 Searle is anxious to qualify this strong claim, since he doesn't
want to deny unconscious mental states, which, for him, include
repressed beliefs and desires as well as intentional states that are
simply not present to the mind at a particular time. He argues that
unconscious mental states are best understood as dispositions of the
underlying neurophysiology of the brain to give rise to occurrent
conscious mental states. So consciousness, even here, remains the mark
of the mental.
4.3 The argument Searle makes turns on two features of intentional
states, two features that he claims require us to invoke consciousness.
[Intentional] states, conscious or unconscious, essentially have
aspectual character and this aspectual character is essentially
subjective, in the sense that it cannot be exhaustively accounted for
in third person "objective" terms (p. 58).
The aspectual character of an intentional state is, very roughly, its
sense or cognitive significance. When I'm thirsty my thought is
directed at water (my thought refers to that stuff). But I think of
water under the aspect 'water' (the liquid stuff that is all around)
rather than, say, H2O (a chemical described in a serious textbook). I
wholly agree that aspectual shape is a mark of an intentional state, and
I also agree that many thoughts have an indexical character
(e.g. because they are about what I am looking at here and now),
which gives rise to a certain kind of subjectivity. But I am wholly
unpersuaded by his arguments that this subjectivity "cannot be
exhaustively accounted for in third person "objective" terms" (ibid.).
Here Searle seems to be equating a puzzle about phenomenal experience
(qualia) with a puzzle about intentionality. Yes, it is clear that he
thinks the two are inextricably linked. What is not clear is how he
supports this claim with argument.
4.4 I don't think bacteria or insects are conscious, and I don't think
Searle does either. But the best way to explain the behaviour (rather
than the mere bodily movements, see Dretske 1988) of such creatures is
to ascribe cognitive and motivational states that are about features
of their world. These states will be subjective (not in Searle's
inflated sense, but in the defensible indexical manner) and will have
aspectual shape. For example, a simple animal might exploit a certain
chemical trace as a reliable indicator of food nearby. Such a creature
directs its desires (motivational states) at its food source (this is
what the motivational state refers to), but it will ignore the food if
some devious experimenter has suppressed the chemical trace. Its desire
comes to be about its food source only via its intentional state and
the way in which it can represent the world.
4.5 Although Searle makes much of the conscious-unconscious distinction,
he is not prepared to countenance a distinction between sub-personal and
personal content (Dennett, 1969). Searle's conscious and unconscious
states are both examples of personal content, content for the unified
and conscious agent (a notion which Searle, unlike Rosenthal and
O'Shaughnessy, does precious little to analyze). Sub-personal content,
on the other hand, does not require us to invoke a unified and enduring
psychological subject. We can use sub-personal content to explain the
behaviour of simple creatures2> and to explain parts of the behaviour
of our own cognitive systems. Think about the judgements that your
visual system makes when it plans and executes the movements of your
eyes as they saccade across a page of text. If we want to explain the
reasons for, rather than the causes of, such movements, we have to
invoke intentional language--we have to invoke content. But such
content is not available to the person, and is probably not even
available in principle. Such content is sensibly called sub-personal.
If one can describe such sub-personal intentional states as thoughts,
then they certainly aren't 'thoughts' of the subject whose eyes are
being directed. (They are more like 'thoughts' of the subject's brain.)
4.6 Once a distinction is made between personal and sub-personal
content, it is possible to embrace many of Searle's points by taking
them to apply only to personal content. The reductionist strategy is to
show how sub-personal contents conspire to create personal content by
bringing into being thoughts that are about an on-going psychological
entity with memories, intentions, and phenomenal sensations.
5. What Is Being Reduced
5.1 The star paper in the collection is O'Shaughnessy's "The Anatomy of
Consciousness". I can hardly do it justice in the short space available
here, but I shall try to give you its flavour. Unlike the other essays
I have discussed, this paper is not directly concerned with giving an
account of intentionality or phenomenal experience. Rather:
It is [concerned] with the vastly familiar light that appears in the
head when a person surfaces from sleep or anaesthetic or dream. In
other words with the state we call "waking", which I shall mostly
refer to as "consciousness" (p. 135).
5.2 The paper begins with an investigation into the logical form of
states of consciousness. This then broadens into a discussion of the
properties of the various modes and the manner in which they
interrelate. O'Shaughnessy argues that consciousness (being awake and
alert) is the essential defining mode of all other modes of
consciousness, such as sleep and dreaming, and that other modes are
"privative derivatives". Consciousness, for a particular creature, is
the mode of being such that, given the capacities of the creature, it
maximises the degree to which the creature is in touch with reality.
For example, it is the mode of being in which "belief-formation out of
veridical perception should be such as normally to make knowledge of
that belief" (p. 157). This, O'Shaughnessy argues, is the "prime
function of the state of consciousness" (p. 159).
5.3 Of course there is something it is like to be a conscious creature
because consciousness supports episodes of thought and phenomenal
experience. But O'Shaughnessy insists that it makes no sense to claim
that consciousness itself is like anything, or that it is directed upon
anything in an intentional manner. And so, curiously, consciousness has
a kind of invisibility, on account of the fact that "consciousness is
a system and supports a system" (p. 169). And this makes
investigating its structure somewhat difficult. However, investigating
the privative modes of consciousness can help. The various privative
modes exhibit absences of essential component functions of consciousness
and so help make plain those component functions that are otherwise
difficult (though not, if I read O'Shaughnessy aright, impossible) to
divine.
5.4 The various privative modes are, like consciousness, stable systems
for underpinning psychological activity, but modes which fail to fulfil
the prime function of the state of consciousness in that they fail to
aim squarely at reality. I can best illustrate this idea by discussing
one of O'Shaughnessy's key examples: dreaming. He uses this example to
explore both the privative mode, dreaming, and also to reveal the role
of action and temporal thought in consciousness (pp. 161-167). He
argues that in the dream the subject's thoughts of the future are
directed not at the future of the dream, but at the future of reality.
In our nightmares we fear genuine danger, not a dream-like danger. And
with respect to the past:
The dream present lacks modes of solidarity with, or responsibility
to its past... I can be dreaming of anything in one instant and
anything in the next. In a sense therefore the dream is created
anew in each instant: not to the point where narrative disintegrates
into unsynthesizable fragments; but in so far as the character of the
present experience necessitates neither a past nor a cognitive
attitude to the past... [It] is continuity of content, rather than
persistence of contents, that unifies the dream (p. 165).
5.5 In sum "the dream present is a sort of Time Island" (p. 166) that
lacks proper connection with a past and a future. The study of the
privative mode of dreaming helps us understand the unprivated state.
For:
[The dream] relation to Time is inconsistent with consciousness. This
is because consciousness requires that we be in a position to
perceive events across time; which is to say, not merely events
which themselves cross time, but the very profile across time of the
event itself (p. 166).
5.6 O'Shaughnessy develops this point by asking us to consider what goes
on when we understand a spoken sentence, or listen to a piece of music.
"[Such] perception is only possible if we retain cognitive links with
our internal past, and an open but real cognitive connection with an
anticipated internal future." With the aid of some elaborate, and
possibly quite delicate, argument O'Shaughnessy suggests a link between
internal mental action (the will) and temporal capacity:
[We] will not achieve [consciousness of the spatio-temporal world] if
we do not relate cognitively and experientially to the past and
future of things; and we will not relate thus to their past and
future if we do not relate thus to our own internal past and future;
and that this last is something that is manifestly accomplished in
intentional internal action... (p. 167)
5.7 So the picture of consciousness painted is one of an active and
enquiring mind that aims to keep itself properly in touch with reality.
The various component parts of consciousness are deeply interrelated,
but we can come to understand them through careful analysis and by
considering various privative modes. It is this structure, then, that
the reductive account seeks to explain. It seeks to show how
sub-personal contents can conspire to give rise to the system of
consciousness, and its derivative modes, that O'Shaughnessy describes.
It is not clear to me what he would make of such a project. He says of
the system that is consciousness that:
[Here] mental explanation comes to an end, and openly gives ways to
the cerebral. While the properties of consciousness are susceptible
of mental explanation in terms of its own mental constituents, the
existence of consciousness is not; and the same must be true of the
constituents themselves. Consciousness and constituents arise
simultaneously together poised on the one purely physical base
(pp. 169-170).
5.8 Villanueva (introduction, p. 7) interprets this remark as opening up
space for a "sub-personal, cerebral" approach. The supporter of the
reductive account is unlikely to be happy with the implied
interchangeability between the expression 'sub-personal' and the
expressions 'cerebral' or 'purely physical base.' Whether sub-personal
content can be reduced to the physical (or the computational) is a
further question, and one which is independent of the reductive
account's reductive aspirations. What is not clear to me in
O'Shaughnessy is whether he thinks there is no intermediate level
between consciousness (personal content) and the physical, or whether he
thinks that the intermediate level (sub-personal content) cannot itself
be reduced. But, O'Shaughnessy's views aside, the supporters of the
reductive account can exploit his excellent analysis for their own ends.
And this analysis, in part, fills in some of the gaps in Rosenthal's
account of which I complained above.
6. Closing Remarks
6.1 This volume comprises some useful essays on consciousness, as well
as five essays on other philosophy of mind topics, which I've not
discussed here.
3> I've concentrated on certain themes, but there's much
more material to be mined from this collection. On the other hand, most
of the content here can be found in other places (a good source is
Davies & Humphreys, 1993), with the exception, to my knowledge, of the
excellent O'Shaughnessy paper. Added to this the very poor standard of
editorial production (an unacceptable number of typographical errors,
missing references, inaccurate cross-referencing, etc.), this is not a
volume I could whole-heartedly recommend.
6.2 For some time much of the philosophical literature on consciousness
has focused on debating the very possibility of providing an account,
with much of the lead being taken by various prominent pessimists. The
papers in this volume indicate a new way for the debate to turn.
Optimists, especially Dennett and Rosenthal, have something like a
positive account of consciousness to offer, the reductive account. The
very coherence of such an account can be questioned, as it is by Searle,
and the details can be hotly disputed. And, of course, the reductive
account almost certainly won't cheer the diehard pessimist, the
anti-physicalist, or the epiphenomenalist, all of whom think that what
makes conscious states light up is something outside the realm of
scientific analysis. Their pessimism won't just go away, but there is
still something in the new turn of debate for them. For although
adherents of the reductive account aim to provide necessary and
sufficient conditions for consciousness, in the interests of keeping the
discussion fresh, and avoiding the tiresome gloom of the pessimistic
school, reductionists may choose to couch their theory as one of merely
necessary conditions. Certainly all parties can be interested in what
it is the reductionist seeks to reduce. O'Shaughnessy explores this
territory in an unashamedly a priori fashion (p. 170), but more
empirical approaches could also be offered, and the merits of the
contrasting methodologies debated. These kinds of issues, issues that
are put into focus by putting forward a positive account of
consciousness, take the philosophy of consciousness into more
interesting areas than the largely negative debate fostered by the
important work of the pessimists.
Acknowledgements
This work was made possible by SERC grant ref. 91313730.
Notes
1. Rosenthal ought to use the word 'human' here, since the use of the
word 'person' in contrast with animal simply begs the question he is
addressing.
2. I would claim that such organisms do not realise psychological
subjects at all -- such organisms bring forth biological selves, but not
psychological ones.
3. For the record the remaining five begin with an indifferent paper on
internalism and externalism by Ernest Sosa. Then, there is an
interesting paper by Donald Davidson, titled "What is Present to the
Mind." Davidson discusses the problems faced by an externalist theory of
self-knowledge. Akeel Bilgrami provides a good commentary on Davidson.
Finally, James Tomberlin has a paper that, in a less than edifying
manner, discusses Chisholm's views on intentionality and
self-ascription. Lynn Pasquarella's excellent commentary on Tomberlin
describes Chisholm's and Tomberlin's views in a clear and concise
way--she also demonstrates how Chisholm's account readily withstands
Tomberlin's criticism.
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