The terms 'axiom' and 'postulate' are often used synonymously. Sometimes the word axiom is used to refer to basic principles that are assumed by every deductive system, and the term postulate is used to refer to first principles peculiar to a particular system, such as Euclidean geometry. Infrequently, the word axiom is used to refer to first principles in logic, and the term postulate is used to refer to first principles in mathematics.
The applications of game theory are wide-ranging and account for steadily growing interest in the subject. Von Neumann and Morgenstern indicated the immediate utility of their work on mathematical game theory by linking it with economic behavior. Models can be developed, in fact, for markets of various commodities with differing numbers of buyers and sellers, fluctuating values of supply and demand, and seasonal and cyclical variations, as well as significant structural differences in the economies concerned. Here game theory is especially relevant to the analysis of conflicts of interest in maximizing profits and promoting the widest distribution of goods and services. Equitable division of property and of inheritance is another area of legal and economic concern that can be studied with the techniques of game theory.
In the social sciences, n-person game theory has interesting uses in studying, for example, the distribution of power in legislative procedures. This problem can be interpreted as a three-person game at the congressional level involving vetoes of the president and votes of representatives and senators, analyzed in terms of successful or failed coalitions to pass a given bill. Problems of majority rule and individual decision making are also amenable to such study.
Sociologists have developed an entire branch of game theory devoted to the study of issues involving group decision making. Epidemiologists also make use of game theory, especially with respect to immunization procedures and methods of testing a vaccine or other medication. Military strategists turn to game theory to study conflicts of interest resolved through 'battles' where the outcome or payoff of a given war game is either victory or defeat. Usually, such games are not examples of zero-sum games, for what one player loses in terms of lives and injuries is not won by the victor. Some uses of game theory in analyses of political and military events have been criticized as a dehumanizing and potentially dangerous oversimplification of necessarily complicating factors. Analysis of economic situations is also usually more complicated than zero-sum games because of the production of goods and services within the play of a given 'game'.
All is the same in the classical theory of the syllogism, a term in a categorical proposition is distributed if the proposition entails any proposition obtained from it by substituting a term denoted by the original. For example, in ‘all dogs bark’ the term ‘dogs’ is distributed, since it entails ‘all terriers bark’, which is obtained from it by a substitution. In ‘Not all dogs bark’, the same term is not distributed, since it may be true while ‘not all terriers bark’ is false.
When a representation of one system by another is usually more familiar, in and for itself, that those extended in representation that their workings are supposed analogous to that of the first. This one might model the behaviour of a sound wave upon that of waves in water, or the behaviour of a gas upon that to a volume containing moving billiard balls. While nobody doubts that models have a useful ‘heuristic’ role in science, there has been intense debate over whether a good model, or whether an organized structure of laws from which it can be deduced and suffices for scientific explanation. As such, the debate of topic was inaugurated by the French physicist Pierre Marie Maurice Duhem (1861-1916), in ‘The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory’ (1954) by which Duhem’s conception of science is that it is simply a device for calculating as science provides deductive system that is systematic, economical, and predictive, but not that represents the deep underlying nature of reality. Steadfast and holding of its contributive thesis that in isolation, and since other auxiliary hypotheses will always be needed to draw empirical consequences from it. The Duhem thesis implies that refutation is a more complex matter than might appear. It is sometimes framed as the view that a single hypothesis may be retained in the face of any adverse empirical evidence, if we prepared to make modifications elsewhere in our system, although strictly speaking this is a stronger thesis, since it may be psychologically impossible to make consistent revisions in a belief system to accommodate, say, the hypothesis that there is a hippopotamus in the room when visibly there is not.
Primary and secondary qualities are the division associated with the 17th-century rise of modern science, wit h its recognition that the fundamental explanatory properties of things that are not the qualities that perception most immediately concerns. There latter are the secondary qualities, or immediate sensory qualities, including colour, taste, smell, felt warmth or texture, and sound. The primary properties are less tied to there deliverance of one particular sense, and include the size, shape, and motion of objects. In Robert Boyle (1627-92) and John Locke (1632-1704) the primary qualities are scientifically tractable, objective qualities essential to anything material, are of a minimal listing of size, shape, and mobility, i.e., the state of being at rest or moving. Locke sometimes adds number, solidity, texture (where this is thought of as the structure of a substance, or way in which it is made out of atoms). The secondary qualities are the powers to excite particular sensory modifications in observers. Once, again, that Locke himself thought in terms of identifying these powers with the texture of objects that, according to corpuscularian science of the time, were the basis of an object’s causal capacities. The ideas of secondary qualities are sharply different from these powers, and afford us no accurate impression of them. For Renè Descartes (1596-1650), this is the basis for rejecting any attempt to think of knowledge of external objects as provided by the senses. But in Locke our ideas of primary qualities do afford us an accurate notion of what shape, size,. And mobility are. In English-speaking philosophy the first major discontent with the division was voiced by the Irish idealist George Berkeley (1685-1753), who probably took for a basis of his attack from Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), who in turn cites the French critic Simon Foucher (1644-96). Modern thought continues to wrestle with the difficulties of thinking of colour, taste, smell, warmth, and sound as real or objective properties to things independent of us.
Continuing as such, is the doctrine advocated by the American philosopher David Lewis (1941-2002), in that different possible worlds are to be thought of as existing exactly as this one does. Thinking in terms of possibilities is thinking of real worlds where things are different. The view has been charged with making it impossible to see why it is good to save the child from drowning, since there is still a possible world in which she (or her counterpart) drowned, and from the standpoint of the universe it should make no difference which world is actual. Critics also charge either that the notion fails to fit with a coherent theory lf how we know about possible worlds, or with a coherent theory of why we are interested in them, but Lewis denied that any other way of interpreting modal statements is tenable.
The proposal set forth that characterizes the ‘modality’ of a proposition as the notion for which it is true or false. The most important division is between propositions true of necessity, and those true as things are: Necessary as opposed to contingent propositions. Other qualifiers sometimes called ‘modal’ include the tense indicators, ‘it will be the case that ‘p’, or ‘it was the case that ‘p’, and there are affinities between the ‘deontic’ indicators, ‘it ought to be the case that ‘p’, or ‘it is permissible that ‘p’, and the of necessity and possibility.
The aim of a logic is to make explicit the rules by which inferences may be drawn, than to study the actual reasoning processes that people use, which may or may not conform to those rules. In the case of deductive logic, if we ask why we need to obey the rules, the most general form of answer is that if we do not we contradict ourselves(or, strictly speaking, we stand ready to contradict ourselves. Someone failing to draw a conclusion that follows from a set of premises need not be contradicting him or herself, but only failing to notice something. However, he or she is not defended against adding the contradictory conclusion to his or fer set of beliefs.) There is no equally simple answer in the case of inductive logic, which is in general a less robust subject, but the aim will be to find reasoning such hat anyone failing to conform to it will have improbable beliefs. Traditional logic dominated the subject until the 19th century., and has become increasingly recognized in the 20th century, in that finer work that were done within that tradition, but syllogistic reasoning is now generally regarded as a limited special case of the form of reasoning that can be reprehend within the promotion and predated values, these form the heart of modern logic, as their central notions or qualifiers, variables, and functions were the creation of the German mathematician Gottlob Frége, who is recognized as the father of modern logic, although his treatment of a logical system ass an abreact mathematical structure, or algebraic, has been heralded by the English mathematician and logician George Boole (1815-64), his pamphlet The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) pioneered the algebra of classes. The work was made of in An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854). Boole also published many works in our mathematics, and on the theory of probability. His name is remembered in the title of Boolean algebra, and the algebraic operations he investigated are denoted by Boolean operations.
The syllogistic, or categorical syllogism is the inference of one proposition from two premises. For example is, ‘all horses have tails, and things with tails are four legged, so all horses are four legged. Each premise has one term in common with the other premises. The term that ds not occur in the conclusion is called the middle term. The major premise of the syllogism is the premise containing the predicate of the contraction (the major term). And the minor premise contains its subject (the minor term). So the first premise of the example in the minor premise the second the major term. So the first premise of the example is the minor premise, the second the major premise and ‘having a tail’ is the middle term. This enable syllogisms that there of a classification, that according to the form of the premises and the conclusions. The other classification is by figure, or way in which the middle term is placed or way in within the middle term is placed in the premise.
Although the theory of the syllogism dominated logic until the 19th century, it remained a piecemeal affair, able to deal with only relations valid forms of valid forms of argument. There have subsequently been reargued actions attempting, but in general it has been eclipsed by the modern theory of quantification, the predicate calculus is the heart of modern logic, having proved capable of formalizing the calculus rationing processes of modern mathematics and science. In a first-order predicate calculus the variables range over objects: In a higher-order calculus the may range over predicate and functions themselves. The fist-order predicated calculus with identity includes ‘=’ as primitive (undefined) expression: In a higher-order calculus I t may be defined by law that χ = y iff (∀F)(Fχ ↔ Fy), which gives grater expressive power for less complexity.
Modal logic was of great importance historically, particularly in the light of the deity, but was not a central topic of modern logic in its gold period as the beginning of the 20th century. It was, however, revived by the American logician and philosopher Irving Lewis (1883-1964), although he wrote extensively on most central philosophical topis, he is remembered principally as a critic of the intentional nature of modern logic, and as the founding father of modal logic. His two independent proofs showing that from a contradiction anything follows a relevance logic, using a notion of entailment stronger than that of strict implication.
The imparting information has been conduced or carried out of the prescribed procedures, as impeding of something that tajes place in the chancing encounter out to be to enter ons’s mind may from time to time occasion of various doctrines concerning th necessary properties, ;east of mention, by adding to a prepositional or predicated calculus two operator, □ and ◊ (sometimes written ‘N’ and ‘M’),meaning necessarily and possible, respectfully. These like ‘p ➞ ◊p and □p ➞ p will be wanted. Controversial these include □p ➞ □□p (if a proposition is necessary,. It its necessarily, characteristic of a system known as S4) and ◊p ➞ □◊p (if as preposition is possible, it its necessarily possible, characteristic of the system known as S5). The classical modal theory for modal logic, due to the American logician and philosopher (1940-) and the Swedish logician Sig Kanger, involves valuing prepositions not true or false simpiciter, but as true or false at possible worlds with necessity then corresponding to truth in all worlds, and possibility to truth in some world. Various different systems of modal logic result from adjusting the accessibility relation between worlds.
In Saul Kripke, gives the classical modern treatment of the topic of reference, both clarifying the distinction between names and definite description, and opening te door to many subsequent attempts to understand the notion of reference in terms of a causal link between the use of a term and an original episode of attaching a name to the subject.
One of the three branches into which ‘semiotic’ is usually divided, the study of semantical meaning of words, and the relation of signs to the degree to which the designs are applicable. In that, in formal studies, a semantics is provided for a formal language when an interpretation of ‘model’ is specified. However, a natural language comes ready interpreted, and the semantic problem is not that of specification but of understanding the relationship between terms of various categories (names, descriptions, predicate, adverbs . . . ) and their meaning. An influential proposal by attempting to provide a truth definition for the language, which will involve giving a full structure of different kinds have on the truth conditions of sentences containing them.
Holding that the basic casse of reference is the relation between a name and the persons or object which it names. The philosophical problems include trying to elucidate that relation, to understand whether other semantic relations, such s that between a predicate and the property it expresses, or that between a description an what it describes, or that between myself or the word ‘I’, are examples of the same relation or of very different ones. A great deal of modern work on this was stimulated by the American logician Saul Kripke’s, Naming and Necessity (1970). It would also be desirable to know whether we can refer to such things as objects and how to conduct the debate about each and issue. A popular approach, following Gottlob Frége, is to argue that the fundamental unit of analysis should be the whole sentence. The reference of a term becomes a derivative notion it is whatever it is that defines the term’s contribution to the trued condition of the whole sentence. There need be nothing further to say about it, given that we have a way of understanding the attribution of meaning or truth-condition to sentences. Other approach, searching for a more substantive possibly that causality or psychological or social constituents are pronounced between words and things.
However, following Ramsey and the Italian mathematician G. Peano (1858-1932), it has been customary to distinguish logical paradoxes that depend upon a notion of reference or truth (semantic notions) such as those of the ‘Liar family,, Berry, Richard, etc. form the purely logical paradoxes in which no such notions are involved, such as Russell’s paradox, or those of Canto and Burali-Forti. Paradoxes of the fist type sem to depend upon an element of self-reference, in which a sentence is about itself, or in which a phrase refers to something about itself, or in which a phrase refers to something defined by a set of phrases of which it is itself one. It is to feel that this element is responsible for the contradictions, although self-reference itself is often benign (for instance, the sentence ‘All English sentences should have a verb’, includes itself happily in the domain of sentences it is talking about), so the difficulty lies in forming a condition that existence only pathological self-reference. Paradoxes of the second kind then need a different treatment. Whilst the distinction is convenient. In allowing set theory to proceed by circumventing the latter paradoxes by technical mans, even when there is no solution to the semantic paradoxes, it may be a way of ignoring the similarities between the two families. There is still th possibility that while there is no agreed solution to the semantic paradoxes, our understand of Russell’s paradox may be imperfect as well.
Truth and falsity are two classical truth-values that a statement, proposition or sentence can take, as it is supposed in classical (two-valued) logic, that each statement has one of these values, and non has both. A statement is then false if and only if it is not true. The basis of this scheme is that to each statement there corresponds a determinate truth condition, or way the world must be for it to be true: If this condition obtains the statement is true, and otherwise false. Statements may indeed be felicitous or infelicitous in other dimensions (polite, misleading, apposite, witty, etc.) but truth is the central normative notion governing assertion. Considerations o vagueness may introduce greys into this black-and-white scheme. For the issue to be true, any suppressed premise or background framework of thought necessary make an agreement valid, or a position tenable, a proposition whose truth is necessary for either the truth or the falsity of another statement. Thus if ‘p’ presupposes ‘q’, ‘q’ must be true for ‘p’ to be either true or false. In the theory of knowledge, the English philologer and historian George Collingwood (1889-1943), announces hat any proposition capable of truth or falsity stand on bed of ‘absolute presuppositions’ which are not properly capable of truth or falsity, since a system of thought will contain no way of approaching such a question (a similar idea later voiced by Wittgenstein in his work On Certainty). The introduction of presupposition therefore mans that either another of a truth value is fond, ‘intermediate’ between truth and falsity, or the classical logic is preserved, but it is impossible to tell whether a particular sentence empresses a preposition that is a candidate for truth and falsity, without knowing more than the formation rules of the language. Each suggestion carries coss, and there is some consensus that at least whowhere definite descriptions are involved, examples equally given by regarding the overall sentence as false as the existence claim fails, and explaining the data that the English philosopher Frederick Strawson (1919-) relied upon as the effects of ‘implicature’.
Views about the meaning of terms will often depend on classifying the implicature of sayings involving the terms as implicatures or as genuine logical implications of what is said. Implicatures may be divided into two kinds: Conversational implicatures of the two kinds and the more subtle category of conventional implicatures. A term may as a matter of convention carry an implicature, thus one of the relations between ‘he is poor and honest’ and ‘he is poor but honest’ is that they have the same content (are true in just the same conditional) but the second has implicatures (that the combination is surprising or significant) that the first lacks.
It is, nonetheless, that we find in classical logic a proposition that may be true or false,. In that, if the former, it is said to take the truth-value true, and if the latter the truth-value false. The idea behind the terminological phrases is the analogues between assigning a propositional variable one or other of these values, as is done in providing an interpretation for a formula of the propositional calculus, and assigning an object as the value of any other variable. Logics with intermediate value are called ‘many-valued logics’.
Nevertheless, an existing definition of the predicate’ . . . is true’ for a language that satisfies convention ‘T’, the material adequately condition laid down by Alfred Tarski, born Alfred Teitelbaum (1901-83), whereby his methods of ‘recursive’ definition, enabling us to say for each sentence what it is that its truth consists in, but giving no verbal definition of truth itself. The recursive definition or the truth predicate of a language is always provided in a ‘metalanguage’, Tarski is thus committed to a hierarchy of languages, each with its associated, but different truth-predicate. Whist this enables the approach to avoid the contradictions of paradoxical contemplations, it conflicts with the idea that a language should be able to ay everything that there is to say, and other approaches have become increasingly important.
So, that the truth condition of a statement is the condition for which the world must meet if the statement is to be true. To know this condition is equivalent to knowing the meaning of the statement. Although this sounds as if it gives a solid anchorage for meaning, some of the securities disappear when it turns out that the truth condition can only be defined by repeating the very same statement: The truth condition of ‘now is white’ is that ‘snow is white’, the truth condition of ‘Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded’, is that ‘Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded’. It is disputed whether this element of running-on-the-spot disqualifies truth conditions from playing the central role in a substantives theory of meaning. Truth-conditional theories of meaning are sometimes opposed by the view that to know the meaning of a statement is to be able to use it in a network of inferences.
Taken to be the view, inferential semantics take on the role of sentence in inference give a more important key to their meaning than this ‘external’ relations to things in the world. The meaning of a sentence becomes its place in a network of inferences that it legitimates. Also known as functional role semantics, procedural semantics, or conception to the coherence theory of truth, and suffers from the same suspicion that it divorces meaning from any clear association with things in the world.
Research in neuroscience has shown that language processing is a staggeringly complex phenomenon that places incredible demands on memory and learning. Language functions extend, for example, into all major lobes of the neocortex: Auditory opinion is associated with the temporal area; tactile information is associated with the parietal area, and attention, working memory, and planning are associated with the frontal cortex of the left or dominant hemisphere. The left prefrontal region is associated with verb and noun production tasks and in the retrieval of words representing action. Broca’s area, next to the mouth-tongue region of a motor cortex, is associated with vocalization in word formation, and Wernicke’s area, by the auditory cortex, is associated with sound analysis in the sequencing of words.
Lower brain regions, like the cerebellum, have also evolved in our species to help in language processing. Until recently, the cerebellum was thought to be exclusively involved with automatic or preprogrammed movements such as throwing a ball, jumping over a high hurdle or playing noted orchestrations as on a musical instrument. Imaging studies in neuroscience suggest, however, that the cerebellum awaken within the smoldering embers brought aflame by the sparks of awakening consciousness, to think communicatively during the spoken exchange. Mostly actuated when the psychological subject occurs in making difficult the word associations that the cerebellum plays a role in associations by providing access to automatic word sequences and by augmenting rapid shifts in attention.
The midbrain and brain stem, situated on top of the spinal cord, coordinate and articulate the numerous amounts of ideas and output systems that, to play an extreme and crucial role in the interplay through which the distributable dynamic communicative functions are adaptively adjusted and coordinated. Vocalization has some special associations with the midbrain, which coordinates the interaction of the oral and respiratory tracks necessary to make speech sounds. Since this vocalization requires synchronous activity among oral, vocal, and respiratory muscles, these functions probably connect to a central site. This site resembles the central gray area of the brain. The central gray area links the reticular nuclei and brain stem motor nuclei to comprise a distributed network for sound production. While human speech is dependent on structures in the cerebral cortex, and on rapid movement of the oral and vocal muscles, this is not true for vocalisation in other mammals.
Research in neuroscience reveals that the human brain is a massively parallel system in which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchical organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. And it is now clear that language processing is not accomplished by stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules that were eventually wired together on some neural circuit board.
Similarly, individual linguistic symbols are proceeding by clusters of distributed brain areas and are not produced in a particular area. The specific sound patterns of words may be produced in fairly dedicated regions. But the symbolic and referential relationships between words is generated through a convergence of neural codes from different and independent brain regions. The processes of words comprehension and retrieval result from combinations simpler associative processes in several separate brain regions that require input from other regions. The symbolic meaning of words, like the grammar that is essential for the construction of meaningful relationships between stings of words, is an emergent property from the complex interaction of a large number of brain parts.
While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, the most critical precondition for the evolution of brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered condition for survival in a ne ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. And Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressure in this new ecological niche favoured pre-adaptive changes required for symbolic commonisation. But as this communication resulted in increasingly more complex behaviour evolution began to take precedence of physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageous within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.
Although male and female hominids favoured pair bonding and created more complex social organizations in thr interests of survival, the interplay between social evolution and biological evolution changed the terms of survival radically. The enhanced ability to use symbolic communication to construct of social interaction eventually made this communication the largest determinant of survival. Since this communication was based on a symbolic vocalization that requires the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species, this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate nd distinct from the external material realm.
Nonetheless, if we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about thr actual experience of the world symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. And while one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
Most experts agree that our ancestries became knowledgeably articulated in the spoken exchange as based on complex grammar and syntax between two hundred thousand and some hundred thousand years ago. The mechanisms in the human brain that allowed for this great achievement clearly evolved, however, over great spans of time. In biology textbooks, the lists of prior adaptations that enhanced the ability of our ancestors to use communication normally include those that are inclining to inclinations to increase intelligence. As to approach a significant alteration of oral and auditory abilities, in that the separation or localization of functional representations is found on two sides of the brain. The evolution of some innate or hard wired grammar, however, when we look at how our ability to use language could have really evolved over the entire course of hominid evolution. The process seems more basic and more counterintuitive than we had previously imagined.
Although we share some aspects of vocalization with our primate cousins, the mechanisms of human vocalization are quite different and have evolved over great spans of time. Incremental increases in hominid brain size over the last 2.5 million years enhanced cortical control over the larynx, which originally evolved to prevent food and other particles from entering the windpipe or trachea; This eventually contributed to the use of vocal symbolization. Humans have more voluntary motor control over sound produced in the larynx than any other vocal species, and this control are associated with higher brain systems involved in skeletal muscle control as opposed to just visceral control. As a result, humans have direct cortical motor control over phonation and oral movement while chimps do not.
The larynx in modern humans is positioned in a comparatively low position to the throat and significantly increases the range and flexibility of sound production. The low position of the larynx allows greater changes in the volume to the resonant chamber formed by the mouth and pharynx and makes it easier to shift sounds to the mouth and away from the nasal cavity. Dramatical conclusions are those of the sounds that comprise vowel components of speeches that become much more variable, including extremes in resonance combinations such as the “ee” sound in “tree” and the ‘aw’ sound in ‘flaw’. Equally important, the repositioning of the larynx dramatically increases the ability of the mouth and tongue to modify vocal sounds. This shift in the larynx also makes it more likely that food and water passing over the larynx will enter the trachea, and this explains why humans are more inclined to experience choking. Yet this disadvantage, which could have caused the shift to e selected against, was clearly out-weighed by the advantage of being able to produce all the sounds used in modern language systems.
Some have argued that this removal of constraints on vocalization suggests that spoken language based on complex symbol systems emerged quite suddenly in modern humans only about one hundred thousand years ago. It is, however, far more likely that language use began with very primitive symbolic systems and evolved over time to increasingly complex systems. The first symbolic systems were not full-blown language systems, and they were probably not as flexible and complex as the vocal calls and gestural displays of modern primates. The first users of primitive symbolic systems probably coordinated most of their social comminations with call and display behavioural attitudes alike those of the modern ape and monkeys.
Critically important to the evolution of enhanced language skills are that behavioural adaptive adjustments that serve to precede and situate biological changes. This represents a reversal of the usual course of evolution where biological change precedes behavioural adaption. When the first hominids began to use stone tools, they probably rendered of a very haphazard fashion, by drawing on their flexible ape-like learning abilities. Still, the use of this technology over time opened a new ecological niche where selective pressures occasioned new adaptions. A tool use became more indispensable for obtaining food and organized social behaviours, mutations that enhanced the use of tools probably functioned as a principal source of selection for both bodied and brains.
The first stone choppers appear in the fossil remnant fragments remaining about 2.5 million years ago, and they appear to have been fabricated with a few sharp blows of stone on stone. If these primitive tools are reasonable, which were hand-held and probably used to cut flesh and to chip bone to expose the marrow, were created by Homo habilis - the first large-brained hominid. Stone making is obviously a skill passed on from one generation to the next by learning as opposed to a physical trait passed on genetically. After these tools became critical to survival, this introduced selection for learning abilities that did not exist for other species. Although the early tool maskers may have had brains roughly comparable to those of modern apes, they were already confronting the processes for being adapted for symbol learning.
The first symbolic representations were probably associated with social adaptations that were quite fragile, and any support that could reinforce these adaptions in the interest of survival would have been favoured by evolution. The expansion of the forebrain in Homo habilis, particularly the prefrontal cortex, was on of the core adaptations. Increased connectivity enhanced this adaption over time to brain regions involved in language processing.
Imagining why incremental improvements in symbolic representations provided a selective advantage is easy. Symbolic communication probably enhanced cooperation in the relationship of mothers to infants, allowed forgoing techniques to be more easily learned, served as the basis for better coordinating scavenging and hunting activities, and generally improved the prospect of attracting a mate. As the list of domains in which symbolic communication was introduced became longer over time, this probably resulted in new selective pressures that served to make this communication more elaborate. After more functions became dependent on this communication, those who failed in symbol learning or could only use symbols awkwardly were less likely to pass on their genes to subsequent generations.
The crude language of the earliest users of symbolics must have been considerably gestured and nonsymbiotic vocalizations. Their spoken language probably became reactively independent and a closed cooperative system. Only after the emergence of hominids were to use symbolic communication evolved, symbolic forms progressively took over functions served by non-vocal symbolic forms. This is reflected in modern languages. The structure of syntax in these languages often reveals its origins in pointing gestures, in the manipulation and exchange of objects, and in more primitive constructions of spatial and temporal relationships. We still use nonverbal vocalizations and gestures to complement meaning in spoken language.
The general idea is very powerful, however, the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be ware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Face to face, the idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world that causes ideas too subjectively becoming to denote in the wold. During which time, his perceptions as they have of changing position within the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
Research, however distant, are those that neuroscience reveals in that the human brain is a massive parallel system which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchal organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. And it is now clear that language processing is not accomplished by stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules that were eventually wired together on some neutral circuit board.
While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, he realized that the different chances of survival of different endowed offsprings could account for the natural evolution of species. Nature “selects” those members of some spacies best adapted to the environment in which they are themselves, just as human animal breeders may select for desirable traits for their livestock, and by that control the evolution of the kind of animal they wish. In the phase of Spencer, nature guarantees the “survival of the fittest.” The Origin of Species was principally successful in marshalling the evidence for evolution, than providing a convincing mechanism for genetic change, and Darwin himself remained open to the search for additional mechanisms, also reaming convinced that natural selection was at the heat of it. It was only with the later discovery of the “gene” as the unit of inheritance that the syntheses known as “neo-Darwinism” became the orthodox theory of evolution.
The solutions to the mysterious evolution by natural selection can shape sophisticated mechanisms are to found in the working of natural section, in that for the sake of some purpose, viz., some action, it is evident that the body as a whole must exist for the sake of some complex action: The process is fundamentally very simple as natural selection occurs whenever genetically influence’s variation among individual affects their survival and reproduction. If a gene codes for characteristics that result in fewer viable offspring in future generations, that gene is gradually eliminated. For instance, genetic mutation that an increase vulnerability to infection, or cause foolish risk taking or lack of interest in sex, will never become common. On the other hand, genes that cause resistance that causes infection, appropriate risk taking and success in choosing fertile mates are likely to spread in the gene pool even if they have substantial costs.
A classical example is the spread of a gene for dark wing colour in a British moth population living downward from major sources of air pollution. Pale moths were conspicuous on smoke-darkened trees and easily caught by birds, while a rare mutant form of a moth whose colour closely matched that of the bark escaped the predator beaks. As the tree trucks became darkened, the mutant gene spread rapidly and largely displaced the gene for pale wing colour. That is all there is to say natural selection insoles no plan, no goal, and no direction - just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with these genes have, relative to order individuals, greater of lesser reproductive success.
The simplicity of natural selection has been obscured by many misconceptions. For instance, Herbert Spencer’s nineteenth-century catch phrase “survival of the fittest” is widely thought to summarize the process, but it actually promotes several misunderstandings. First of all, survival is of no consequence in and of itself. This is why natural selection has created some organisms, such as salmon and annual plants, that reproduces only once, the die. Survival increases fitness only insofar as it increases later reproduction. Genes that increase lifetime reproduction will be selected for even if they result in a reduced longevity. Conversely, a gene that deceases total lifetime reproduction will obviously be eliminated by selection even if it increases an individual’s survival.
Farther confusion arises from the ambiguous meaning of “fittest.” The fittest individuals in the biological scene, is not necessarily the healthiest, stronger, or fastest. In today’s world, and many of those of the past, individuals of outstanding athletic accomplishment need not be the ones who produce the most grandchildren, a measure that should be roughly correlated with fattiness. To someone who understands natural selection, it is no surprise that the parents who are not concerned about their children;’s reproduction.
A gene or an individual cannot be called “fit” in isolation but only with reference to some particular spacies in a particular environment. Even in a single environment, every gene involves compromise. Consider a gene that makes rabbits more fearful and thereby helps to keep then from the jaws of foxes. Imagine that half of the rabbits in a field have this gene. Because they do more hiding and less eating, these timid rabbits might be, on average, some bitless well fed than their bolder companions. Of, a hundred down in the March swamps awaiting for spring, two thirds of them starve to death while this is the fate of only one-third of the rabbits who lack the gene for fearfulness, it has been selected against. It might be nearly eliminated by a few harsh winters. Milder winters or an increased number of foxes could have the opposite effect, it all depends on the current environment.
The version of an evolutionary ethic called “social Darwinism” emphasizes the struggle for natural selection, and draws the conclusion that we should glorify the assists each struggle, usually by enhancing competitive and aggressive relations between people in society, or better societies themselves. More recently the reaction between evolution and ethics has been re-thought in the light of biological discoveries concerning altruism and kin-selection.
The most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. And Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured pre-adaptive changes required for symbolic communication. All the same, this communication resulted directly through its passing an increasingly atypically structural complex and intensively condensed behaviour. Social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.
Because this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species. As this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.
If the emergent reality in this mental realm cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained as for, the sum of its parts, it seems reasonable to conclude that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths has ben advancing by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. And no scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how accomplish it can but be accounted for in actualized experience, especially of a thought or feeling, as an emergent aspect of global brain function.
If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. And while one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
Even if we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality is associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the orbital parts. Yet, the entire biosphere is of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. The emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems. As marked and noted by the appearance of a new profound complementarity in relationships between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. But it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.
If we also concede that an indivisible whole contains, by definition, no separate parts and that a phenomenon can be assumed to be “real” only when it is “observed” phenomenon, we are led to more interesting conclusions. The indivisible whole whose existence is inferred in the results of the aspectual experiments that cannot in principle is itself the subject of scientific investigation. There is a simple reason why this is the case. Science can claim knowledge of physical reality only when the predictions of a physical theory are validated by experiment. Since the indivisible whole cannot be measured or observed, we confront as the “event horizon” or knowledge where science can say nothing about the actual character of this reality. Why this is so, is a property of the entire universe, then we must also conclude that undivided wholeness exists on the most primary and basic level in all aspects of physical reality. What we are dealing within science per se, however, are manifestations of tis reality, which are invoked or “actualized” in making acts of observation or measurement. Since the reality that exists between the space-like separated regions is a whole whose existence can only be inferred in experience. As opposed to proven experiment, the correlations between the particles, and the sum of these parts, do not constitute the “indivisible” whole. Physical theory allows us to understand why the correlations occur. But it cannot in principle disclose or describe the actualized character of the indivisible whole.
The scientific implications to this extraordinary relationship between parts ( in that, to know what it is like to have an experience is to know its qualia) and indivisible whole (the universe) are quite staggering. Our primary concern, however, is a new view of the relationship between mind and world that carries even larger implications in human terms. When factors into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.
All that is required to embrace the alternative view of the relationship between mind and world that are consistent with our most advanced scientific knowledge is a commitment to metaphysical and epistemological realism and a willingness to follow arguments to their logical conclusions. Metaphysical realism assumes that physical reality or has an actual existence independent of human observers or any act of observation, epistemological realism assumes that progress in science requires strict adherence to scientific mythology, or to the rules and procedures for doing science. If one can accept these assumptions, most of the conclusions drawn should appear fairly self-evident in logical and philosophical terms. And it is also not necessary to attribute any extra-scientific properties to the whole to understand and embrace the new relationship between part and whole and the alternative view of human consciousness that is consistent with this relationship. This is, in this that our distinguishing character between what can be “proven” in scientific terms and what can be reasonably “inferred” in philosophical terms based on the scientific evidence.
Moreover, advances in scientific knowledge rapidly became the basis for the creation of a host of new technologies. Yet are those responsible for evaluating the benefits and risks associated with the use of these technologies, much less their potential impact on human needs and values, normally have expertise on only one side of a two-culture divide. Perhaps, more important, many potential threats to the human future - such as, to, environmental pollution, arms development, overpopulation, and spread of infectious diseases, poverty, and starvation - can be effectively solved only by integrating scientific knowledge with knowledge from the social sciences and humanities. We have not done so for a simple reason - the implications of the amazing new fact of nature called non-locality cannot be properly understood without some familiarity wit the actual history of scientific thought. The intent is to suggest that what is most important about this back-ground can be understood in its absence. Those who do not wish to struggle with the small and perhaps, the fewer amounts of back-ground implications should feel free to ignore it. But this material will be no more challenging as such, that the hope is that from those of which will find a common ground for understanding and that will meet again on this commonly functions as addressed to the relinquishing clasp of closure, and unswervingly close of its circle, resolve in the equations of eternity and complete of the universe of its obtainable gains for which its unification holds all that should be.
Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allowed us to construct symbolic universes based on complex language system that is particularly relevant for our purposes concerns consciousness of self. Consciousness of self as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this self and the other selves. Self, as it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a self-referential character in a mental realm separately distinct from the material realm. It was, the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his famous dualism in understanding the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.
In a thought experiment, instead of bringing a course of events, as in a normal experiment, we are invited to imagine one. We may tenably be able to “see” that some result’s following, or that by some description is appropriate, or our inability to describe the situation may itself have some consequential consequence. Thought experiments played a major role in the development of physics: For example, Galileo probably never dropped two balls of unequal weight from the leaning Tower of Pisa, in order to refute the Aristotelean view that a heavy body falls faster than a lighter one. He merely asked used to imagine a heavy body made into the shape of a dumbbell, and then connecting rod gradually thinner, until it is finally severed. The thing is one heavy body until the last moment and he n two light ones, but it is incredible that this final snip alters the velocity dramatically. Other famous examples include the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment. In the philosophy of personal identity, our apparent capacity to imagine ourselves surviving drastic changes of body, brain, and mind is a permanent source of difficulty. There is no consensus on the legitimate place of thought experiments, to substitute either for real experiment, or as a reliable device for discerning possibilities. Though experiments with and one dislike is sometimes called intuition pumps.
For familiar reasons, it is common to suppose that people are characterized by their rationality, and the most evident display of our rationality is our capacity to think. This is the rehearsal in the mind of what to say, or what to do. Not all thinking is verbal, since chess players, composers and painters all think, and there is no deductive reason that their deliberations should take any more verbal a form than this action. It is permanently tempting to conceive of this activity in terms of the presence in the mind of elements of some language, or other medium that represents aspects of the world. But the model has been attacked, notably by Wittgenstein, as insufficient, since no such presence could carry a guarantee that the right use would be made of it. And such of an inner present seems unnecessary, since an intelligent outcome might arouse of some principal measure from it.
In the philosophy of mind and ethics the treatment of animals exposes major problems if other animals differ from human beings, how is the difference to be characterized: Do animals think and reason, or have thoughts and beliefs? In philosophers as different as Aristotle and Kant the possession of reason separates humans from animals, and alone allows entry to the moral community.
For Descartes, animals are mere machines and ee lack consciousness or feelings. In the ancient world the rationality of animals is defended with the example of Chrysippus’ dog. This animal, tracking prey, comes to a cross-roads with three exits, and without pausing to pick-up the scent, reasoning, according to Sextus Empiricus. The animal went either by this road, or by this road, or by that, or by the other. However, it did not go by this or that. Therefore, he went the other way. The ‘syllogism of the dog’ was discussed by many writers, since in Stoic cosmology animals should occupy a place on the great chain of being somewhat below human beings, the only terrestrial rational agents: Philo Judaeus wrote a dialogue attempting to show again Alexander of Aphrodisias that the dog’s behaviour does no t exhibit rationality, but simply shows it following the scent, by way of response Alexander has the animal jump down a shaft (where the scent would not have lingered). Plutah sides with Philo, Aquinas discusses the dog and scholastic thought in general was quite favourable to brute intelligence (it was common for animals to be made to stand trail for various offences in medieval times). In the modern era Montaigne uses the dog to remind us of the frailties of human reason: Rorarious undertook to show not only that beasts are rational, but that they make better use of reason than people do. James the first of England defends the syllogising dog, sand Henry More and Gassendi both takes issue with Descartes on that matter. Hume is an outspoken defender of animal cognition, but with their use of the view that language is the essential manifestation of mentality, animals’ silence began to count heavily against them, and they are completely denied thoughts by, for instance Davidson.
Dogs are frequently shown in pictures of philosophers, as their assiduity and fidelity are some symbols
It is, nonetheless, that Decanters’s first work, the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (1628/9), was never complected, yet in Holland between 1628 and 1649, Descartes firsr wrote, and then cautiously suppressed, Le Monde (1934), and in 1637 produced the Discours de la méthode as a preface to the treatise on mathematics and physics in which he introduced the notion of Cartesian co-ordinates. His best-known philosophical work, the Meditationes de Prima Phi losophiia (Meditations on First Philosophy), together with objections by distinguished contemporaries and replies by Descartes (The Objections and Replies), appeared in 1641. The authors of thr objections are: First set, the Dutch, thgirst aet, Hobbes, fourth set. Arnauld, fifth set, Gassendi and the sixth set, Mersenne. The second edition (1642) of the Meditations included a seventh se t by the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin. Descartes’s penultimate work, the Principia Pilosophiae (Principles of the Soul), published in 1644 was designed partly for use as a theological textbook. His last work was Les Passions de l´ame (The Passions of the Soul) published in 1649. When in Sweden, where he contracted pneumonia, allegedly through being required to break his normal habit of late rising in order to give lessons at 5:00 a.m. His last words are supposed to have been “Ça, mon âme, il faut partir” (so, my soul, it is time to part).
All the same, Decartes’s theory of knowledge starts with the quest for certainty, for an indubitable starting-point or foundation on the bassi alone of which progress is possible.
The Cartesian doubt is the method of investigating how much knowledge and its basis in reason or experience as used by Descartes in the first two Medications. It attempted to put knowledge upon secure foundation by first inviting us to suspend judgements on any proportion whose truth can be doubted, even as a bare possibility. The standards of acceptance are gradually raised as we are asked to doubt the deliverance of memory, the senses, and eve n reason, all of which are in principle capable of letting us down. This is eventually found in the celebrated “Cogito ergo sum”: I think, therefore I am. By locating the point of certainty in my awareness of my own self, Descartes gives a first-person twist to the theory of knowledge that dominated the following centuries in spite of a various counter-attack on behalf of social and public starting-points. The metaphysics associated with this priority are the Cartesian dualism, or separation of mind and matter into two different but interacting substances. Descartes rigorously and rightly sees that it takes divine dispensation to certify any relationship between the two realms thus divided, and to prove the reliability of the senses invokes a “clear and distinct perception” of highly dubious proofs of the existence of a benevolent deity. This has not met general acceptance: A Hume drily puts it, “to have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit.”
By dissimilarity, Descartes’s notorious denial that non-human animals are conscious is a stark illustration of dissimulation. In his conception of matter Descartes also gives preference to rational cogitation over anything from the senses. Since we can conceive of the matter of a ball of wax, surviving changes to its sensible qualities, matter is not an empirical concept, but eventually an entirely geometrical one, with extension and motion as its only physical nature.
Although the structure of Descartes’s epistemology, theory of mind and theory of matter have been rejected many times, their relentless exposure of the hardest issues, their exemplary clarity and even their initial plausibility, all contrives to make him the central point of reference for modern philosophy.
The term instinct (Lat., instinctus, impulse or urge) implies innately determined behaviour, flexible to change in circumstance outside the control of deliberation and reason. The view that animals accomplish even complex tasks not by reason was common to Aristotle and the Stoics, and the inflexibility of their outline was used in defence of this position as early as Avicennia. A continuity between animal and human reason was proposed by Hume, and followed by sensationalist such as the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). The theory of evolution prompted various views of the emergence of stereotypical behaviour, and the idea that innate determinants of behaviour are fostered by specific environments is a guiding principle of ethology. In this sense it may be instinctive in human beings to be social, and for that matter too reasoned on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, it seems clear that our real or actualized self is not imprisoned in our minds.
It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, human observers its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the “otherness” of self and world be is an illusion, in that disguises of its own actualization are to find all its relations between the part that are of their own characterization. Its self as related to the temporality of being whole is that of a biological reality. It can be viewed, of course, that a proper definition of this whole must not include the evolution of the larger indivisible whole. Yet, the cosmos and unbroken evolution of all life, by that of the first self-replication molecule that was the ancestor of DNA. It should include the complex interactions that have proven that among all the parts in biological reality that any resultant of emerging is self-regulating. This, of course, is responsible to properties owing to the whole of what might be to sustain the existence of the parts.
Founded on complications and complex coordinate systems in ordinary language may be conditioned as to establish some developments have been descriptively made by its physical reality and metaphysical concerns. That is, that it is in the history of mathematics and that the exchanges between the mega-narratives and frame tales of religion and science were critical factors in the minds of those who contributed. The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, allowed scientists to better them in the understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality has marked results in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.
The subjectivity of our mind affects our perceptions of the world that is held to be objective by natural science. Create both aspects of mind and matter as individualized forms that belong to the same underlying reality.
Our everyday experience confirms the apparent fact that there is a dual-valued world as subject and objects. We as having consciousness, as personality and as experiencing beings are the subjects, whereas for everything for which we can come up with a name or designation, seems to be the object, that which is opposed to us as a subject. Physical objects are only part of the object-world. There are also mental objects, objects of our emotions, abstract objects, religious objects etc. language objectifies our experience. Experiences per se are purely sensational experienced that do not make a distinction between object and subject. Only verbalized thought reifies the sensations by conceptualizing them and pigeonholing them into the given entities of language.
Some thinkers maintain, that subject and object are only different aspects of experience. I can experience myself as subject, and in the act of self-reflection. The fallacy of this argument is obvious: Being a subject implies having an object. We cannot experience something consciously without the mediation of understanding and mind. Our experience is already conceptualized at the time it comes into our consciousness. Our experience is negative insofar as it destroys the original pure experience. In a dialectical process of synthesis, the original pure experience becomes an object for us. The common state of our mind is only capable of apperceiving objects. Objects are reified negative experience. The same is true for the objective aspect of this theory: by objectifying myself I do not dispense with the subject, but the subject is causally and apodeictically linked to the object. As soon as I make an object of anything, I have to realize, that it is the subject, which objectifies something. It is only the subject who can do that. Without the subject there are no objects, and without objects there is no subject. This interdependence, however, is not to be understood in terms of a dualism, so that the object and the subject are really independent substances. Since the object is only created by the activity of the subject, and the subject is not a physical entity, but a mental one, we have to conclude then, that the subject-object dualism is purely mentalistic.
The Cartesian dualism posits the subject and the object as separate, independent and real substances, both of which have their ground and origin in the highest substance of God. Cartesian dualism, however, contradicts itself: The very fact, which Descartes posits the "I,” that is the subject, as the only certainty, he defied materialism, and thus the concept of some "res extensa.” The physical thing is only probable in its existence, whereas the mental thing is absolutely and necessarily certain. The subject is superior to the object. The object is only derived, but the subject is the original. This makes the object not only inferior in its substantive quality and in its essence, but relegates it to a level of dependence on the subject. The subject recognizes that the object is a "res extensa" and this means, that the object cannot have essence or existence without the acknowledgment through the subject. The subject posits the world in the first place and the subject is posited by God. Apart from the problem of interaction between these two different substances, Cartesian dualism is not eligible for explaining and understanding the subject-object relation.
By denying Cartesian dualism and resorting to monistic theories such as extreme idealism, materialism or positivism, the problem is not resolved either. What the positivists did, was just verbalizing the subject-object relation by linguistic forms. It was no longer a metaphysical problem, but only a linguistic problem. Our language has formed this object-subject dualism. These thinkers are very superficial and shallow thinkers, because they do not see that in the very act of their analysis they inevitably think in the mind-set of subject and object. By relativizing the object and subject in terms of language and analytical philosophy, they avoid the elusive and problematical aporia of subject-object, which has been the fundamental question in philosophy ever since. Shunning these metaphysical questions is no solution. Excluding something, by reducing it to a more material and verifiable level, is not only pseudo-philosophy but actually a depreciation and decadence of the great philosophical ideas of mankind.
Therefore, we have to come to grips with idea of subject-object in a new manner. We experience this dualism as a fact in our everyday lives. Every experience is subject to this dualistic pattern. The question, however, is, whether this underlying pattern of subject-object dualism is real or only mental. Science assumes it to be real. This assumption does not prove the reality of our experience, but only that with this method science is most successful in explaining our empirical facts. Mysticism, on the other hand, believes that there is an original unity of subject and objects. To attain this unity is the goal of religion and mysticism. Man has fallen from this unity by disgrace and by sinful behaviour. Now the task of man is to get back on track again and strive toward this highest fulfilment. Again, are we not, on the conclusion made above, forced to admit, that also the mystic way of thinking is only a pattern of the mind and, as the scientists, that they have their own frame of reference and methodology to explain the supra-sensible facts most successfully?
If we assume mind to be the originator of the subject-object dualism, then we cannot confer more reality on the physical or the mental aspect, as well as we cannot deny the one in terms of the other.
The crude language of the earliest users of symbolics must have been considerably gestured and nonsymbiotic vocalizations. Their spoken language probably became reactively independent and a closed cooperative system. Only after the emergence of hominids were to use symbolic communication evolved, symbolic forms progressively took over functions served by non-vocal symbolic forms. This is reflected in modern languages. The structure of syntax in these languages often reveals its origins in pointing gestures, in the manipulation and exchange of objects, and in more primitive constructions of spatial and temporal relationships. We still use nonverbal vocalizations and gestures to complement meaning in spoken language.
The general idea is very powerful, however, the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be ware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Face to face, the idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world that causes ideas too subjectively becoming to denote in the wold. During which time, his perceptions as they have of changing position within the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
Research, however distant, are those that neuroscience reveals in that the human brain is a massive parallel system which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchal organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. And it is now clear that language processing is not accomplished by stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules that were eventually wired together on some neutral circuit board.
While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, the most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. And Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured pre-adaptive changes required for symbolic communication. All the same, this communication resulted directly through its passing an increasingly atypically structural complex and intensively condensed behaviour. Social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.
Because this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species. As this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.
If the emergent reality in this mental realm cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained as for, the sum of its parts, it seems reasonable to conclude that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths has ben advancing by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. And no scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how accomplish it can but be accounted for in actualized experience, especially of a thought or feeling, as an emergent aspect of global brain function.
If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. And while one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
Even if we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality is associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the orbital parts. Yet, the entire biosphere is of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. The emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems. As marked and noted by the appearance of a new profound complementarity in relationships between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. But it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.
If we also concede that an indivisible whole contains, by definition, no separate parts and that a phenomenon can be assumed to be “real” only when it is “observed” phenomenon, we are led to more interesting conclusions. The indivisible whole whose existence is inferred in the results of the aspectual experiments that cannot in principle is itself the subject of scientific investigation. There is a simple reason why this is the case. Science can claim knowledge of physical reality only when the predictions of a physical theory are validated by experiment. Since the indivisible whole cannot be measured or observed, we confront as the “event horizon” or knowledge where science can say nothing about the actual character of this reality. Why this is so, is a property of the entire universe, then we must also conclude that an undivided wholeness exists on the most primary and basic level in all aspects of physical reality. What we are dealing within science per se, however, are manifestations of tis reality, which are invoked or “actualized” in making acts of observation or measurement. Since the reality that exists between the space-like separated regions is a whole whose existence can only be inferred in experience. As opposed to proven experiment, the correlations between the particles, and the sum of these parts, do not constitute the “indivisible” whole. Physical theory allows us to understand why the correlations occur. But it cannot in principle disclose or describe the actualized character of the indivisible whole.
The scientific implications to this extraordinary relationship between parts (qualia) and indivisible whole (the universe) are quite staggering. Our primary concern, however, is a new view of the relationship between mind and world that carries even larger implications in human terms. When factors into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.
All that is required to embrace the alternative view of the relationship between mind and world that are consistent with our most advanced scientific knowledge is a commitment to metaphysical and epistemological realism and a willingness to follow arguments to their logical conclusions. Metaphysical realism assumes that physical reality or has an actual existence independent of human observers or any act of observation, epistemological realism assumes that progress in science requires strict adherence to scientific mythology, or to the rules and procedures for doing science. If one can accept these assumptions, most of the conclusions drawn should appear fairly self-evident in logical and philosophical terms. And it is also not necessary to attribute any extra-scientific properties to the whole to understand and embrace the new relationship between part and whole and the alternative view of human consciousness that is consistent with this relationship. This is, in this that our distinguishing character between what can be “proven” in scientific terms and what can be reasonably “inferred” in philosophical terms based on the scientific evidence.
Moreover, advances in scientific knowledge rapidly became the basis for the creation of a host of new technologies. Yet those responsible for evaluating the benefits and risks associated with the use of these technologies, much less their potential impact on human needs and values, normally had expertise on only one side of a two-culture divide. Perhaps, more important, many of the potential threats to the human future - such as, to, environmental pollution, arms development, overpopulation, and spread of infectious diseases, poverty, and starvation - can be effectively solved only by integrating scientific knowledge with knowledge from the social sciences and humanities. We have not done so for a simple reason - the implications of the amazing new fact of nature called non-locality cannot be properly understood without some familiarity wit the actual history of scientific thought. The intent is to suggest that what is most important about this back-ground can be understood in its absence. Those who do not wish to struggle with the small and perhaps, the fewer amounts of back-ground implications should feel free to ignore it. But this material will be no more challenging as such, that the hope is that from those of which will find a common ground for understanding and that will meet again on this commonly functions in an effort to close the circle, resolves the equations of eternity and complete the universe to obtainably gain in its unification of which that holds within.
Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allowed us to construct symbolic universes based on complex language system that is particularly relevant for our purposes concerns consciousness of self. Consciousness of self as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this self and the other selves. Self, as it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a self-referential character in a mental realm separately distinct from the material realm. It was, the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his famous dualism in understanding the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.
In a thought experiment, instead of bringing a course of events, as in a normal experiment, we are invited to imagine one. We may ten be able to “see” that some result following, or tat some description is appropriate, or our inability to describe the situation may itself have some consequences. Thought experiments played a major role in the development of physics: For example, Galileo probably never dropped two balls of unequal weight from the leaning Tower of Pisa, in order to refute the Aristotelean view that a heavy body falls faster than a lighter one. He merely asked used to imagine a heavy body made into the shape of a dumbbell, and then connecting rod gradually thinner, until it is finally severed. The thing is one heavy body until the last moment and he n two light ones, but it is incredible that this final outline alters the velocity dramatically. Other famous examples include the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment. In the philosophy of personal identity, our apparent capacity to imagine ourselves surviving drastic changes of body, brain, and mind is a permanent source of difficulty. There is no consensus on the legitimate place of thought experiments, to substitute either for real experiment, or as a reliable device for discerning possibilities. Thought experiments one dislikes are sometimes called intuition pumps.
For familiar reasons, it is common to suppose that people are characterized by their rationality, and the most evident display of our rationality is our capacity to think. This is the rehearsal in the mind of what to say, or what to do. Not all thinking is verbal, since chess players, composers and painters all think, and there is no a priori reason that their deliberations should take any more verbal a form than this actions. It is permanently tempting to conceive of this activity in terms of the presence in the mind of elements of some language, or other medium that represents aspects of the world. But the model has been attacked, notably by Wittgenstein, as insufficient, since no such presence could carry a guarantee that the right use would be made of it. And such an inner present seems unnecessary, since an intelligent outcome might arise in principle weigh out it.
In the philosophy of mind as well as ethics the treatment of animals exposes major problems if other animals differ from human beings, how is the difference to be characterized: Do animals think and reason, or have thoughts and beliefs? In philosophers as different as Aristotle and Kant the possession of reason separates humans from animals, and alone allows entry to the moral community.
For Descartes, animals are mere machines and ee lack consciousness or feelings. In the ancient world the rationality of animals is defended with the example of Chrysippus’ dog. This animal, tracking a prey, comes to a cross-roads with three exits, and without pausing to pick-up the scent, reasoning, according to Sextus Empiricus” The animal went either by this road, or by this road, or by that, or by the other. However, it did not go by this or that, therefore he went the other way. The ‘syllogism of the dog’ was discussed by many writers, since in Stoic cosmology animals should occupy a place on the great chain of being somewhat below human beings, the only terrestrial rational agents: Philo Judaeus wrote a dialogue attempting to show again Alexander of Aphrodisias that the dog’s behaviour does no t exhibit rationality, but simply shows it following the scent, by way of response Alexander has the animal jump down a shaft (where the scent would not have lingered). Plutah sides with Philo, Aquinas discusses the dog and scholastic thought in general was quite favourable to brute intelligence (it was common for animals to be made to stand trail for various offences in medieval times). In the modern era Montaigne uses the dog to remind us of the frailties of human reason: Rorarious undertook to show not only that beasts are rational, but that they make better use of reason than people do. James the Ist of England defends the syllogising dog, and Henry More and Gassendi both takes issue with Descartes on that matter. Hume is an outspoken defender of animal cognition, but with their use of the view that language is the essential manifestation of mentality, animals silence began to count heavily against them, and they are completely denied thoughts by, for instance Davidson.
Dogs are frequently shown in pictures of philosophers, as their assiduity and fidelity are a symbol
The term instinct (Lat., instinctus, impulse or urge) implies innately determined behaviour, flexible to change in circumstance outside the control of deliberation and reason. The view that animals accomplish even complex tasks not by reason was common to Aristotle and the Stoics, and the inflexibility of their outline was used in defence of this position as early as Avicennia. A continuity between animal and human reason was proposed by Hume, and followed by sensationalist such as the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). The theory of evolution prompted various views of the emergence of stereotypical behaviour, and the idea that innate determinants of behaviour are fostered by specific environments is a guiding principle of ethology. In this sense it may be instinctive in human beings to be social, and for that matter too reasoned on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, it seems clear that our real or actualized self is not imprisoned in our minds.
It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, human observers its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the “otherness” of self and world be is an illusion, in that disguises of its own actualization are to find all its relations between the part that are of their own characterization. Its self as related to the temporality of being whole is that of a biological reality. It can be viewed, of course, that a proper definition of this whole must not include the evolution of the larger undissectible whole. Yet, the cosmos and unbroken evolution of all life, by that of the first self-replication molecule that was the ancestor of DNA. It should include the complex interactions that have proven that among all the parts in biological reality that any resultant of emerging is self-regulating. This, of course, is responsible to properties owing to the whole of what might be to sustain the existence of the parts.
Founded on complications and complex coordinate systems in ordinary language may be conditioned as to establish some developments have been descriptively made by its physical reality and metaphysical concerns. That is, that it is in the history of mathematics and that the exchanges between the mega-narratives and frame tales of religion and science were critical factors in the minds of those who contributed. The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, allowed scientists to better them in the understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality has marked results in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.
Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometry and numerical relationships. We imagine that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece. This, of course, opposes any other option but to speculate some displacement afar from the Chinese or Babylonian cultures. Partly because the social, political, and economic climates in Greece were more open in the pursuit of knowledge along with greater margins that reflect upon cultural accessibility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigations. But it was only after this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential feature of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
The Greek philosophers we now recognized as the originator’s scientific thoughts were oraclically mystic who probably perceived their world as replete with spiritual agencies and forces. The Greek religious heritage made it possible for these thinkers to attempt to coordinate diverse physical events within a framework of immaterial and unifying ideas. The fundamental assumption that there is a pervasive, underlying substance out of which everything emerges and into which everything returns are attributed to Thales of Miletos. Thales had apparently transcended to this conclusion out of the belief that the world was full of gods, and his unifying substance, water, was similarly charged with spiritual presence. Religion in this instance served the interests of science because it allowed the Greek philosophers to view “essences” underlying and unifying physical reality as if they were “substances.”
Nonetheless, the belief that the mind of God as the Divine Architect permeates the workings of nature. All of which, is the principle of scientific thought, as pronounced through Johannes Kepler, and subsequently to most contemporaneous physicists, as the consigned probability can feel of some discomfort, that in reading Kepler’s original manuscripts. Physics and metaphysics, astronomy and astrology, geometry and theology commingle with an intensity that might offend those who practice science in the modern sense of that word. “Physical laws,” wrote Kepler, “lie within the power of understanding of the human mind, God wanted us to perceive them when he created us in His image so that we may take part in His own thoughts . . . Our knowledge of numbers and quantities are the same as that of God’s, at least as far as we can understand something of it in this mortal life.”
The history of science grandly testifies to the manner in which scientific objectivity results in physical theories that must be assimilated into “customary points of view and forms of perception.” The framers of classical physics derived, like the rest of us there, “customary points of view and forms of perception” from macro-level visualized experience. Thus, the descriptive apparatus of visualizable experience became reflected in the classical descriptive categories.
A major discontinuity appears, however, as we moved from descriptive apparatus dominated by the character of our visualizable experience to a complete description of physical reality in relativistic and quantum physics. The actual character of physical reality in modern physics lies largely outside the range of visualizable experience. Einstein, was acutely aware of this discontinuity: “We have forgotten what features of the world of experience caused us to frame pre-scientific concepts, and we have great difficulty in representing the world of experience to ourselves without the spectacles of the old-established conceptual interpretation. There is the further difficulty that our language is compelled to work with words that are inseparably connected with those primitive concepts.”
It is time, for the religious imagination and the religious experience to engage the complementary truths of science in filling that which is silence with meaning. However, this does not mean that those who do not believe in the existence of God or Being should refrain in any sense for assessing the implications of the new truths of science. Understanding these implications does not require to some ontology, and is in no way diminished by the lack of ontology. And one is free to recognize a basis for an exchange between science and religion since one is free to deny that this basis exists - there is nothing in our current scientific world-view that can prove the existence of God or Being and nothing that legitimate any anthropomorphic conceptions of the nature of God or Being. The question of belief in onology remains what it has always been - a question, and the physical universe on the most basic level remains what has always been - a riddle. And the ultimate answer to the question and the ultimate meaning of the riddle are, and probably will always be, a mater of personal choice and conviction.
Our frame reference work is mostly to incorporate in an abounding set-class affiliation between mind and world, by that lay to some defining features and fundamental preoccupations, for which there is certainly nothing new in the suggestion that contemporary scientific world-view legitimates an alternate conception of the relationship between mind and world. The essential point of attention is that one of “consciousness” and remains in a certain state of our study.
But at the end of this, sometimes labourious journey that precipitate to some conclusion that should make the trip very worthwhile. Initiatory comments offer resistance in contemporaneous physics or biology for believing “I” in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have rather aptly described as “the disease of the Western mind.” In addition, let us consider the legacy in Western intellectual life of the stark division between mind and world sanctioned by René Descartes.
Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, inasmuch as he made epistemological questions the primary and central questions of the discipline. But this is misleading for several reasons. In the first, Descartes conception of philosophy was very different from our own. The term “philosophy” in the seventeenth century was far more comprehensive than it is today, and embraced the whole of what we nowadays call natural science, including cosmology and physics, and subjects like anatomy, optics and medicine. Descartes reputation as a philosopher in his own time was based as much as anything on his contributions in these scientific areas. Secondly, even in those Cartesian writings that are philosophical in the modern academic sense, the e epistemological concerns are rather different from the conceptual and linguistic inquiries that characterize present-day theory of knowledge. Descartes saw the need to base his scientific system on secure metaphysical foundations: By “metaphysics” he meant that in the queries into God and the soul and usually all the first things to be discovered by philosophizing. Yet, he was quick to realize that there was nothing in this view that provided untold benefits between heaven and earth and united the universe in a shared and communicable frame of knowledge, it presented us with a view of physical reality that was totally alien from the world of everyday life. Even so, there was nothing in this view of nature that could explain or provide a foundation for the mental, or for all that of direct experience as distinctly human, with no ups, downs or any which ways of direction.
Following these fundamentals’ explorations that include questions about knowledge and certainty, but even here, Descartes is not primarily concerned with the criteria for knowledge claims, or with definitions of the epistemic concepts involved, as his aim is to provide a unified framework for understanding the universe. And with this, Descartes was convinced that the immaterial essences that gave form and structure to this universe were coded in geometrical and mathematical ideas, and this insight led him to invented algebraic geometry.
A scientific understanding to these ideas could be derived, as did that Descartes declared, that with the aid of precise deduction, and he also claimed that the contours of physical reality could be laid out in three-dimensional coordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modelling became the most powerful tools of modern science. And the dream that the entire physical world could be known and mastered through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principle of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanisms lacking any concerns about its spiritual dimension or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile, or eliminate Descartes’s stark division between mind and matter became perhaps the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
As in the view of the relationship between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics and formalized by Descartes became a central preoccupation in Western intellectual life. And the tragedy of the Western mind is that we have lived since the seventeenth century with the prospect that the inner world of human consciousness and the outer world of physical reality are separated by an abyss or a void that cannot be bridged or to agree with reconciliation.
In classical physics, external reality consisted of inert and inanimate matter moving according to wholly deterministic natural laws, and collections of discrete atomized parts made up wholes. Classical physics was also premised, however, a dualistic conception of reality as consisting of abstract disembodied ideas existing in a domain separate form and superior to sensible objects and movements. The notion that the material world experienced by the senses was inferior to the immaterial world experienced by mind or spirit has been blamed for frustrating the progress of physics up too at least the time of Galileo. But in one very important respect, it also made the first scientific revolution possible. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton firmly believed that the immaterial geometrical and mathematical ideas that inform physical reality had a prior existence in the mind of God and that doing physics was a form of communion with these ideas.
The tragedy of the Western mind is a direct consequence of the stark Cartesian division between mind and world. This is the tragedy of the modern mind which “solved the riddle of the universe,” but only to replace it by another riddle: The riddle of itself. Yet, we discover the “certain principles of physical reality,” said Descartes, “not by the prejudices of the senses, but by rational analysis, which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth.” Since the real, or that which actually remains external to ourselves, was in his view only that which could be represented in the quantitative terms of mathematics, Descartes concluded that all qualitative aspects of reality could be traced to the deceitfulness of the senses.
Given that Descartes distrusted the information from the senses to the point of doubting the perceived results of repeatable scientific experiments, how did he conclude that our knowledge of the mathematical ideas residing only in mind or in human subjectivity was accurate, much less the absolute truth? He did so by making a leap of faith - God constructed the world, said Descartes, according to the mathematical ideas that our minds could uncover in their pristine essence. The truths of classical physics as Descartes viewed them were quite literally “revealed” truths, and it was this seventeenth-century metaphysical presupposition that became in the history of science what is termed the “hidden ontology of classical epistemology.” Descartes lingers in the widespread conviction that science does not provide a “place for man” or for all that we know as distinctly human in subjective reality.
The historical notion in the unity of consciousness has had an interesting history in philosophy and psychology. Taking Descartes to be the first major philosopher of the modern period, the unity of consciousness was central to the study of the mind for the whole of the modern period until the 20th century. The notion figured centrally in the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Kant, Brennan, James, and, in most of the major precursors of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology. It played a particularly important role in Kant's work.
A couple of examples will illustrate the role that the notion of the unity of consciousness played in this long literature. Consider a classical argument for dualism (the view that the mind is not the body, indeed is not made out of matter at all). It starts like this: When I consider the mind, which is to say of myself, as far as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.
Descartes then asserts that if the mind is not made up of parts, it cannot consist of matter, presumably because, as he saw it, anything material has parts. He then goes on to say that this would be enough to prove dualism by itself, had he not already proved it elsewhere. It is in the unified consciousness that I have of myself.
Here is another, more elaborate argument based on unified consciousness. The conclusion will be that any system of components could never achieve unified consciousness acting in concert. William James' well-known version of the argument starts as follows: Take a sentence of a dozen words, take twelve men, and to each word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; Nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.
James generalizes this observation to all conscious states. To get dualism out of this, we need to add a premise: That if the mind were made out of matter, conscious states would have to be distributed over some group of components in some relevant way. Nevertheless, this thought experiment is meant to show that conscious states cannot be so distributed. Therefore, the conscious mind is not made out of matter. Calling the argument that James is using is the Unity Argument. Clearly, the idea that our consciousness of, here, the parts of a sentence are unified is at the centre of the Unity Argument. Like the first, this argument goes all the way back to Descartes. Versions of it can be found in thinkers otherwise as different from one another as Leibniz, Reid, and James. The Unity Argument continued to be influential into the 20th century. That the argument was considered a powerful reason for concluding that the mind is not the body is illustrated in a backhanded way by Kant's treatment of it (as he found it in Descartes and Leibniz, not James, of course).
Kant did not think that we could uncover anything about the nature of the mind, including whether nor is it made out of matter. To make the case for this view, he had to show that all existing arguments that the mind is not material do not work and he set out to do just this in the chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason on the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (1781), paralogisms are faulty inferences about the nature of the mind. The Unity Argument is the target of a major part of that chapter; if one is going to show that we cannot know what the mind is like, we must dispose of the Unity Argument, which purports to show that the mind is not made out of matter. Kant's argument that the Unity Argument does not support dualism is simple. He urges that the idea of unified consciousness being achieved by something that has no parts or components are no less mysterious than its being achieved by a system of components acting together. Remarkably enough, though no philosopher has ever met this challenge of Kant's and no account exists of what an immaterial mind not made out of parts might be like, philosophers continued to rely on the Unity Argument until well into the 20th century. It may be a bit difficult for us to capture this now but the idea any system of components, and for an even stronger reason might not realize that merge with consciousness, that each system of material components, had a strong intuitive appeal for a long time.
The notion that consciousness agrees to unification and was in addition central to one of Kant's own famous arguments, his ‘transcendental deduction of the categories’. In this argument, boiled down to its essentials, Kant claims that to tie various objects of experience together into a single unified conscious representation of the world, something that he simply assumed that we could do, we could probably apply certain concepts to the items in question. In particular we have to apply concepts from each of four fundamental categories of concept: Quantitative, qualitative, relational, and what he called ‘modal’ concepts. Modal concept’s concern of whether an item might exist, does exist, or must exist. Thus, the four kinds of concept are concepts for how many units, what features, what relations to other objects, and what existence status is represented in an experience.
It was relational conceptual representation that most interested Kant and of relational concepts, he thought the concept of cause-and-effect to be by far the most important. Kant wanted to show that natural science (which for him meant primarily physics) was genuine knowledge (he thought that Hume's sceptical treatment of cause and effect relations challenged this status). He believed that if he could prove that we must tie items in our experience together causally if we are to have a unified awareness of them, he would have put physics back on "the secure path of a science.” The details of his argument have exercised philosophers for more than two hundred years. We will not go into them here, but the argument illustrates how central the notion of the unity of consciousness was in Kant's thinking about the mind and its relation to the world.
Although the unity of consciousness had been at the centre of pre-20th century research on the mind, early in the 20th century the notion almost disappeared. Logical atomism in philosophy and behaviourism in psychology were both unsympathetic to the notion. Logical atomism focussed on the atomic elements of cognition (sense data, simple propositional judgments, etc.), rather than on how these elements are tied together to form a mind. Behaviourism urged that we focus on behaviour, the mind being alternatively myth or something otherwise that we cannot and do not need of studying the mysteriousness of science, from which brings meaning and purpose to humanity. This attitude extended to consciousness, of course. The philosopher Daniel Dennett summarizes the attitude prevalent at the time this way: Consciousness may be the last bastion of occult properties, epiphenomena, immeasurable subjective states - in short, the one area of mind best left to the philosophers. Let them make fools of themselves trying to corral the quicksilver of ‘phenomenology’ into a respectable theory.
The unity of consciousness next became an object of serious attention in analytic philosophy only as late as the 1960s. In the years since, new work has appeared regularly. The accumulated literature is still not massive but the unity of consciousness has again become an object of serious study. Before we examine the more recent work, we need to explicate the notion in more detail than we have done so far and introduce some empirical findings. Both are required to understand recent work on the issue.
To expand on our earlier notion of the unity of consciousness, we need to introduce a pair of distinctions. Current works on consciousness labours under a huge, confusing terminology. Different theorists exchange dialogue over the excess consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, simple consciousness, creature consciousness, states consciousness, monitoring consciousness, awareness as equated with consciousness, awareness distinguished from consciousness, higher orders thought, higher orders experience, qualia, the felt qualities of representations, consciousness as displaced perception, . . . and on and on and on. We can ignore most of this profusion but we do need two distinctions: between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects, and between consciousness of representations and consciousness of self.
It is very natural to think of self-consciousness or, cognitive state more accurately, as a set of cognitive states. Self-knowledge is an example of such a cognitive state. There are plenty of things that I know bout self. I know the sort of thing I am: a human being, a warm-blooded rational animal with two legs. I know of many properties and much of what is happening to me, at both physical and mental levels. I also know things about my past, things I have done and that of whom I have been with other people I have met. But I have many self-conscious cognitive states that are not instances of knowledge. For example, I have the capacity to plan for the future - to weigh up possible courses of action in the light of goals, desires, and ambitions. I am capable of ca certain type of moral reflection, tide to moral self-and understanding and moral self-evaluation. I can pursue questions like, what sort of person I am? Am I the sort of person I want to be? Am I the sort of individual that I ought to be? This is my ability to think about myself. Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employing in my thought about other people and other objects.
When I say that I am a self-conscious creature, I am saying that I can do all these things. But what do they have in common? Could I lack some and still be self-conscious? These are central questions that take us to the heart of many issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of psychology.
Even so, with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might naturally assume that there is a single ability that all presuppose. This is my ability to think about myself. I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for autobiographical memories and moral self-understanding.
The proposing account would be on par with other noted examples of the deflationary account of self-consciousness. If, in at all, a straightforward explanation to what makes those of the “self contents” immune to error through misidentification concerning the semantics of self, then it seems fair to say that the problem of self-consciousness has been dissolved, at least as much as solved.
This proposed account would be on a par with other noted examples as such as the redundancy theory of truth. That is to say, the redundancy theory or the deflationary view of truth claims that the predicate ‘ . . . true’ does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concept that ought to be the topic of philosophic enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, but centres on the pints (1) that ‘it is true that p’ says no more nor less than ‘p’ (so, redundancy”) (2) that in less direct context, such as ‘everything he said was true’, or ‘all logical consequences of true propositions as true’, the predicated functions as a device enabling us to generalize rather than as an adjective or predicate describing the things he said, or the kinds of propositions that follow from true propositions. For example, its translation is to infer that: (∀p, q)(p & p ➝ q ➝ q)’ where there is no use of a notion of truth.
There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, but they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive uses of the notion, such as . . . ‘science aims at the truth’ or ‘truth is a norm governing discourse. Indeed, postmodernist writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms, along with a discredited ‘objective’ concept ion of truth. But perhaps, we can have the norms even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed within mention of truth: Science wants to be so that whenever science holds that ‘p’, when ‘p’‘. Discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p’. When not-p.
It is important to stress how redundancy or the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun, is motivated by an important principle that ha governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. This is the principle that the philosophical analysis of thought can only proceed through the philosophical analysis of language:
Thoughts differ from all else that is aid to be among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable: It is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my thought is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without residue, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed. We communicate thought by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language, it is these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the employment of language, unaided by any supposed contact between mind and the senses that they carry. In order to analyses thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp. (Dummett, 1978)
So how can such thoughts be entertained by a thinker incapable of reflexively referring to himself as English speakers do with the first-person pronoun be plausibly ascribed thought with first-person contents? The thought that, despite all this, there are in fact first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been deployed by Hugh Mellor (1988-1989). The basic phenomenon he is interested in explaining is what it is for a creature to have what he terms as subjective belief, which is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. Mellor starts from the functionalist premise that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions. It is, of course, the emphasis on causal links between belief and action that make it plausible to think that belief might be independent of language and conscious belief, since “agency entails neither linguistic ability nor conscious belief. The idea that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions can be deployed to explain the content of a give n belief through which the equation of truth conditions and utility conditions, where utility conditions are those in which the actions caused by the conjunction of that belief with a single desire result in the satisfaction of that desire. To expound forthwith, consider a creature ‘x’ who is hungry and has a desire for food at time ‘t’. That creature has a token belief b/(p) that conjoins with its desire for food to cause it to eat what is in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in from it of ‘x’ at that time. Moreover, for b/(p) to cause ‘x’ to eat what is in front of it at ‘t’, b/(p) must be a belief that ‘x’ has at ‘t’. Therefore, the utility/truth conditions of b/(p) is that whatever creature has this belief faces food when it is in fact facing food. And a belief with this content is, of course, the subjective belief whose natural linguistic expression would be “I am facing food now.” On the other hand, however, a belief that would naturally be expressed wit these words can be ascribed to a non-linguistic creature, because what makes it the belief that it is depending not on whether it can be linguistically expressed but on how it affects behaviour.
For in order to believe ‘p’, I need only be disposed to eat what I face if I feel hungry: A disposition which causal contiguity ensures that only my simultaneous hunger can provide, and only into making me eat, and only then. That’s what makes my belief refers to me and to when I have it. And that’s why I need have no idea who I am or what the time is, no concept of the self or of the present, no implicit or explicit grasp of any “sense” of “I” or “now”, to fix the reference of my subjective belies: Causal contiguity fixes them for me.
Causal contiguity, according to explanation may well be to why no internal representation of the self is required, even at what other philosophers has called the subpersonal level. Mellor believes that reference to distal objects can take place when in internal state serves as a causal surrogate for the distal object, and hence as an internal representation of that object. No such causal surrogate, and hence no such internal representation, is required in the case of subjective beliefs. The relevant casual components of subjective beliefs are the believer and the time.
The necessary contiguity of cause and effect is also the key to =the functionalist account of self-reference in conscious subjective belief. Mellor adopts a relational theory of consciousness, equating conscious beliefs with second-order beliefs to the effect that one is having a particular first-order subjective belief, it is, simply a fact about our cognitive constitution that these second-order beliefs are reliably, though of course fallibly, generated so that we tend to believe that we believe things that we do in fact believe.
The contiguity law in Leibniz, extends the principles that there are no discontinuous changes in nature” “natura non facit saltum”, nature makes no leaps. Leibniz was able to use the principle to criticize the mechanical system of Descartes, which would imply such leaps in some circumstances, and to criticize contemporary atomism, which implied discontinuous changes of density at the edge of an atom. However, according to Hume the contiguity of evens is an important element in our interpretation of their conjunction for being causal.
Others attending to the functionalist point of view are it’s the advocates Putnam and Stellars, and its guiding principle is that we can define mental states by a triplet of relations: What typically cayuses them, what affects they have on other mental states and what affects they have on behaviour. The definition need not take the form of a simple analysis, but if we could write down the totality of axioms, or postulates, or platitudes that govern our theories about what things are apt to cause (for example) a belief state, what effects it would have on a variety of other mental states, and what effect it us likely to have on behaviour, then we would have done all that is needed to maske the state a proper theoretical notion. It would be implicitly defined by these theses. Functionalism is often compared with descriptions of a computer, since according to it mental descriptions correspond to a description of a machine in terms of software, that remains silent about the underlying hardware ee or “realization” of the program the machine is running. The principal advantages of functionalism include its fit with the way we know of mental states both of ourselves and others are via their effects on behaviour and other mental states. As with behaviourism, critics charge that structurally complex items that do not bear mental states might nevertheless imitate the functions that are cited. According to this criticism functionalism is too generous, and would count too many things as having minds. It is also queried whether functionalism is too parochial, able to see mental similarities only when there is causal similarity, when our actual practices of interpretation enable us to ascribe thoughts and desires to persons whose causal structure may be rather different from our own. It may then seem as though beliefs and desires can be variably realized in causal architectures, just as much as they can be in different neurophysiological stares.
Nevertheless, we are confronted with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might assume that there is a single ability that is presupposed. This is my ability to think about myself, and I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for autographical memories and moral self-understanding. These are ways of thinking about myself.
Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employ in my thoughts about other people and other objects. My knowledge that I am a human being deploys certain conceptual abilities that I can also deploy in thinking that you are a human being. The same holds when I congratulate myself for satisfying the exacting moral standards of autonomous moral agencies. This involves concepts and descriptions that can apply equally to themselves and to others. On the other hand, when I think about myself, I am also putting to work an ability that I cannot put to work in thinking about other people and other objects. This is precisely the ability to apply those concepts and descriptions to myself. It has become common to refer to this ability as the ability to entertain “I’-thoughts.
Nonetheless, both subject and object, either mind or matter, are real or both are unreal, imaginary. The assumption of just an illusory subject or illusory object leads to dead-ends and to absurdities. This would entail an extreme form of skepticism, wherein everything is relative or subjective and nothing could be known for sure. This is not only devastating for the human mind, but also most ludicrous.
Does this leave us with the only option, that both, subject and objects are alike real? That would again create a real dualism, which we realized, is only created in our mind. So, what part of this dualism is not real?
To answer this, we have first to inquire into the meaning of the term "real.” Reality comes from the Latin word "realitas,” which could be literally translated by "thing-hood.” "Res" does not only have the meaning of a material thing.” "Res" can have a lot of different meanings in Latin. Most of them have little to do with materiality, e.g., affairs, events, business, a coherent collection of any kind, situation, etc. These so-called situative terms are always subjective, and therefore related to the way of thinking and feeling of human beings. Outside of the realm of human beings, reality has no meaning at all. Only in the context of conscious and rational beings does reality become something meaningful. Reality is the whole of the human affairs insofar as these are related to our world around us. Reality is never the bare physical world, without the human being. Reality is the totality of human experience and thought in relation to an objective world.
Now this is the next aspect we have to analyse. Is this objective world, which we encounter in our experience and thought, something that exists on its own or is it dependent on our subjectivity? That the subjective mode of our consciousness affects the perceptions of the objective world is conceded by most of the scientists. Nevertheless, they assume a real and objective world, that would even exist without a human being alive or observing it. One way to handle this problem is the Kantian solution of the "thing-in-itself," that is inaccessible to our mind because of mind's inherent limitations. This does not help us very much, but just posits some undefinable entity outside of our experience and understanding. Hegel, on the other side, denied the inaccessibility of the "thing-in-itself" and thought, that knowledge of the world as it is in itself is attainable, but only by "absolute knowing" the highest form of consciousness.
One of the most persuasive proofs of an independent objective world, is the following thesis by science: If we put a camera into a landscape, where no human beings are present, and when we leave this place and let the camera take some pictures automatically through a timer, and when we come back some days later to develop the pictures, we will find the same picture of the landscape as if we had taken the picture ourselves. Also, common-sense tells us: if we wake up in the morning, it is highly probable, even sure, that we find ourselves in the same environment, without changes, without things having left their places uncaused.
Is this empirical argument sufficient to persuade even the most sceptical thinker, which there is an objective world out there? Hardly. If a sceptic nonetheless tries to uphold the position of a solipsistic monism, then the above-mentioned argument would only be valid, if the objects out there were assumed to be subjective mental constructs. Not even Berkeley assumed such an extreme position. His immaterialism was based on the presumption, that the world around us is the object of God's mind, that means, that all the objects are ideas in a universal mind. This is more persuasive. We could even close the gap between the religious concept of "God" and the philosophical concept by relating both of them to the modern quantum physical concept of a vacuum. All have one thing in common: there must be an underlying reality, which contains and produces all the objects. This idea of an underlying reality is interestingly enough a continuous line of thought throughout the history of mankind. Almost every great philosopher or every great religion assumed some kind of supreme reality. I deal with this idea in my historical account of mind's development.
We're still stuck with the problem of subject and object. If we assume, that there may be an underlying reality, neither physical nor mental, neither object nor subject, but producing both aspects, we end up with the identity of subject and object. So long as there is only this universal "vacuum,” nothing is yet differentiated. Everything is one and the same. By a dialectical process of division or by random fluctuations of the vacuum, elementary forms are created, which develop into more complex forms and finally into living beings with both a mental and a physical aspect. The only question to answer is, how these two aspects were produced and developed. Maybe there are an infinite numbers of aspects, but only two are visible to us, such as Spinoza postulated it. Also, since the mind does not evolve out of matter, there must have been either a concomitant evolution of mind and matter or matter has evolved whereas mind has not. Consequently mind is valued somehow superiorly to matter. Since both are aspects of one reality, both are alike significant. Science conceives the whole physical world and the human beings to have evolved gradually from an original vacuum state of the universe (singularity). So, has mind just popped into the world at some time in the past, or has mind emerged from the complexity of matter? The latter are not sustainable, and this leaves us with the possibility, that the other aspect, mind, has different attributes and qualities. This could be proven empirically. We do not believe, that our personality is something material, that our emotions, our love and fear are of a physical nature. The qualia and properties of consciousness are completely different from the properties of matter as science has defined it. By the very nature and essence of each aspect, we can assume therefore a different dialectical movement. Whereas matter is by the very nature of its properties bound to evolve gradually and existing in a perpetual movement and change, mind, on the other hand, by the very nature of its own properties, is bound to a different evolution and existence. Mind as such has not evolved. The individualized form of mind in the human body, that is, the subject, can change, although in different ways than matter changes. Both aspects have their own sets of laws and patterns. Since mind is also non-local, it comprises all individual minds. Actually, there is only one consciousness, which is only artificially split into individual minds. That's because of the connection with brain-organs, which are the means of manifestation and expression for consciousness. Both aspects are interdependent and constitute the world and the beings as we know them.
Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometry and numerical relationships. We imagine that the seeds of the scientific imagination were
planted in ancient Greece. This, of course, opposes any other option but to speculate some displacement afar from the Chinese or Babylonian cultures. Partly because the social, political, and economic climates in Greece were more open in the pursuit of knowledge along with greater margins that reflect upon cultural accessibility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigations. But it was only after this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential feature of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
The Greek philosophers we now recognized as the originator’s scientific thoughts were oraclically mystic who probably perceived their world as replete with spiritual agencies and forces. The Greek religious heritage made it possible for these thinkers to attempt to coordinate diverse physical events within a framework of immaterial and unifying ideas. The fundamental assumption that there is a pervasive, underlying substance out of which everything emerges and into which everything returns are attributed to Thales of Miletos. Thales had apparently transcended to this conclusion out of the belief that the world was full of gods, and his unifying substance, water, was similarly charged with spiritual presence. Religion in this instance served the interests of science because it allowed the Greek philosophers to view “essences” underlying and unifying physical reality as if they were “substances.”
Nonetheless, the belief that the mind of God as the Divine Architect permeates the workings of nature. All of which, is the principle of scientific thought, as pronounced through Johannes Kepler, and subsequently to most contemporaneous physicists, as the consigned probability can feel of some discomfort, that in reading Kepler’s original manuscripts. Physics and metaphysics, astronomy and astrology, geometry and theology commingle with an intensity that might offend those who practice science in the modern sense of that word. “Physical laws,” wrote Kepler, “lie within the power of understanding of the human mind, God wanted us to perceive them when he created us in His image so that we may take part in His own thoughts . . . Our knowledge of numbers and quantities are the same as that of God’s, at least as far as we can understand something of it in this mortal life.”
The history of science grandly testifies to the manner in which scientific objectivity results in physical theories that must be assimilated into “customary points of view and forms of perception.” The framers of classical physics derived, like the rest of us there, “customary points of view and forms of perception” from macro-level visualized experience. Thus, the descriptive apparatus of visualizable experience became reflected in the classical descriptive categories.
A major discontinuity appears, however, as we moved from descriptive apparatus dominated by the character of our visualizable experience to a complete description of physical reality in relativistic and quantum physics. The actual character of physical reality in modern physics lies largely outside the range of visualizable experience. Einstein, was acutely aware of this discontinuity: “We have forgotten what features of the world of experience caused us to frame pre-scientific concepts, and we have great difficulty in representing the world of experience to ourselves without the spectacles of the old-established conceptual interpretation. There is the further difficulty that our language is compelled to work with words that are inseparably connected with those primitive concepts.”
It is time, for the religious imagination and the religious experience to engage the complementary truths of science in filling that which is silence with meaning. However, this does not mean that those who do not believe in the existence of God or Being should refrain in any sense for assessing the implications of the new truths of science. Understanding these implications does not require to some ontology, and is in no way diminished by the lack of ontology. And one is free to recognize a basis for an exchange between science and religion since one is free to deny that this basis exists - there is nothing in our current scientific world-view that can prove the existence of God or Being and nothing that legitimate any anthropomorphic conceptions of the nature of God or Being. The question of belief in onology remains what it has always been - a question, and the physical universe on the most basic level remains what has always been - a riddle. And the ultimate answer to the question and the ultimate meaning of the riddle are, and probably will always be, a mater of personal choice and conviction.
Our frame reference work is mostly to incorporate in an abounding set-class affiliation between mind and world, by that lay to some defining features and fundamental preoccupations, for which there is certainly nothing new in the suggestion that contemporary scientific world-view legitimates an alternate conception of the relationship between mind and world. The essential point of attention is that one of “consciousness” and remains in a certain state of our study.
But at the end of this, sometimes labourious journey that precipitate to some conclusion that should make the trip very worthwhile. Initiatory comments offer resistance in contemporaneous physics or biology for believing “I” in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have rather aptly described as “the disease of the Western mind.” In addition, let us consider the legacy in Western intellectual life of the stark division between mind and world sanctioned by René Descartes.
Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, inasmuch as he made epistemological questions the primary and central questions of the discipline. But this is misleading for several reasons. In the first, Descartes conception of philosophy was very different from our own. The term “philosophy” in the seventeenth century was far more comprehensive than it is today, and embraced the whole of what we nowadays call natural science, including cosmology and physics, and subjects like anatomy, optics and medicine. Descartes reputation as a philosopher in his own time was based as much as anything on his contributions in these scientific areas. Secondly, even in those Cartesian writings that are philosophical in the modern academic sense, the e epistemological concerns are rather different from the conceptual and linguistic inquiries that characterize present-day theory of knowledge. Descartes saw the need to base his scientific system on secure metaphysical foundations: By “metaphysics” he meant that in the queries into God and the soul and usually all the first things to be discovered by philosophizing. Yet, he was quick to realize that there was nothing in this view that provided untold benefits between heaven and earth and united the universe in a shared and communicable frame of knowledge, it presented us with a view of physical reality that was totally alien from the world of everyday life. Even so, there was nothing in this view of nature that could explain or provide a foundation for the mental, or for all that of direct experience as distinctly human, with no ups, downs or any which ways of direction.
Following these fundamentals’ explorations that include questions about knowledge and certainty, but even here, Descartes is not primarily concerned with the criteria for knowledge claims, or with definitions of the epistemic concepts involved, as his aim is to provide a unified framework for understanding the universe. And with this, Descartes was convinced that the immaterial essences that gave form and structure to this universe were coded in geometrical and mathematical ideas, and this insight led him to invented algebraic geometry.
A scientific understanding to these ideas could be derived, as did that Descartes declared, that with the aid of precise deduction, and he also claimed that the contours of physical reality could be laid out in three-dimensional coordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modelling became the most powerful tools of modern science. And the dream that the entire physical world could be known and mastered through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principle of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanisms lacking any concerns about its spiritual dimension or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile, or eliminate Descartes’s stark division between mind and matter became perhaps the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
As in the view of the relationship between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics and formalized by Descartes became a central preoccupation in Western intellectual life. And the tragedy of the Western mind is that we have lived since the seventeenth century with the prospect that the inner world of human consciousness and the outer world of physical reality are separated by an abyss or a void that cannot be bridged or to agree with reconciliation.
In classical physics, external reality consisted of inert and inanimate matter moving according to wholly deterministic natural laws, and collections of discrete atomized parts made up wholes. Classical physics was also premised, however, a dualistic conception of reality as consisting of abstract disembodied ideas existing in a domain separate form and superior to sensible objects and movements. The notion that the material world experienced by the senses was inferior to the immaterial world experienced by mind or spirit has been blamed for frustrating the progress of physics up too at least the time of Galileo. But in one very important respect, it also made the first scientific revolution possible. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton firmly believed that the immaterial geometrical and mathematical ideas that inform physical reality had a prior existence in the mind of God and that doing physics was a form of communion with these ideas.
The tragedy of the Western mind is a direct consequence of the stark Cartesian division between mind and world. This is the tragedy of the modern mind which “solved the riddle of the universe,” but only to replace it by another riddle: The riddle of itself. Yet, we discover the “certain principles of physical reality,” said Descartes, “not by the prejudices of the senses, but by rational analysis, which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth.” Since the real, or that which actually remains external to ourselves, was in his view only that which could be represented in the quantitative terms of mathematics, Descartes concluded that all qualitative aspects of reality could be traced to the deceitfulness of the senses.
Given that Descartes distrusted the information from the senses to the point of doubting the perceived results of repeatable scientific experiments, how did he conclude that our knowledge of the mathematical ideas residing only in mind or in human subjectivity was accurate, much less the absolute truth? He did so by making a leap of faith - God constructed the world, said Descartes, according to the mathematical ideas that our minds could uncover in their pristine essence. The truths of classical physics as Descartes viewed them were quite literally “revealed” truths, and it was this seventeenth-century metaphysical presupposition that became in the history of science what is termed the “hidden ontology of classical epistemology.” Descartes lingers in the widespread conviction that science does not provide a “place for man” or for all that we know as distinctly human in subjective reality.
The historical notion in the unity of consciousness has had an interesting history in philosophy and psychology. Taking Descartes to be the first major philosopher of the modern period, the unity of consciousness was central to the study of the mind for the whole of the modern period until the 20th century. The notion figured centrally in the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Kant, Brennan, James, and, in most of the major precursors of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology. It played a particularly important role in Kant's work.
A couple of examples will illustrate the role that the notion of the unity of consciousness played in this long literature. Consider a classical argument for dualism (the view that the mind is not the body, indeed is not made out of matter at all). It starts like this: When I consider the mind, which is to say of myself, as far as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.
Descartes then asserts that if the mind is not made up of parts, it cannot consist of matter, presumably because, as he saw it, anything material has parts. He then goes on to say that this would be enough to prove dualism by itself, had he not already proved it elsewhere. It is in the unified consciousness that I have of myself.
Here is another, more elaborate argument based on unified consciousness. The conclusion will be that any system of components could never achieve unified consciousness acting in concert. William James' well-known version of the argument starts as follows: Take a sentence of a dozen words, take twelve men, and to each word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; Nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.
James generalizes this observation to all conscious states. To get dualism out of this, we need to add a premise: That if the mind were made out of matter, conscious states would have to be distributed over some group of components in some relevant way. Nevertheless, this thought experiment is meant to show that conscious states cannot be so distributed. Therefore, the conscious mind is not made out of matter. Calling the argument that James is using is the Unity Argument. Clearly, the idea that our consciousness of, here, the parts of a sentence are unified is at the centre of the Unity Argument. Like the first, this argument goes all the way back to Descartes. Versions of it can be found in thinkers otherwise as different from one another as Leibniz, Reid, and James. The Unity Argument continued to be influential into the 20th century. That the argument was considered a powerful reason for concluding that the mind is not the body is illustrated in a backhanded way by Kant's treatment of it (as he found it in Descartes and Leibniz, not James, of course).
Kant did not think that we could uncover anything about the nature of the mind, including whether nor is it made out of matter. To make the case for this view, he had to show that all existing arguments that the mind is not material do not work and he set out to do just this in the chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason on the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (1781), paralogisms are faulty inferences about the nature of the mind. The Unity Argument is the target of a major part of that chapter; if one is going to show that we cannot know what the mind is like, we must dispose of the Unity Argument, which purports to show that the mind is not made out of matter. Kant's argument that the Unity Argument does not support dualism is simple. He urges that the idea of unified consciousness being achieved by something that has no parts or components are no less mysterious than its being achieved by a system of components acting together. Remarkably enough, though no philosopher has ever met this challenge of Kant's and no account exists of what an immaterial mind not made out of parts might be like, philosophers continued to rely on the Unity Argument until well into the 20th century. It may be a bit difficult for us to capture this now but the idea any system of components, and for an even stronger reason might not realize that merge with consciousness, that each system of material components, had a strong intuitive appeal for a long time.
The notion that consciousness agrees to unification and was in addition central to one of Kant's own famous arguments, his ‘transcendental deduction of the categories’. In this argument, boiled down to its essentials, Kant claims that to tie various objects of experience together into a single unified conscious representation of the world, something that he simply assumed that we could do, we could probably apply certain concepts to the items in question. In particular we have to apply concepts from each of four fundamental categories of concept: Quantitative, qualitative, relational, and what he called ‘modal’ concepts. Modal concept’s concern of whether an item might exist, does exist, or must exist. Thus, the four kinds of concept are concepts for how many units, what features, what relations to other objects, and what existence status is represented in an experience.
It was relational conceptual representation that most interested Kant and of relational concepts, he thought the concept of cause-and-effect to be by far the most important. Kant wanted to show that natural science (which for him meant primarily physics) was genuine knowledge (he thought that Hume's sceptical treatment of cause and effect relations challenged this status). He believed that if he could prove that we must tie items in our experience together causally if we are to have a unified awareness of them, he would have put physics back on "the secure path of a science.” The details of his argument have exercised philosophers for more than two hundred years. We will not go into them here, but the argument illustrates how central the notion of the unity of consciousness was in Kant's thinking about the mind and its relation to the world.
Consciousness may possibly be the most challenging and pervasive source of problems in the whole of philosophy. Our own consciousness seems to be the most basic fact confronting us, yet it is almost impossible to say what consciousness is. Is mine like your? Is ours like that of animals? Might machines come to have consciousness? Is it possible for there to be disembodied consciousness? Whatever complex biological and neural processes go backstage, it is my consciousness that provides the theatre where my experiences and thoughts have their existence, where my desires are felt and where my intentions are formed. But then how am I to conceive the “I,” or self that is the spectator of this theatre? One of the difficulties in thinking about consciousness is that the problems seem not to be scientific ones: Leibniz remarked that if we could construct a machine that could think and feel, and blow it up to the size of a mill and thus be able to examine its working parts as thoroughly as we pleased, we would still not find consciousness and draw the conclusion that consciousness resides in simple subjects, not complex ones. Eve n if we are convinced that consciousness somehow emerges from the complexity of brain functioning, we many still feel baffled about the way the emergence takes place, or why it takes place in just the way it does.
The nature of the conscious experience has been the largest single obstacle to physicalism, behaviourism, and functionalism in the philosophy of mind: These are all views that according to their opponents, can only be believed by feigning permanent anaesthesin. But many philosophers are convinced that we can divide and conquer: We may make progress by breaking the subject into different skills and recognizing that rather than a single self or observer we would do better to think of a relatively undirected whirl of cerebral activity, with no inner theatre, no inner lights, ad above all no inner spectator.
A fundamental philosophical topic both for its central place in any theory of knowledge, and its central place in any theory of consciousness. Philosophy in this area is constrained by a number of properties that we believe to hold of perception. (1) It gives us knowledge of the world around us (2) We are conscious of that world by being aware of “sensible qualities,” colours, sounds, tastes, smells, felt warmth, and the shapes and positions of objects in the environment. (3) Such consciousness is affected through highly complex information channels, such as the output of three different types of colour-sensitive cells in the eye, or the channels in the ear for interpreting pulses of air pressure as frequencies of sound. (4) There ensues even more neurophysiological coding of that information, and eventually higher-order brain functions bring it about that we interpreted the information so received (much of this complexity has been revealed by the difficulty of writing programs enabling commuters to recognize quite simple aspects of the visual scene.) The problem is to avoid thinking of there being a central, ghostly, conscious self. Fed information in the same way that a screen is fed information by a remote television camera. Once such a model is in place, experience will seem like a model getting between us and the world, and the direct objects of perception will seem to be private items in an inner theatre or sensorium. The difficulty of avoiding this model is especially acuter when we consider the secondary qualities of colour, sound, tactile feelings, and taste, which can easily seem to have a purely private existence inside the perceiver, like sensations of pain. Calling such supposed items names like sense data or percepts exacerbate the tendency. But once the model is in place, the fist property, the perception gives us knowledge or the inner world around us, is quickly threatened, for there now seem little connection between these items in immediate experience and any independent reality. Reactions to this problem include scepticism and idealism.
A more hopeful approach is to claim that complexities of (3) and (4) explain how we can have direct acquaintances of the world, than suggesting that the acquaintance we do have at best an emendable indiction. It is pointed out that perceptions are not like sensations, precisely because they have a content, or outer-directed nature. To have a perception is to be aware of the world as bing such-and-such a way, than to enjoy a mere modification of sensation. Nut. Such direct realism has to be sustained in the face of the evident personal (neurophysiological and other) factors determining how we perceive. One approach is to ask why it is useful to be conscious of what we perceive, when other aspects of our functioning work with information determining responses without any conscious awareness or intervention. A solution to this problem would offer the hope of making consciousness part of the natural world, than strange optional extra.
Even to be, that if one is without idea, one is without concept, and, in the same likeness that, if one is without concept he too is without idea. Idea (Gk., visible form) that may be a notion as if by stretching all the way from one pole, where it denotes a subjective, internal presence in thr mind, somehow though t of as representing something about the orld, to the other pole, where it represents an eternal, timeless unchanging form or concept: The concept of the number series or of justice, for example, thought of as independent objects of enquiry and perhaps of knowledge. These two poles are not distinct in meaning by the term kept, although they give rise to many problems of interpretation, but between them they define a space of philosophical problems. On the one hand, ideas are that with which we think. Or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may ne employed about in thinking Looked at that way they seem to be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presence. On the other, ideas provide the way in which objective knowledge can ne expressed. They are the essential components of understanding and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. Plato’s theory of “Form” is a celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and in this hand ideas are reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin, this doctrine, notably in the Timarus opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other-worldly aspect, until after Descartes ideas become assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being.
Together with a general bias toward the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like images, and a belief that thinking is well explained as the manipulation of images, this was developed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume into a full-scale view of the understanding as the domain of images, although they were all aware of anomalies that were later regarded as fatal to this doctrine. The defects in the account were exposed by Kant, who realized that the understanding needs to be thought of more in terms of rules and organized principles than of any kind of copy of what is given in experience. Kant also recognized the danger of the opposite extreme (that of Leibniz) of failing to connect the elements of understanding with those of experience at all (Critique of Pure Reason).
It has become more common to think of ideas, or concepts as dependent upon social and especially linguistic structures, than the self-standing creatures of an individual mind, but the tension between the objective and the subjective aspects of the matter lingers on, for instance in debates about the possibility of objective knowledge, of indeterminacy in translation, and of identity between thoughts people entertain at one time and those that they entertain at another.
To possess a concept is able to deploy a term expressing it in making judgements: The ability connects with such things as recognizing when the term applies, and being able to understand the consequences of its application. The term “idea” was formerly used in the same way, but is avoided because of its association with subjective mental imagery, which may be irrelevant to the possession of concept. In the semantics of Frége, a concept is the reference of a predicate, and cannot be referred to by a subject term. Frége regarded predicates as incomplete expressions for a function, such as, sine . . . or log . . . is incomplete. Predicates refer to concepts, which themselves are “unsaturated,” and cannot be referred to by subject expressions (we thus get the paradox that the concept of a horse is not a concept). Although Frége recognized the metaphorical nature of the notion of a concept being unsaturated, he was rightly convinced that some such notion is needed to explain the unity of a sentence, and to prevent sentences from being thought of as mere lists of names.
Mental states have contents: A belief may have the content that I will catch the train, a hope may have the content that the prime minister will resign. A concept is something which is capable of being a constituent of such contents. More specifically, a concept is a way of thinking of something – a particular object, or property, or relation. Or some other entity.
Several different concepts may each be ways of thinking of the same object. A person may think of himself in the first-person way, or think of himself as the spouse of May Smith, or as the person located in a certain room now. More generally, a concept “c” is such-and-such without believing “d” is such-and-such. As words can be combined to form structured sentences, concepts have also been conceived as combinable into structured complex contents. When these complex contents are expressed in English by “that . . . “ clauses, as in our opening examples, they will be capable of been true or false, depending on the way the world is.
Concepts are to be distinguished from stereotypes and from conceptions. The stereotypical spy may be a middle-level official down on his luck and in need of money, none the less, we can come to learn that Anthony Blunt, are historian and Surveyor of the Queen’s Picture, is a spy: We can come to believe that something falls under a concept while positively disbelieving that the same thing falls under the stereotype association with the concept. Similarly, a person’s conception of a just arrangement for resolving disputes may involve something like contemporary Western legal systems. But whether or not it would be correct, it is quite intelligible for someone to reject this conception by arguing that it does not adequately provide for the elements of fairness and respect which are required by the concept of justice.
A theory of a particular concept must be distinguished from a theory of the object or objects it picks out. The theory of the concept is part of the theory of thought and epistemology: A theory of the object or objects is part of metaphysics and ontology. Some figures in the history of philosophy - and perhaps even some of our contemporaries - are open to the accusation of not having fully respected the distinction between the two kinds of theory. Descartes appears to have moved from facts about the indubitability of the thought “I think,” containing the first-person way of thinking, to conclusions about the non-material nature of the object he himself was. But though the goals of a theory of concepts theory is required to have an adequate account to its relation to the other theory. A theory of concepts is unacceptable if it gives no account of how the concept is capable of picking out the object it evidently does pick out. A theory of objects is unacceptable if it makes it impossible to understand how we could have concepts of those objects.
A fundamental question for philosophy is: What individuates a given concept - that is, what makes it the one is, than any other concept? One answer, which has been developed in great detail, is that it is impossible to give a non-trivial answer to this question. An alternative addresses the question by stating from the ideas that a concept is individuated by the condition which must be satisfied if a thinker is to posses that concept and to be capable of having beliefs and other attitudes whose contents contain it as a constituent. So to take a simple case, on e could propose the logical concept “and” is individuated by this conditions: It is the unique concept “C” to possess which a thinker has to find these forms of inference compelling, without basing them on any further inference or information: From any to premisses “A” and “B,” “ABC” can be inferred: And from any premiss “ABC,” each of “A” and “B” can be inferred. Again, a relatively observational concept such as “round” can be individuated in part by stating that the thinker finds specified contents containing it compelling when he has certain kinds of perception, and in part by relating those judgements containing the concept and which are based on perception which individuates a concept by saying what is required for a thinker to possess it can be described as giving the possession condition for the concept.
A possession condition for a particular concept may actually make use of that concept. The possession condition for “and” does not. We can also expect to use relatively observational concepts in specifying the kind of experiences which have to be of comment in the possession condition for relatively observational concepts. We must avoid, as mentioned of the concept in question as such, within the content of the attitudes attributed to the thinker in the possession condition. Otherwise we would be presupposing possession of the concept in an account which was meant to elucidate its possession, in talking of what the thinker finds compelling, the possession conditions can also respect an insight of the later Wittgenstein: That a thinker’s mastery of a concept is inextricably tied to how he finds it natural to go on in new cases in applying the concept.
Sometimes a family of concepts has this property: It is not possible to master any one of the members of the family without mastering the other. Two of the families which plausibly have this status are these: The family consisting of some simple concepts 0, 1, 2, . . . of the natural numbers and the corresponding concepts of numerical quantifiers there are 0 so-and-sos, there is 1 so-and-so, . . . : And the family consisting of the concepts “belief” ad “desire.” Such families have come to be known as “local holisms.” A local Holism does not prevent the individuation of a concept by its possession condition. Rather, it demands that all the concepts in the family be individuated simultaneously. So one would say something of this form: Belief and desire form the unique pair of concepts C1 and C2 such that for a thinker to possess them is to meet such-and-such condition involving the thinker, C1 and C2. For these and other possession conditions to individuate properly, it is necessary that there be some ranking of the concepts treated, and the possession conditions for concepts higher in ranking must presuppose only possession of concepts at the same or lower level in the ranking.
A possession condition may in various ways make a thinker’s possession of a particular concept dependents upon his relations to his environment. Many possession conditions will mention the links between a concept and the thinker’s perceptual experience. Perceptual experience represents the world for being a certain way. It is arguable that the only satisfactory explanation of what it is for perceptual experience to represent the world in a particular way must refer to the complex relations of the experience e to the subject’s environment. If this is so, then mention more much experiences in a possession condition will make possession of that concept dependent in particular upon the environmental relations of the thinker. Also, from intuitive particularities, that evens though the thinker’s non-environmental properties and relations remain constant, the conceptual content of his mental state can vary if the thinker’s social environment is varied. A possession condition which properly individuates such a concept must take into account the thinker’s social relations, in particular his linguistic relations.
Concepts have a normative dimension, a fact strongly emphasized by Kriple. For any judgement whose content involves s a given concept, there is a correctness condition for that judgement, a condition which is dependent in part upon the identity of the concept. The normative character of concepts also extends into the territory of a thinker’s reason for making judgements. A thinker’s visual perception can give him good reason for judging “That man is bald”: It does not by itself give him good reason for judging “Rostropovich is bald,” even if the man he sees is Rostropovich. All these normative connections must be explained by a theory of concepts. One approach to these matters is to look to the possession condition for a concept, and consider how the referent of the concept is fixed from it, together with the world. One proposal is that the referent if the concept is that object (or property, or function, . . . ) which makes the practices of judgement and inference in the possession condition always lead to true judgements and truth-preserving inferences. This proposal would explain why certain reasons are necessarily good reasons for judging given contents. Provided the possession condition permit s us to say what it is about a thinker’s previous judgements that make it the case that he is employing one concept rather than another, this proposal would also have another virtue. It would allow us to say how the correctness condition is determined for a newly encountered object. The judgement is correct if t he new object has the property which in fact makes the judgmental practices in the possession condition yield true judgements, or truth-preserving inferences.
Despite the fact that the unity of consciousness had been at the centre of pre-20th century research on the mind, early in the 20th century the notion almost disappeared. Logical atomism in philosophy and behaviourism in psychology were both unsympathetic to the notion. Logical atomism focussed on the atomic elements of cognition (sense data, simple propositional judgments, etc.), rather than on how these elements are tied together to form a mind. Behaviourism urged that we focus on behaviour, the mind being alternatively myth or something otherwise that we cannot and do not need of studying the mysteriousness of science, from which brings meaning and purpose to humanity. This attitude extended to consciousness, of course. The philosopher Daniel Dennett summarizes the attitude prevalent at the time this way: Consciousness may be the last bastion of occult properties, epiphenomena, immeasurable subjective states - in short, the one area of mind best left to the philosophers. Let them make fools of themselves trying to corral the quicksilver of ‘phenomenology’ into a respectable theory.
The unity of consciousness next became an object of serious attention in analytic philosophy only as late as the 1960s. In the years since, new work has appeared regularly. The accumulated literature is still not massive but the unity of consciousness has again become an object of serious study. Before we examine the more recent work, we need to explicate the notion in more detail than we have done so far and introduce some empirical findings. Both are required to understand recent work on the issue.
To expand on our earlier notion of the unity of consciousness, we need to introduce a pair of distinctions. Current works on consciousness labours under a huge, confusing terminology. Different theorists exchange dialogue over the excess consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, simple consciousness, creature consciousness, states consciousness, monitoring consciousness, awareness as equated with consciousness, awareness distinguished from consciousness, higher orders thought, higher orders experience, qualia, the felt qualities of representations, consciousness as displaced perception, . . . and on and on and on. We can ignore most of this profusion but we do need two distinctions: between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects, and between consciousness of representations and consciousness of self.
It is very natural to think of self-consciousness or, cognitive state more accurately, as a set of cognitive states. Self-knowledge is an example of such a cognitive state. There are plenty of things that I know bout self. I know the sort of thing I am: a human being, a warm-blooded rational animal with two legs. I know of many properties and much of what is happening to me, at both physical and mental levels. I also know things about my past, things I have done and that of whom I have been with other people I have met. But I have many self-conscious cognitive states that are not instances of knowledge. For example, I have the capacity to plan for the future - to weigh up possible courses of action in the light of goals, desires, and ambitions. I am capable of ca certain type of moral reflection, tide to moral self-and understanding and moral self-evaluation. I can pursue questions like, what sort of person I am? Am I the sort of person I want to be? Am I the sort of individual that I ought to be? This is my ability to think about myself. Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employing in my thought about other people and other objects.
When I say that I am a self-conscious creature, I am saying that I can do all these things. But what do they have in common? Could I lack some and still be self-conscious? These are central questions that take us to the heart of many issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of psychology.
Even so, with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might naturally assume that there is a single ability that all presuppose. This is my ability to think about myself. I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for autobiographical memories and moral self-understanding.
The proposing account would be on par with other noted examples of the deflationary account of self-consciousness. If, in at all, a straightforward explanation to what makes those of the “self contents” immune to error through misidentification concerning the semantics of self, then it seems fair to say that the problem of self-consciousness has been dissolved, at least as much as solved.
This proposed account would be on a par with other noted examples as such as the redundancy theory of truth. That is to say, the redundancy theory or the deflationary view of truth claims that the predicate ‘ . . . true’ does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concept that ought to be the topic of philosophic enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, but centres on the pints (1) that ‘it is true that p’ says no more nor less than ‘p’ (so, redundancy”) (2) that in less direct context, such as ‘everything he said was true’, or ‘all logical consequences of true propositions as true’, the predicated functions as a device enabling us to generalize rather than as an adjective or predicate describing the things he said, or the kinds of propositions that follow from true propositions. For example, its translation is to infer that: (∀p, Q)(P & p ➞ q ➞ q)’ where there is no use of a notion of truth.
There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, but they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive uses of the notion, such as . . . ‘science aims at the truth’ or ‘truth is a norm governing discourse. Indeed, postmodernist writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms, along with a discredited ‘objective’ concept ion of truth. But perhaps, we can have the norms even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed within mention of truth: Science wants to be so that whenever science holds that ‘p’, when ‘p’‘. Discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p’. When not-p.
It is important to stress how redundancy or the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun, is motivated by an important principle that ha governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. This is the principle that the philosophical analysis of thought can only proceed through the philosophical analysis of language:
Thoughts differ from all else that is aid to be among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable: It is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my thought is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without residue, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed. We communicate thought by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language, it is these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the employment of language, unaided by any supposed contact between mind and the senses that they carry. In order to analyses thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp. (Dummett, 1978)
So how can such thoughts be entertained by a thinker incapable of reflexively referring to himself as English speakers do with the first-person pronoun be plausibly ascribed thought with first-person contents? The thought that, despite all this, there are in fact first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been deployed by Hugh Mellor (1988-1989). The basic phenomenon he is interested in explaining is what it is for a creature to have what he terms as subjective belief, which is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. Mellor starts from the functionalist premise that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions. It is, of course, the emphasis on causal links between belief and action that make it plausible to think that belief might be independent of language and conscious belief, since “agency entails neither linguistic ability nor conscious belief. The idea that beliefs are causal functions from desires too actions can be deployed to explain the content of a give n belief through which the equation of truth conditions and utility conditions, where utility conditions are those in which the actions caused by the conjunction of that belief with a single desire result in the satisfaction of that desire. To expound forthwith, consider a creature ‘x’ who is hungry and has a desire for food at time ‘t’. That creature has a token belief b/(p) that conjoins with its desire for food to cause it to eat what is in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in from it of ‘x’ at that time. Moreover, for b/(p) to cause ‘x’ to eat what is in front of it at ‘t’, b/(p) must be a belief that ‘x’ has at ‘t’. Therefore, the utility/truth conditions of b/(p) is that whatever creature has this belief faces food when it is in fact facing food. And a belief with this content is, of course, the subjective belief whose natural linguistic expression would be “I am facing food now.” On the other hand, however, a belief that would naturally be expressed wit these words can be ascribed to a non-linguistic creature, because what makes it the belief that it is depending not on whether it can be linguistically expressed but on how it affects behaviour.
For in order to believe ‘p’, I need only be disposed to eat what I face if I feel hungry: A disposition which causal contiguity ensures that only my simultaneous hunger can provide, and only into making me eat, and only then. That’s what makes my belief refers to me and to when I have it. And that’s why I need have no idea who I am or what the time is, no concept of the self or of the present, no implicit or explicit grasp of any “sense” of “I” or “now”, to fix the reference of my subjective belies: Causal contiguity fixes them for me.
Causal contiguities, according to explanation may well be to why no internal representation of the self is required, even at what other philosophers have called the sub-personal level. Mellor believes that reference to distal objects can take place when in internal state serves as a causal surrogate for the distal object, and hence as an internal representation of that object. No such causal surrogate, and hence no such internal representation, is required in the case of subjective beliefs. The relevant casual component of subjective belies are the believer and the time.
The necessary contiguity of cause and effect is also the key to =the functionalist account of self-reference in conscious subjective belief. Mellor adopts a relational theory of consciousness, equating conscious beliefs with second-order beliefs to the effect that one is having a particular first-order subjective belief, it is, simply a fact about our cognitive constitution that these second-order beliefs are reliably, though of course fallibly, generated so that we tend to believe that we believe things that we do in fact believe.
The contiguity law in Leibniz, extends the principles that there are no discontinuous changes in nature, “natura non facit saltum”, nature makes no leaps. Leibniz was able to use the principle to criticize the mechanical system of Descartes, which would imply such leaps in some circumstances, and to criticize contemporary atomism, which implied discontinuous changes of density at the edge of an atom however, according to Hume the contiguity of evens is an important element in our interpretation of their conjunction for being causal.
Others attending to the functionalist points of view are it’s the advocate’s Putnam and Stellars, and its guiding principle is that we can define mental states by a triplet of relations: What typically situations to them, in of what effects them have on other mental states and what effects them have on behaviour. The definition need not take the form of a simple analysis, but if we could write down the totality of axioms, or postulates, or platitudes that govern our theories about what things are apt to cause (for example) a belief state, what effects it would have on a variety of other mental states, and what effect it us likely to have on behaviour, then we would have done all that is needed to make the state a proper theoretical notion. It would be implicitly defined by these theses. Functionalism is often compared with descriptions of a computer, since according to it mental descriptions correspond to a description of a machine in terms of software, that remains silent about the underlying hardware or “realization” of the program the machine is running. The principal advantage of functionalism includes its fit with the way we know of mental states both of ourselves and others are via their effects on behaviour and other mental states. As with behaviourism, critics charge that structurally complex items that do not bear mental states might nevertheless imitate the functions that are cited. According to this criticism functionalism is too generous, and would count too many things as having minds. It is also queried whether functionalism is too parochial, able to see mental similarities only when there is causal similarity, when our actual practices of interpretation enable us to ascribe thoughts and desires to persons whose causal structure may be rather different from our own. It may then seem as though beliefs and desires can be “variably realized” in causal architectures, just as much as they can be in different neurophysiological stares.
The anticipation, to revolve os such can find the tranquillity in functional logic and mathematics as function, a relation that auspicates members of one class “X” with some unique member “y” of another “Y”. The associations are written as y = f(x), The class “X” is called the domain of the function, and “Y” its range. Thus “the father of x” is a function whose domain includes all people, and whose range is the class of male parents, and whose range is the class of male parents, but the relation “by that x” is not a function, because a person can have more than one son. “Sine x” is a function from angles of a circle πx, is a function of its diameter x, . . . and so on. Functions may take sequences x1. . . .Xn as their arguments, in which case they may be thought of as associating a unique member of “Y” with any ordered, n-tuple as argument. Given the equation y = f(x1 . . . xn), x1 . . . xn is called the independent variables, or argument of the function, and “y” the dependent variable or value, functions may be many-one, meaning that differed not members of “X” may take the same member of “Y” as their value, or one-one when to each member of “X” may take the same member of “Y” as their value, or one-one when to each member of “X” their corresponds a distinct member of “Y”. A function with “X” and “Y” is called a mapping from “X” to”Y” is also called a mapping from “X” to “Y”, written f X ➝ Y, if the function is such that (1) If x, y ∈ X and f(x) = f(y) then x’s = y, then the function is an injection from to Y, if also: (2) If y ∈ Y, then (∃x)(x ∈ X & Y = f(x)). Then the function is a bi-jection of “X” onto “Y”. A di-jection is both an injection and a sir-jection where a subjection is any function whose domain is “X” and whose range is the whole of “Y”. Since functions ae relations a function may be defined asa set of “ordered” pairs
One of Frége’s logical insights was that a concept is analogous of a function, as a predicate analogous to the expression for a function (a functor). Just as “the square root of x” takes you from one number to another, so “x is a philosopher’ refers to a function that takes us from his person to truth-values: True for values of “x” who are philosophers, and false otherwise.”
Functionalism can be attached both in its commitment to immediate justification and its claim that all medially justified beliefs ultimately depend on the former. Though, in cases, is the latter that is the position’s weaker point, most of the critical immediately unremitting have been directed ti the former. As much of this criticism has ben directed against some particular from of immediate justification, ignoring the possibility of other forms. Thus much anti-foundationalist artillery has been derricked at the “myth of the given” to consciousness in pre-conceptual, pre-judgmental mode, and that beliefs can be justified on that basis (Sellars, 1963) The most prominent general argument against immediate justifications is a whatever use taken does so if the subject is justified in supposing that the putative justifier has what it takes to do so. Hence, since the justification of the original belief depends on the justification of the higher level belief just specified, the justification is not immediate after all. We may lack adequate support for any such higher level as requirement for justification: And if it were imposed we would be launched on an infinite regress, for a similar requirement would hold equally for the higher belief that the original justifier was efficacious.
The reflexive considerations initiated by functionalism evoke an intelligent system, or mind, may fruitfully be thought of as the result of a number of sub-systems performing more simple tasks in co-ordination switch each other. The sub-systems may be envisaged as homunculi, or small, relatively stupid agents. The archetype is a digital computer, where a battery of switches capable of only one response (on or off) can make u a machine that can play chess, write dictionaries, etc.
Nonetheless, we are confronted with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might assume that there is a single ability that is presupposed. This is my ability to think about myself, and I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for autographical memories and moral self-understanding. These are ways of thinking about myself.
Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employ in my thoughts about other people and other objects. My knowledge that I am a human being deploys certain conceptual abilities that I can also deploy in thinking that you are a human being. The same holds when I congratulate myself for satisfying the exacting moral standards of autonomous moral agencies. This involves concepts and descriptions that can apply equally to me and to others. On the other hand, when I think about myself, I am also putting to work an ability that I cannot put to work in thinking about other people and other objects. This is precisely the ability to apply those concepts and descriptions to myself. It has become common to refer to this ability as the ability to entertain “I’-thoughts.
What is an, “I”-thought” Obviously, an “I”-thought is a thought that involves self-reference. I can think an, “I”-thought only by thinking about myself. Equally obvious, though, this cannot be all that there is to say on the subject. I can think thoughts that involve a self-reference but are not “I”-thoughts. Suppose I think that the next person to set a parking ticket in the centre of Toronto deserves everything he gets. Unbeknown to be, the very next recipient of a parking ticket will be me. This makes my thought self-referencing, but it does not make it an “I”-thought. Why not? The answer is simply that I do not know that I will be the next person to get a parking ticket in downtown Toronto. Is ‘A’, is that unfortunate person, then there is a true identity statement of the form I = A, but I do not know that this identity holds, I cannot be ascribed the thoughts that I will deserve everything I get? And si I am not thinking genuine “I”-thoughts, because one cannot think a genuine “I”-thought if one is ignorant that one is thinking about oneself. So it is natural to conclude that “I”-thoughts involve a distinctive type of self-reference. This is the sort of self-reference whose natural linguistic expression is the first-person pronoun “I”, because one cannot be the first-person pronoun without knowing that one is thinking about oneself.
This is still not quite right, however, because thought contents can be specific, perhaps, they can be specified directly or indirectly. That is, all cognitive states to be considered, presuppose the ability to think about oneself. This is not only that they all have to some commonality, but it is also what underlies them all. We can see is more detail what this suggestion amounts to. This claim is that what makes all those cognitive states modes of self-consciousness is the fact that they all have content that can be specified directly by means of the first person pronoun “I” or indirectly by means of the direct reflexive pronoun “he,” such they are first-person contents.
The class of first-person contents is not a homogenous class. There is an important distinction to be drawn between two different types of first-person contents, corresponding to two different modes in which the first person can be employed. The existence of this distinction was first noted by Wittgenstein in an important passage from The Blue Book: That there are two different cases in the use of the word “I” (or, “my”) of which is called “the use as object” and “the use as subject.” Examples of the first kind of use are these” “My arm is broken,” “I have grown six inches,” “I have a bump on my forehead,” “The wind blows my hair about.” Examples of the second kind are: “I see so-and-so,” “I try to lift my arm,” “I think it will rain,” “I have a toothache.” (Wittgenstein 1958)
The explanations given are of the distinction that hinge on whether or not they are judgements that involve identification. However, one can point to the difference between these two categories by saying: The cases of the first category involve the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as: The possibility of can error has been provided for . . . It is possible that, say in an accident, I should feel a pain in my arm, see a broken arm at my side, and think it is mine when really it is my neighbour’s. And I could, looking into a mirror, mistake a bump on his forehead for one on mine. On the other hand, there is no question of recognizing when I have a toothache. To ask “are you sure that its you who have pains?” would be nonsensical (Wittgenstein, 1958?).
Wittgenstein is drawing a distinction between two types of first-person contents. The first type, which is describes as invoking the use of “I” as object, can be analysed in terms of more basic propositions. Such that the thought “I am B” involves such a use of “I”. Then we can understand it as a conjunction of the following two thoughts” “a is B” and “I am a”. We can term the former a predication component and the latter an identification component (Evans 1982). The reason for braking the original thought down into these two components is precisely the possibility of error that Wittgenstein stresses in the second passages stated. One can be quite correct in predicating that someone is B, even though mistaken in identifying oneself as that person.
To say that a statement “a is B” is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term “a” means the following is possible: The speaker knows some particular thing to be “B”, but makes the mistake of asserting “a is B” because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he knows to be “B” is what “a” refers to (Shoemaker 1968).
The point, then, is that one cannot be mistaken about who is being thought about. In one sense, Shoemaker’s criterion of immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun (simply “immunity to error through misidentification”) is too restrictive. Beliefs with first-person contents that are immune to error through identification tend to be acquired on grounds that usually do result in knowledge, but they do not have to be. The definition of immunity to error trough misidentification needs to be adjusted to accommodate them by formulating it in terms of justification rather than knowledge.
The connection to be captured is between the sources and grounds from which a belief is derived and the justification there is for that belief. Beliefs and judgements are immune to error through misidentification in virtue of the grounds on which they are based. The category of first-person contents being picked out is not defined by its subject matter or by any points of grammar. What demarcates the class of judgements and beliefs that are immune to error through misidentification is evidence base from which they are derived, or the information on which they are based. So, to take by example, my thought that I have a toothache is immune to error through misidentification because it is based on my feeling a pain in my teeth. Similarly, the fact that I am consciously perceiving you makes my belief that I am seeing you immune to error through misidentification.
To say that a statement “a is b” is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term “a” means that some particular thing is “b,” because his belief is based on an appropriate evidence base, but he makes the mistake of asserting “a is b” because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he justified believes to be “b” is what “a” refers to.
Beliefs with first-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification tend to be acquired on grounds that usually result in knowledge, but they do not have to be. The definition of immunity to error through misidentification needs to be adjusted to accommodate by formulating in terms of justification rather than knowledge. The connection to be captured is between the sources and grounds from which a beef is derived and the justification there is for that belief. Beliefs and judgements are immune to error through misidentification in virtue of the grounds on which they are based. The category of first-person contents picked out is not defined by its subject matter or by any points of grammar. What demarcates the class of judgements and beliefs that ae immune to error through misidentification is the evidence base from which they are derived, or the information on which they are based. For example, my thought that I have a toothache is immune to error through misidentification because it is based on my feeling a pain in my teeth. Similarly, the fact that I am consciously perceiving you makes my belief that I am seeing you immune to error through misidentification.
A suggestive definition is to say that a statement “a is b” is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term “a” means that the following is possible: The speaker is warranted in believing that some particular thing is “b”, because his belief is based on an appropriate evidence base, but he makes the mistake of asserting “a is b” because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he justified believes to be “b” is what “a” refers to.
First-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification can be mistaken, but they do have a basic warrant in virtue of the evidence on which they are based, because the fact that they are derived from such an evidence base is closely linked to the fact that they are immune to error thought misidentification. Of course, there is room for considerable debate about what types of evidence base ae correlated with this class of first-person contents. Seemingly, then, that the distinction between different types of first-person content can be characterized in two different ways. We can distinguish between those first-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification and those that are subject to such error. Alternatively, we can discriminate between first-person contents with an identification component and those without such a component. For purposes rendered, in that these different formulations each pick out the same classes of first-person contents, although in interestingly different ways.
All first-person consent subject to error through misidentification contain an identification component of the from “I am a” and employ of the first-person-pronoun contents with an identification component and those without such a component. In that identification component, does it or does it not have an identification component? Clearly, then, on pain of an infinite regress, at some stage we will have to arrive at an employment of the first-person pronoun that does not have to arrive at an employment of the first-person pronoun that does not presuppose an identification components, then, is that any first-person content subject to error through misidentification will ultimately be anchored in a first-person content that is immune to error through misidentification.
It is also important to stress how self-consciousness, and any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun, is motivated by an important principle that has governed much if the development of analytical philosophy. This is the principle that the philosophical analysis of though can only proceed through the principle analysis of language. The principle has been defended most vigorously by Michael Dummett.
Even so, thoughts differ from that is said to be among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable: It is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my though is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without residue, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed (Dummett 1978).
Dummett goes on to draw the clear methodological implications of this view of the nature of thought: We communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language, it is these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the mind other than via the medium of language which endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyse thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
Many philosophers would want to dissent from the strong claim that the philosophical analysis of thought through the philosophical analysis of language is the fundamental task of philosophy. But there is a weaker principle that is very widely held as The Thought-Language Principle.
As it stands, the problem between to different roles that the pronoun “he” can play of such oracle clauses. On the one hand, “he” can be employed in a proposition that the antecedent of the pronoun (i.e., the person named just before the clause in question) would have expressed using the first-person pronoun. In such a situation that holds that “he”, is functioning as a quasi-indicator. Then when “he” is functioning as a quasi-indicator, it be written as “he”. Others have described this as the indirect reflexive pronoun. When “he” is functioning as an ordinary indicator, it picks out an individual in such a way that the person named just before the clause of o reality need not realize the identity of himself with that person. Clearly, the class of first-person contents is not homogenous class.
There is canning obviousness, but central question that arises in considering the relation between the content of thought and the content of language, namely, whether there can be thought without language as theories like the functionalist theory. The conception of thought and language that underlies the Thought-Language Principe is clearly opposed to the proposal that there might be thought without language, but it is important to realize that neither the principle nor the considerations adverted to by Dummett directly yield the conclusion that there cannot be that in the absence of language. According to the principle, the capacity for thinking particular thoughts can only be analysed through the capacity for linguistic expression of those thoughts. On the face of it, however, this does not yield the claim that the capacity for thinking particular thoughts cannot exist without the capacity for their linguistic expression.
Thoughts being wholly communicable not entail that thoughts must always be communicated, which would be an absurd conclusion. Nor does it appear to entail that there must always be a possibility of communicating thoughts in any sense in which this would be incompatible with the ascription of thoughts to a nonlinguistic creature. There is, after all, a primary distinction between thoughts being wholly communicable and it being actually possible to communicate any given thought. But without that conclusion there seems no way of getting from a thesis about the necessary communicability of thought to a thesis about the impossibility of thought without language.
A subject has distinguished self-awareness to the extent that he is able to distinguish himself from the environment and its content. He has distinguished psychological self-awareness to the extent that he is able to distinguish himself as a psychological subject within a contract space of other psychological subjects. What does this require? The notion of a non-conceptual point of view brings together the capacity to register one’s distinctness from the physical environment and various navigational capacities that manifest a degree of understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. One very basic reason for thinking that these two elements must be considered together emerges from a point made in the richness of the self-awareness that accompanies the capacity to distinguish the self from the environment is directly proportion are to the richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being distinguished. So no creature can understand its own distinction from the physical enjoinment without having an independent understanding of the nature of the physical environment, and since the physical environment is essentially spatial, this requires an understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. But this cannot be the whole story. It leaves unexplained why an understanding should be required of this particular essential feature of the physical environment. Afer all, it is also an essential feature of the physical environment that it be composed of a an objects that have both primary and secondary qualities, but thee is n reflection of this in the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. More is needed to understand the significance of spatiality.
First, to take a step back from primitive self-consciousness to consider the account of self-identifying first-person thoughts as given in Gareth Evans’s Variety of Reference (1982). Evens places considerable stress on the connection between the form of self-consciousness that he is considering and a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. As far as Evans is concerned, the capacity to think genuine first-person thought implicates a capacity for self-location, which he construes in terms of a thinker’s to conceive of himself as an idea with an element of the objective order. Thought, don’t endorse the particular gloss that Evans puts on this, the general idea is very powerful. The relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because he world is spatial but also because the self-consciousness subject is himself a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Evans tends to stress a dependence in the opposite direction between these notions
The very idea of a perceived objective spatial world brings with it the ideas of the subject for being in the world, which the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable in the way of the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere cannot be separated, and where he is given by what he can perceive (Evans 1982).
But the main criteria of his work is very much that the dependence holds equally in the opposite direction.
It seems that this general idea can be extrapolated and brought to bar on the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. What binds together the two apparently discrete components of a non-conceptual point of view is precisely the fact that a creature’s self-awareness must be awareness of itself as a spatial bing that acts up and is acted upon by the spatial world. Evans’s own gloss on how a subject’s self-awareness, is awareness of himself as a spatial being involves the subject’s mastery of a simple theory explaining how the world makes his perceptions as they are, with principles like “I perceive such and such, such and such holds at P; So (probably) am P and “I am, such who does not hold at P, so I can’t really be perceiving such and such, even though it appears that I am” (Evans 1982). This is not very satisfactory, though. If the claim is that the subject must explicitly hold these principles, then it is clearly false. If, on the other hand, the claim is that these are the principles of a theory that a self-conscious subject must tacitly know, then the claim seems very uninformative in the absence of a specification of the precise forms of behaviour that can only be explained by there ascription of such a body of tacit knowledge. We need an account of what it is for a subject to be correctly described as possessing such a simple theory of perception. The point however, is simply that the notion of as non-conceptual point of view as presented, can be viewed as capturing, at a more primitive level, precisely the same phenomenon that Evans is trying to capture with his notion of a simple theory of perception.
But it must not be forgotten that a vital role in this is layed by the subject’s own actions and movements. Appreciating the spatiality of the environment and one’s place in it is largely a function of grasping one’s possibilities for action within the environment: Realizing that f one wants to return to a particular place from here one must pass through these intermediate places, or that if there is something there that one wants, one should take this route to obtain it. That this is something that Evans’s account could potentially overlook emerge when one reflects that a simple theory of perception of the form that described could be possessed and decoyed by a subject that only moves passively, in that it incorporates the dimension of action by emphasizing the particularities of navigation.
Moreover, stressing the importance of action and movement indicates how the notion of a non-conceptual point of view might be grounded in the self-specifying in for action to be found in visual perception. By that in thinking particularly of the concept of an affordance so central to Gibsonian theories of perception. One important type of self-specifying information in the visual field is information about the possibilities for action and reaction that the environment affords the perceiver, by which that affordancs are non-conceptual first-person contents. The development of a non-conceptual point of view clearly involves certain forms of reasoning, and clearly, we will not have a full understanding of he notion of a non-conceptual point of view until we have an explanation of how this reasoning can take place. The spatial reasoning involved in over which this reasoning takes place. The spatial reasoning involved in developing a non-conceptual point of view upon the world is largely a matter of calibrating different affordances into an integrated representation of the world.
In short, any learned cognitive ability be contractible out of more primitive abilities already in existence. There are good reason to think that the perception of affordance is innate. And so if, the perception of affordances is the key to the acquisition of an integrated spatial representation of the environment via the recognition of affordance symmetries, affordance transitives, and affordance identities, then it is precisely conceivable that the capacities implicated in an integrated representation of the world could emerge non-mysteriously from innate abilities.
Nonetheless, there are many philosophers who would be prepared to countenance the possibility of non-conceptual content without accepting that to use the theory of non-conceptual content so solve the paradox of self-consciousness. This is ca more substantial task, as the methodology that is adapted rested on the first of the marks of content, namely that content-bearing states serve to explain behaviour in situations where the connections between sensory input and behaviour output cannot be plotted in a law-like manner (the functionalist theory of self-reference). As such, not of allowing that every instance of intentional behaviour where there are no such law-like connections between sensory input and behaviour output needs to be explained by attributing to the creature in question of representational states with first-person contents. Even so, many such instances of intentional behaviour do need to be explained in this way. This offers a way of establishing the legitimacy of non-conceptual first-person contents. What would satisfactorily demonstrate the legitimacy of non-conceptual first-person contents would be the existence of forms of behaviour in pre-linguistic or non-linguistic creatures for which inference to the best understanding or explanation (which in this context includes inference to the most parsimonious understanding, or explanation) demands the ascription of states with non-conceptual first-person contents.
The non-conceptual first-person contents and the pick-up of self-specifying information in the structure of exteroceptive perception provide very primitive forms of non-conceptual self-consciousness, albeit forms that can plausibly be viewed as in place rom. birth or shortly afterward. The dimension along which forms of self-consciousness must be compared is the richest of the conception of the self that they provide. All of which, a crucial element in any form of self-consciousness is how it enables the self-conscious subject to distinguish between self and environment - what many developmental psychologists term self-world dualism. In this sense, self-consciousness is essentially a contrastive notion. One implication of this is that a proper understanding of the richness of the conception that we take into account the richness of the conception of the environment with which it is associated. In the case of both somatic proprioception and the pick-up of self-specifying information in exteroceptive perception, there is a relatively impoverished conception of the environment. One prominent limitation is that both are synchronic than diachronic. The distinction between self and environment that they offer is a distinction that is effective at a time but not over time. The contrast between propriospecific and exterospecific invariant in visual perception, for example, provides a way for a creature to distinguish between itself and the world at any given moment, but this is not the same as a conception of oneself as an enduring thing distinguishable over time from an environment that also endures over time.
The notion of a non-conceptual point of view brings together the capacity to register one’s distinctness from the physical environment and various navigational capacities that manifest a degree of understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. One very basic reason for thinking that these elements must be considered together emerges from a point made from which the richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being distinguished. So no creature can understand its own distinctness from the physical environment without having an independent understanding of the nature of the physical environment, and since the physical environment is essentially spatial, this requires an understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. But this cannot be the whole story. It leaves unexplained why an understanding should be required of this particular essential feature of the physical environment. Afer all, it is also an essential feature of the physical environment that it be composed of objects that have both primary and secondary qualities, but there is no reflection of this in the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. More is needed to understand the significance of spatiality.
The general idea is very powerful, that the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is himself a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world.
The very idea of a perceivable, objectively spatial would be the idea of the subject for being in the world, with the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere cannot be separated, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
One possible reaction to consciousness, is that it is only because unrealistic and ultimately unwarranted requirements are being placed on what are to count as genuinely self-referring first-person thoughts. Suppose for such an objection will be found in those theories tat attempt to explain first-person thoughts in a way that does not presuppose any form of internal representation of the self or any form of self-knowledge. Consciousness arises because mastery of the semantics of he first-person pronoun is available only to creatures capable of thinking first-person thoughts whose contents involve reflexive self-reference and thus, seem to presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun. If, thought, it can be established that the capacity to think genuinely first-person thoughts does not depend on any linguistic and conceptual abilities, then arguably the problem of circularity will no longer have purchase.
There is no account of self-reference and genuinely first-person thought that can be read in a way that poses just such a direct challenge to the account of self-reference underpinning the conscious. This is the functionalist account, although spoken before, the functionalist view, reflexive self-reference is a completely non-mysterious phenomenon susceptible to a functional analysis. Reflexive self-reference is not dependent upon any antecedent conceptual or linguistic skills. Nonetheless, the functionalist account of a reflexive self-reference is deemed to be sufficiently rich to provide the foundation for an account of the semantics of the first-person pronoun. If this is right, then the circularity at which consciousness is at its heart, and can be avoided.
The circularity problems at the root of consciousness arise because mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun requires the capacity to think fist-person thoughts whose natural expression is by means of the first-person pronoun. It seems clear that the circle will be broken if there are forms of first-person thought that are more primitive than those that do not require linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. What creates the problem of capacity circularity is the thought that we need to appeal to first-person contents in explaining mastery of the first-person pronoun, combined with the thought that any creature capable of entertaining first-person contents will have mastered the first-person pronoun. So if we want to retain the thought that mastery of the first-person pronoun can only be explained in terms of first-person contents, capacity circularity can only be avoided if there are first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun.
On the other hand, however, it seems to follow from everything earlier mentioned about “I”-thoughts that conscious thought in the absence of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun is a contradiction in terms. First-person thoughts have first-person contents, where first-person contents can only be specified in terms of either the first-person pronoun or the indirect reflexive pronoun. So how could such thoughts be entertained by a thinker incapable of reflexive self-reference? How can a thinker who is not capable of reflexively reference? How can a thinker who is not the first-person pronoun be plausibly ascribed thoughts with first-person contents? The thought that, despite all this, there are real first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been provided by Hugh Mellor (1988-1089). The basic phenomenon he is interested in explaining is what it is for a creature to have what he terms a “subjective belief,” that is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. The explanation of subjective belief that he offers makes such beliefs independent of both linguistic abilities and conscious beliefs. From this basic account he constructs an account of conscious subjective beliefs and the of the reference of the first-person pronoun “I”. These putatively more sophisticate d cognitive states are casually derivable from basic subjective beliefs.
Mellor starts from the functionalist premise that beliefs are causal functions from desire to actions. It is, of course, the emphasis in causal links between belief and action that make it plausible to think that belief might be independent of language and conscious belief “agency entails neither linguistic ability nor conscious belief” (Mellor 1988). The idea that beliefs are causal functions from desires to action can be deployed to explain the content of a given belief via the equation of truth conditions and utility conditions, where utility conditions are those in which are actions caused by the conjunction of that belief with a single desire result in the satisfaction of that desire. We can see how this works by considering Mellor’s own example. Consider a creature ‘x’ who is hungry and has a desire for food at time ‘t’. That creature has a token belief b/(p) that conjoins with its desire for food to cause it to eat that there food in front of ‘x at that time. Moreover, for b/(p) to cause ‘x’ to eat what is in front of it at ‘t’. b/(p) mus t be a belief that ‘x’ has at ‘t’. For Mellor, therefore, the utility/truth condition of b/(p) is that whatever creature has this belief faces when it is actually facing food. And a belief with this content is, of course, the subjective belief whose natural linguistic expression would be ‘I am facing food now’ on the other hand, however, belief that would naturally be expressed with these words can be ascribed to a non-linguistic creature, because what makes it te belief that it is depends no on whether it can be linguistically expressed but on how it affects behaviour.
What secures a self-reference in belief b/(p) is the contiguity of cause and effect. The essence of a subjective conjointly with a desire or set of desires, and the relevant sort of conjunction is possible only if it is the same agent at the same time who has the desire and the belief.
For in order to believe ‘p’, I need only be disposed to eat what I face if I feel hungry, a disposition which causal contiguity ensures that only my simultaneous hunger can provoke, and only into masking me eat, and only then.
Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometric and numerical relationships. We speculate that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece, as opposed to Chinese or Babylonian culture, partly because the social, political, and economic climate in Greece was more open to the pursuit of knowledge with marginal cultural utility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigation, but this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential features in beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
All the same, newer logical frameworks point to the logical condition for description and comprehension of experience such as to quantum physics. While normally referred to as the principle of complementarity, the use of the word principle was unfortunate in that complementarity is not a principle as that word is used in physics. A complementarity is rather a logical framework for the acquisition and comprehension of scientific knowledge that discloses a new relationship between physical theory and physical reality that undermines all appeals to metaphysics.
The logical conditions for description in quantum mechanics, the two conceptual components of classical causality, space-time description and energy-momentum conservation are all mutually exclusive and can be coordinated through the limitations imposed by Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle.
The logical farmwork of complementarity is useful and necessary when the following requirements are met: (1) When the theory consists of two individually complete constructs: (2) when the constructs preclude one another in a description of the unique physical situation to which they both apply, (3) when both constitute a complete description of that situation. As we are to discover a situation, in which complementarity clearly applies, we necessarily confront an imposing limit to our knowledge of this situation. Knowledge can never be complete in the classical sense because we are able to simultaneously apply the mutually exclusive constructs that make up the complete description.
Why, then, must we use classical descriptive categories, like space-time descriptions and energy-momentum conservation, in our descriptions of quantum events? If classical mechanics is an approximation of the actual physical situation, it would seem to follow that classical; descriptive categories are not adequate to describe this situation. If, for example, quantities like position and momentum are abstractions with properties that are “definable and observable only through their interactions with other systems,” why should we represent these classical categories as if they were actual quantities in physical theory and experiment? However, these categories are rarely discussed, but it carries some formidable implications for the future of scientific thought.
Nevertheless, our journeys through which the corses of times generations we historically the challenge when it became of Heidegger' theory of spatiality distinguishes that concludes to three different types of space: (1) world-space, (2) regions (Gegend), and (3) Dasein's spatiality. What Heidegger calls "world-space" is space conceived as an “arena” or “container” for objects. It captures both our ordinary conception of space and theoretical space - in particular absolute space. Chairs, desks, and buildings exist “in” space, but world-space is independent of such objects, much like absolute space “in which” things exist. However, Heidegger thinks that such a conception of space is an abstraction from the spatializing conduct of our everyday activities. The things which we deal with are near or far relative to us; according to Heidegger, this nearness or farness of things is how we first become familiar with that which we (later) represent to ourselves as "space." This familiarity is what renders the understanding of space (in a "container" metaphor or in any other way) possible. It is because we act spatially, going to places and reaching for things to use, that we can even develop a conception of abstract space at all. What we normally think of as space - world-space - turns out not to be what space fundamentally is; world-space is, in Heidegger's terminology, space conceived as vorhanden. It is an objectified space founded on a more basic space-of-action.
Since Heidegger thinks that space-of-action is the condition for world-space, he must explain the former without appealing to the latter. Heidegger's task then is to describe the space-of-action without presupposing such world-space and the derived concept of a system of spatial coordinates. However, this is difficult because all our usual linguistic expressions for describing spatial relations presuppose world-space. For example, how can one talk about the "distance between you and me" without presupposing some sort of metric, i.e., without presupposing an objective access to the relation? Our spatial notions such as "distance," "location," etc. must now be redescribed from a standpoint within the spatial relation of self (Dasein) to the things dealt with. This problem is what motivates Heidegger to invent his own terminology and makes his discussion of space awkward. In what follows I will try to use ordinary language whenever possible to explain his principal ideas.
The space-of-action has two aspects: regions (space as Zuhandenheit) and Dasein's spatiality (space as Existentiale). The sort of space we deal within our daily activity is "functional" or zuhanden, and Heidegger's term for it is "region." The places we work and live-the office, the park, the kitchen, etc.-all have different regions which organize our activities and contextualize “equipment.” My desk area as my work region has a computer, printer, telephone, books, etc., in their appropriate “places,” according to the spatiality of the way in which I work. Regions differ from space viewed as a "container"; the latter notion lacks a "referential" organization with respect to our context of activities. Heidegger wants to claim that referential functionality is an inherent feature of space itself, and not just a "human" characteristic added to a container-like space.
In our activity, how do we specifically stand with respect to functional space? We are not "in" space as things are, but we do exist in some spatially salient manner. What Heidegger is trying to capture is the difference between the nominal expression "we exist in space" and the adverbial expression "we exist spatially." He wants to describe spatiality as a mode of our existence rather than conceiving space as an independent entity. Heidegger identifies two features of Dasein's spatiality - "de-severance" (Ent-fernung) and "directionality" (Ausrichtung).
De-severance describes the way we exist as a process of spatial self-determination by “making things available” to ourselves. In Heidegger's language, in making things available we "take in space" by "making the farness vanish" and by "bringing things close"
We are not simply contemplative beings, but we exist through concretely acting in the world - by reaching for things and going to places. When I walk from my desk area into the kitchen, I am not simply changing locations from point A to B in an arena-like space, but I am “taking in space” as I move, continuously making the “farness” of the kitchen “vanish,” as the shifting spatial perspectives are opened up as I go along.
This process is also inherently "directional." Every de-severing is aimed toward something or in a certain direction which is determined by our concern and by specific regions. I must always face and move in a certain direction that is dictated by a specific region. If I want to get a glass of ice tea, instead of going out into the yard, I face toward the kitchen and move in that direction, following the region of the hallway and the kitchen. Regions determine where things belong, and our actions are coordinated in directional ways accordingly.
De-severance, directionality, and regionality are three ways of describing the spatiality of a unified Being-in-the-world. As aspects of Being-in-the-world, these spatial modes of being are equiprimordial.9 10 Regions "refer" to our activities, since they are established by our ways of being and our activities. Our activities, in turn, are defined in terms of regions. Only through the region can our de-severance and directionality be established. Our object of concern always appears in a certain context and place, in a certain direction. It is because things appear in a certain direction and in their places “there” that we have our “here.” We orient ourselves and organize our activities, always within regions which must already be given to us.
Heidegger's analysis of space does not refer to temporal aspects of Being-in-the-world, even though they are presupposed. In the second half of Being and Time he explicitly turns to the analysis of time and temporality in a discussion that is significantly more complex than the earlier account of spatiality. Heidegger makes the following five distinctions between types of time and temporality: (1) the ordinary or "vulgar" conception of time; this is time conceived as Vorhandenheit. (2) world-time; this is time as Zuhandenheit. Dasein's temporality is divided into three types: (3) Dasein's inauthentic (uneigentlich) temporality, (4) Dasein's authentic (eigentlich) temporality, and (5) temporal originality or “temporality as such.” The analyses of the vorhanden and zuhanden modes of time are interesting, but it is Dasein's temporality that is relevant to our discussion, since it is this form of time that is said to be founding for space. Unfortunately, Heidegger is not clear about which temporality plays this founding role.
We can begin by excluding Dasein's inauthentic temporality. This mode of time refers to our unengaged, "average" way in which we regard time. It is the “past we forget” and the “future we expect,” all without decisiveness and resolute understanding. Heidegger seems to consider that this mode of temporality is the temporal dimension of de-severance and directionality, since de-severance and directionality deal only with everyday actions. As such, inauthentic temporality must itself be founded in an authentic basis of some sort. The two remaining candidates for the foundation are Dasein's authentic temporality and temporal originality.
Dasein's authentic temporality is the "resolute" mode of temporal existence. Authentic temporality is realized when Dasein becomes aware of its own finite existence. This temporality has to do with one's grasp of his or her own life as a whole from one's own unique perspective. Life gains meaning as one's own life-project, bounded by the sense of one's realization that he or she is not immortal. This mode of time appears to have a normative function within Heidegger's theory. In the second half of BT he often refers to inauthentic or "everyday" mode of time as lacking some primordial quality which authentic temporality possesses.
In contrast, temporal originality is the formal structure of Dasein's temporality itself. In addition to its spatial Being-in-the-world, Dasein also exists essentially as "projection." Projection is oriented toward the future, and this futural orientation regulates our concern by constantly realizing various possibilities. Temporality is characterized formally as this dynamic structure of "a future which makes present in the process of having been." Heidegger calls the three moments of temporality - the future, the present, and the past - the three ecstases of temporality. This mode of time is not normative but rather formal or neutral; as Blattner argues, the temporal features which constitute Dasein's temporality describe both inauthentic and authentic temporality.
There are some passages which indicate that authentic temporality is the primary manifestation of temporalities, because of its essential orientation toward the future. For instance, Heidegger states that "temporality first showed itself in anticipatory resoluteness." Elsewhere, he argues that "the ‘time’ which is accessible to Dasein's common sense is not primordial, but arises rather from authentic temporality." In these formulations, authentic temporalities is said to found other inauthentic modes. According to Blattner, this is "by far the most common" interpretation of the status of authentic time.
However, to ague with Blattner and Haar, in that there are far more passages where Heidegger considers temporal originality as temporality as distinct from authentic temporality, and founding for it and for Being-in-the-world as well. Here are some examples: Temporality has different possibilities and different ways of temporalizing itself. The basic possibilities of existence, the authenticity and inauthenticity of Dasein, are grounded ontologically on possible temporalizations of temporality. Time is primordial as the temporalizing of temporality, and as such it makes possible the Constitution of the structure of care.
Heidegger's conception seems to be that it is because we are fundamentally temporal - having the formal structure of ecstatico-horizonal unity - that we can project, authentically or inauthentically, our concernful dealings in the world and exist as Being-in-the-world. It is on this account that temporality is said to found spatiality.
Since Heidegger uses the term "temporality" rather than "authentic temporality" whenever the founding relation is discussed between space and time, I will begin the following analysis by assuming that it is originary temporality that founds Dasein's spatiality. On this assumption two interpretations of the argument are possible, but both are unsuccessful given his phenomenological framework.
I will then consider the possibility that it is "authentic temporality" which founds spatiality. Two interpretations are also possible in this case, but neither will establish a founding relation successfully. I will conclude that despite Heidegger's claim, an equiprimordial relation between time and space is most consistent with his own theoretical framework. I will now evaluate the specific arguments in which Heidegger tries to prove that temporality founds spatiality.
The principal argument, entitled "The Temporality of the Spatiality that is Characteristic of Dasein." Heidegger begins the section with the following remark: Though the expression `temporality' does not signify what one understands by "time" when one talks about `space and time', nevertheless spatiality seems to make up another basic attribute of Dasein corresponding to temporality. Thus with Dasein's spatiality, existential-temporal analysis seems to come to a limit, so that this entity which we call "Dasein," must be considered as `temporal' `and also' as spatial coordinately.
Accordingly, Heidegger asks, "Has our existential-temporal analysis of Dasein thus been brought to a halt . . . by the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein . . . and Being-in-the-world?" His answer is no. He argues that since "Dasein's constitution and its ways to being possible are ontologically only on the basis of temporality," and since the "spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein . . . belongs to Being-in-the-world," it follows that "Dasein's specific spatiality must be grounded in temporality."
Heidegger's claim is that the totality of regions-de-severance-directionality can be organized and re-organized, "because Dasein as temporality is ecstatico-horizonal in its Being." Because Dasein exists futurally as "for-the-sake-of-which," it can discover regions. Thus, Heidegger remarks: "Only on the basis of its ecstatico-horizonal temporality is it possible for Dasein to break into space."
However, in order to establish that temporality founds spatiality, Heidegger would have to show that spatiality and temporality must be distinguished in such a way that temporality not only shares a content with spatiality but also has additional content as well. In other words, they must be truly distinct and not just analytically distinguishable. But what is the content of "the ecstatic-horizonal constitution of temporality?" Does it have a content above and beyond Being-in-the-world? Nicholson poses the same question as follows: Is it human care which accounts for the characteristic features of human temporality? Or is it, as Heidegger says, human temporality which accounts for the characteristic features of human care, serves as their foundation? The first alternative, according to Nicholson, is to reduce temporality to care: "the specific attributes of the temporality of Dasein . . . would be in their roots not aspects of temporality but reflections of Dasein's care." The second alternative is to treat temporality as having some content above and beyond care: "the three-fold constitution of care stems from the three-fold constitution of temporality."
Nicholson argues that the second alternative is the correct reading.18 Dasein lives in the world by making choices, but "the ekstasis of temporality lies well prior to any choice . . . so our study of care introduces us to a matter whose scope outreaches care: the ekstases of temporality itself." Accordingly, "What was able to make clear is that the reign of temporal ekstasis over the choices we make accords with the place we occupy as finite beings in the world."
But if Nicholson's interpretation is right, what would be the content of "the ekstases of temporality itself," if not some sort of purely formal entity or condition such as Kant's "pure intuition?" But this would imply that Heidegger has left phenomenology behind and is now engaging in establishing a transcendental framework outside the analysis of Being-in-the-world, such that this formal structure founds Being-in-the-world. This is inconsistent with his initial claim that Being-in-the-world is itself foundational.
I believe Nicholson's first alternative offers a more consistent reading. The structure of temporality should be treated as an abstraction from Dasein's Being-in-the-world, specifically from care. In this case, the content of temporality just is the past and the present and the future ways of Being-in-the-world. Heidegger's own words support this reading: "as Dasein temporalizes itself, a world is too," and "the world is neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality." He also states that the zuhanden "world-time, in the rigorous sense of the existential-temporal conception of the world, belongs to temporality itself." In this reading, "temporality temporalizing itself," "Dasein's projection," and "the temporal projection of the world" are three different ways of describing the same "happening" of Being-in-the-world, which Heidegger calls "self-directive."
However, if this is the case, then temporality does not found spatiality, except perhaps in the trivial sense that spatiality is built into the notion of care which is identified with temporality. The content of "temporality temporalizing itself" simply is the various openings of regions, i.e., Dasein's "breaking into space." Certainly, as Stroeker points out, it is true that "nearness and remoteness are spatio-temporal phenomena and cannot be conceived without a temporal moment." But this necessity does not constitute a foundation. Rather, they are equiprimordial. The addition of temporal dimensions does indeed complete the discussion of spatiality, which abstracted from time. But this completion, while it better articulates the whole of Being-in-the-world, does not show that temporality is more fundamental.
If temporality and spatiality are equiprimordial, then all of the supposedly founding relations between temporality and spatiality could just as well be reversed and still hold true. Heidegger's view is that "because Dasein as temporality is ecstatico-horizonal in its Being, it can take along with it a space for which it has made room, and it can do so factically and constantly." But if Dasein is essentially a factical projection, then the reverse should also be true. Heidegger appears to have assumed the priority of temporality over spatiality perhaps under the influence of Kant, Husserl, or Dilthey, and then based his analyses on that assumption.
However, there may still be a way to save Heidegger's foundational project in terms of authentic temporality. Heidegger never specifically mentions authentic temporality, since he suggests earlier that the primary manifestation of temporality is authentic temporality, such a reading may perhaps be justified. This reading would treat the whole spatio-temporal structure of Being-in-the-world. The resoluteness of authentic temporality, arising out of Dasein's own "Being-towards-death," would supply a content to temporality above and beyond everyday involvements.
Heidegger is said to have its foundations in resoluteness, Dasein determines its own Situation through anticipatory resoluteness, which includes particular locations and involvements, i.e., the spatiality of Being-in-the-world. The same set of circumstances could be transformed into a new situation with different significance, if Dasein chooses resolutely to bring that about. Authentic temporality in this case can be said to found spatiality, since Dasein's spatiality is determined by resoluteness. This reading moreover enables Heidegger to construct a hierarchical relation between temporality and spatiality within Being-in-the-world rather than going outside of it to a formal transcendental principle, since the choice of spatiality is grasped phenomenologically in terms of the concrete experience of decision.
Moreover, one might argue that according to Heidegger one's own grasp of "death" is uniquely a temporal mode of existence, whereas there is no such weighty conception involving spatiality. Death is what makes Dasein "stand before itself in its own most potentiality-for-Being." Authentic Being-towards-death is a "Being toward a possibility - indeed, toward a distinctive possibility of Dasein itself." One could argue that notions such as "potentiality" and "possibility" are distinctively temporal, nonspatial notions. So "Being-towards-death," as temporal, appears to be much more ontologically "fundamental" than spatiality.
However, Heidegger is not yet out of the woods. I believe that labelling the notions of anticipatory resoluteness, Being-towards-death, potentiality, and possibility specifically as temporal modes of being (to the exclusion of spatiality) begs the question. Given Heidegger's phenomenological framework, why assume that these notions are only temporal (without spatial dimensions)? If Being-towards-death, potentiality-for-Being, and possibility were "purely" temporal notions, what phenomenological sense can we make of such abstract conceptions, given that these are manifestly our modes of existence as bodily beings? Heidegger cannot have in mind such an abstract notion of time, if he wants to treat authentic temporality as the meaning of care. It would seem more consistent with his theoretical framework to say that Being-towards-death is a rich spatio-temporal mode of being, given that Dasein is Being-in-the-world.
Furthermore, the interpretation which defines resoluteness as uniquely temporal suggests too much of a voluntaristic or subjectivistic notion of the self that controls its own Being-in-the-world from the standpoint of its future. This would drive a wedge between the self and its Being-in-the-world, thereby creating a temporal "inner self" which can decide its own spatiality. However, if Dasein is Being-in-the-world as Heidegger claims, then all of Dasein's decisions should be viewed as concretely grounded in Being-in-the-world. If so, spatiality must be an essential constitutive element.
Hence, authentic temporality, if construed narrowly as the mode of temporality, at first appears to be able to found spatiality, but it also commits Heidegger either to an account of time which is too abstract, or to the notion of the self far more like Sartre's than his own. What is lacking in Heidegger's theory that generates this sort of difficulty is a developed conception of Dasein as a lived body - a notion more fully developed by Merleau-Ponty.
The elements of a more consistent interpretation of authentic temporality are present in Being and Time. This interpretation incorporates a view of "authentic spatiality" in the notion of authentic temporality. This would be Dasein's resolutely grasping its own spatio-temporal finitude with respect to its place and its world. Dasein is born at a particular place, but lives in a particular place, dies in a particular place, all of which it can relate to in an authentic way. The place Dasein lives is not a place of anonymous involvements. The place of Dasein must be there where its own potentiality-for-Being is realized. Dasein's place is thus a determination of its existence. Had Heidegger developed such a conception more fully, he would have seen that temporality is equiprimordial with thoroughly spatial and contextual Being-in-the-world. They are distinguishable but equally fundamental ways of emphasizing our finitude.
The internal tensions within his theory eventually leads Heidegger to reconsider his own positions. In his later period, he explicitly develops what may be viewed as a conception of authentic spatiality. For instance, in "Building Dwelling Thinking," Heidegger states that Dasein's relations to locations and to spaces inheres in dwelling, and dwelling is the basic character of our Being. The notion of dwelling expresses an affirmation of spatial finitude. Through this affirmation one acquires a proper relation to one's environment.
But the idea of dwelling is in fact already discussed in Being and Time, regarding the term "Being-in-the-world," Heidegger explains that the word "in" is derived from "innan" - to "reside," "habitare," "to dwell." The emphasis on "dwelling" highlights the essentially "worldly" character of the self.
Thus from the beginning Heidegger had a conception of spatial finitude, but this fundamental insight was undeveloped because of his ambition to carry out the foundational project which favoured time. From the 1930's on, as Heidegger abandons the foundational project focussing on temporality, the conception of authentic spatiality comes to the fore. For example, in Discourse on Thinking Heidegger considers the spatial character of Being as "that-which-regions (die Gegnet)." The peculiar expression is a re-conceptualization of the notion of "region" as it appeared in Being and Time. Region is given an active character and defined as the "openness that surrounds us" which "comes to meet us." By giving it an active character, Heidegger wants to emphasize that region is not brought into being by us, but rather exists in its own right, as that which expresses our spatial existence. Heidegger states that "one needs to understand ‘resolve’ (Entschlossenheit) as it is understood in Being and Time: as the opening of man [Dasein] particularly undertaken by him for openness, . . . which we think of as that-which-regions." Here Heidegger is asserting an authentic conception of spatiality. The finitude expressed in the notion of Being-in-the-world is thus transformed into an authentic recognition of our finite worldly existence in later writings.
The return to the conception of spatial finitude in the later period shows that Heidegger never abandoned the original insight behind his conception of Being-in-the-world. But once committed to this idea, it is hard to justify singling out an aspect of the self -temporality - as the foundation for the rest of the structure. All of the existentiales and zuhanden modes, which constitute the whole of Being-in-the-world, are equiprimordial, each mode articulating different aspects of a unified whole. The preference for temporality as the privileged meaning of existence reflects the Kantian residue in Heidegger's early doctrine which he later rejected as still excessively subjectivistic.
Meanwhile, it seems that it is nonetheless, natural to combine this close connection with conclusions by proposing an account of self-consciousness, as to the capacity to think “I”-thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, though misidentification varies with the semantics of the “self” - this would be a redundant account of self-consciousness. Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking “I”-thoughts, we will have explained everything distinctive about self-consciousness. It stems from the thought that what is distinctive about “I”-thoughts are that they are either themselves immune to error or they rest on further “I” -Thoughts that are immune in that way.
Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, we will have explained everything about the capacity to think “I”-thoughts. As it would to claim of deriving from the thought that immunity to error through misidentification depends on the semantics of the “self.”
Once, again, that when we have an account of the semantics in that we will have explained everything distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification.
The suggestion is that the semantics of “self-ness” will explain what is distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification. Semantics alone cannot be expected to explain the capacity for thinking thoughts. The point in fact, that all that there is to the capacity of think thoughts that are immune tp error is the capacity to think the sort of thought whose natural linguistic expression involves the “self,” where this capacity is given by mastery of the semantics of “self-ness.” Yielding, to explain what it is to master the semantics of “self-ness,” especially to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification.
On this view, the mastery of the semantics of “self-ness” may be construed as for the single most important explanation in a theory of “self-consciousness.”
Its quickened reformulation might be put to a defender of “redundancy” or the deflationary theory is how mastery of the semantics of “self-ness” can make sense of the distinction between “self-ness contents” that are immune to error through misidentification and the “self contents” that lack such immunity. However, this is only an apparent difficulty when one remembers that those of the “selves” content is immune to error through misidentification, because, those employing ‘”I” as object, were able in having to break down their component elements. The identification component and the predication components that for which if the composite identification components of each are of such judgements that mastery of the semantics of “self-regulatory” content must be called upon to explain. Identification component are, of course, immune to error through misidentification.
It is also important to stress how the redundancy and the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the “self-ness,” are motivated by an important principle that has governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. The principle is the principle that the analysis of thought can only continue thought, the philosophical analysis of language such that we communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principle governing the use of language: It is these principles, which relate to what is open to view and mind other that via the medium of language, which endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyse thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
Still, at the core of the notion of broad self-consciousness is the recognition of what consciousness is the recognition of what developmental psychologist’s call “self-world dualism.” Any subject properly described as self-conscious must be able to register the distinction between himself and the world, of course, this is a distinction that can be registered in a variety of way. The capacity for self-ascription of thoughts and experiences, in combination with the capacity to understand the world as a spatial and causally structured system of mind-independent objects, is a high-level way of registering of this distinction.
Consciousness of objects is closely related to sentience and to being awake. It is (at least) being in somewhat of a distinct informational and behavioural intention where its responsive state is for one's condition as played within the immediateness of environmental surroundings. It is the ability, for example, to process and act responsively to information about food, friends, foes, and other items of relevance. One finds consciousness of objects in creatures much less complex than human beings. It is what we (at any rate first and primarily) have in mind when we say of some person or animal as it is coming out of general anaesthesia, ‘It is regaining consciousness’ as consciousness of objects is not just any form of informational access to the world, but the knowing about and being conscious of, things in the world.
We are conscious of our representations when we are conscious, not (just) of some object, but of our representations: ‘I am seeing [as opposed to touching, smelling, tasting] and seeing clearly [as opposed too dimly].’ Consciousness of our own representations it is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but it is not just any form of such informational access. It is knowing about, being conscious of, one's own psychological states. In Nagel's famous phrase (1974), when we are conscious of our representations, it is ‘like something’ to have them. If, that which seems likely, there are forms of consciousness that do not involve consciousness of objects, they might consist in consciousness of representations, though some theorists would insist that this kind of consciousness be not of representations either (via representations, perhaps, but not of them).
The distinction just drawn between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects may seem similar to Form's (1995) contributes of a well-known distinction between P- [phenomenal] and A- [access] consciousness. Here is his definition of ‘A-consciousness’: "A state is A-conscious if it is poised for direct control of thought and action." He tells us that he cannot define ‘P-consciousness’ in any "remotely non-circular way" but will use it to refer to what he calls "experiential properties,” what it is like to have certain states. Our consciousness of objects may appear to be like A-consciousness. It is not, however, it is a form of P-consciousness. Consciousness of an object is - how else can we put it? - consciousness of the object. Even if consciousness is just informational excess of a certain kind (something that Form would deny), it is not all form of informational access and we are talking about conscious access here. Recall the idea that it is like something to have a conscious state. Other closely related ideas are that in a conscious state, something appears to one, that conscious states have a ‘felt quality’. A term for all this is phenomenology: Conscious states have a phenomenology. (Thus some philosophers speak of phenomenal consciousness here.) We could now state the point we are trying to make this way. If I am conscious of an object, then it is like something to have that object as the content of a representation.
Some theorists would insist that this last statement be qualified. While such a representation of an object may provide everything that a representation has to have for its contents to be like something to me, they would urge, something more is needed. Different theorists would add different elements. For some, I would have to be aware, not just of the object, but of my representation of it. For others, I would have directorial implications that infer of the certain attentive considerations to its way or something other than is elsewhere. We cannot go into this controversy here. As, we are merely making the point that consciousness of objects is more than Form's A-consciousness.
Consciousness self involves, not just consciousness of states that it is like something to have, but consciousness of the thing that has them, i.e., of ones-self. It is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but again it is more than that. It is knowing about, being conscious of, oneself, indeed of itself as itself. And consciousness of oneself in this way it is often called consciousness of self as the subject of experience. Consciousness of oneself as oneself seems to require indexical adeptness and by preference to a special indexical ability at that, not just an ability to pick out something out but to pick something out as oneself. Human beings have such self-referential indexical ability. Whether any other creatures have, it is controversial. The leading nonhuman candidate would be chimpanzees and other primates whom they have taught enough language to use first-person pronouns.
The literature on consciousness sometimes fails to distinguish consciousness of objects, consciousness of one's own representations, and consciousness of self, or treat one three, usually consciousness of one's own representations, as actualized of its owing totality in consciousness. (Conscious states do not have objects, yet is not consciousness of a representation either. We cannot pursue that complication here.) The term ‘conscious’ and cognates are ambiguous in everyday English. We speak of someone regaining consciousness - where we mean simple consciousness of the world. Yet we also say things like, She was haphazardly conscious of what motivated her to say that - where we do not mean that she lacked either consciousness of the world or consciousness of self but rather than she was not conscious of certain things about herself, specifically, certain of her own representational states. To understand the unity of consciousness, making these distinctions is important. The reason is this: the unity of consciousness takes a different form in consciousness of self than it takes in either consciousness of one's own representations or consciousness of objects.
So what is unified consciousness? As we said, the predominant form of the unity of consciousness is being aware of several things at the same time. Intuitively, this is the notion of several representations being aspects of a single encompassing conscious state. A more informative idea can be gleaned from the way philosophers have written about unified consciousness. As emerging from what they have said, the central feature of unified consciousness is taken to be something like this unity of consciousness: A group of representational relations related to each other that to be conscious of any of them is to be conscious of others of them and of the group of them as a single group.
Call this notion (x). Now, unified consciousness of some sort can be found in all three of the kinds of consciousness we delineated. (It can be found in a fourth, too, as we will see in a moment.) We can have unified consciousness of: Objectively represented to us; These are existent representations of themselves, but are contained in being alone, that in their findings are a basis held to oneself, that of something has of each the discerning character to value their considerations in the qualities of such that represents our qualifying phenomenon. In the first case, the represented objects would appear as aspects of a single encompassing conscious states. In the second case, the representations themselves would thus appear. In the third case, one is aware of oneself as a single, unified subject. Does (x) fit all three (or all four, including the fourth yet to be introduced)? It does not. At most, it fits the first two. Let us see how this unfolds.
Its collective and unified consciousness manifests as of such a form that most substantively awaken sustenance are purposive and may be considered for occurring to consciousness. Is that one has of the world around one (including one's own body) as aspects of a single world, of the various items in it as linked to other items in it? What makes it unified can be illustrated by an example. Suppose that I am aware of the computer screen in front of me and of the car sitting in my driveway. If awareness of these two items is not unified, I will lack the ability to compare the two. If I cannot bring the car as I am aware of it to the state in which I am aware of the computer screen, I could not answer questions such as, Is the car the same colour as the WordPerfect icon? Or even, As I am experiencing them, is the car to the left or to the right of the computer screen? We can compare represented items in these ways only if we are aware of both items together, as parts of the same field or state or act of conscious. That is what unified consciousness doe for us. (x) fits this kind of unified consciousness well. There are a couple of disorders of consciousness in which this unity seems to break down or be missing. We will examine them shortly.
Unified consciousness of one's own representations is the consciousness that we have of our representations, consciousness of our own psychological states. The representations by which we are conscious of the world are particularly important but, if those theorists who maintain that there are forms of consciousness that does not have objects are right, they are not the only ones. What makes consciousness of our representations unified? We are aware of many representations together, so that they appear as aspects of a single state of consciousness. As with unified consciousness of the world, here we can compare items of which we have unified consciousness. For example, we can compare what it is like to see an object to what it is like to touch the same object. Thus, (x) fits this kind of unified consciousness well, too.
When one has unified consciousness of self, it is to occur that at least one signifies its own awareness of oneself, not just as the subject but in Kant's words, as the “single common subject” of many representations and the single common agent of various acts of deliberation and action.
This is one of the two forms of unified consciousness that (x) does not fit. When one is aware of oneself as the common subject of experiences, the common agent of actions, one is not aware of several objects. Some think that when one is aware of oneself as subject, one is not aware of oneself as an object at all. Kant believed this. Whatever the merits of this view, when one is clearly aware of oneself as the single common subject of many representations, one is not aware of several things. As an alternative, one is aware of, and knows that one is aware of, the same thing - via many representations. Call this kind of unified consciousness (Y). Although (Y) is different form (x), we still have the core idea: Unified consciousness consists in tying what is contained in several representations, here most representations of oneself, together so that they are all part of a single field or state or act of consciousness.
Unified consciousness of self has been argued to have some very special properties. In particular, there is a small but important literature on the idea that the reference to oneself as oneself by which one achieves awareness of oneself as subject involves no ‘identification.’ Generalizing the notion a bit, some claim that reference to self does not proceed by way of attribution of properties or features to oneself at all. One argument for this view is that one is or could be aware of oneself as the subject of each of one's conscious experiences. If so, awareness of self is not what Bennett call ‘experience-dividing’ - statements expressing it have "no direct implications of the form “I” will experience C rather than D.” If this is so, the linguistic activities using first person pronouns by which we call ourselves subject and the representational states that result have to have some unusual properties.
Finally, we need to distinguish a fourth site of unified consciousness. Let us call it unity of focus. Unity of focus is our ability to pay unified attention to objects, one's representations, and one's own self. It is different from the other sorts of unified consciousness. In the other three situations, consciousness ranges over many alternate objects or many instances of consciousness of an object (in unified consciousness of self). Unity of focus picks out one such item (or a small numbers of them). Wundt captures what I have in mind well in his distinction between the field of consciousness and the focus of consciousness. The consciousness of a single item on which one is focussing is unified because one is aware of many aspects of the item in one state or act of consciousness (especially relational aspects, e.g., any dangers it poses, how it relates to one's goals, etc.) and one is aware of many different considerations with respect to it in one state or act of consciousness (goals, how well one is achieving them with respect to this object, etc.). (x) does not fit this kind of unified consciousness any better than it fit unified consciousness of self? Here that we are not, or need not be, aware of most items. Instead, one is integrating most properties of an item, especially properties that involve relationships to oneself, and integrating most of one's abilities and applying them to the item, and so on. Call this form of unified consciousness (z). One way to think of the affinity of (z) (a unified focus) to (x) and (Y) is this. (z) occurs within (x) and (Y) - within unified consciousness of world and self.
Though this has often been overlooked, all forms of unified consciousness come in both simultaneous and across-time versions. That is to say, the unity can consist in links of certain kinds among phenomena occurring at the same time (synchronically) and it can consist in links of certain kinds among phenomena occurring at different times (diachronically). In its synchronic form, it consists in such things as our ability to compare items with one of another, for example, to see if an item fits into another item. Diachronically, it consists in a certain crucial form of memory, namely, our ability to retain a representation of an earlier object in the right way and for long enough to bring it as recalled into current consciousness of currently represented objects in the same as we do with simultaneously represented objects. Though this process across time has always been called the unity of consciousness, sometimes even to the exclusion of the synchronic unity just delineated, another good name for it would be continuity of consciousness. Note that this process of relating earlier to current items in consciousness is more than, and perhaps different from, the learning of new skills and associations. Even severe amnesiacs can do the latter.
That consciousness can be unified across time and at given time points merited of how central unity of consciousness is to cognition. Without the ability to retain representations of earlier objects and unite them with current represented objects, most complex cognition would simply be impossible. The only bits of language that one could probably understand, for example, would be single words; The simplest of sentences is an entity spread over time. Now, unification in consciousness might not be the only way to unite earlier cognitive states (earlier thoughts, earlier experiences) with current ones but it is a central way and the one best known to us. The unity of consciousness is central to cognition.
Justly as thoughts differ from all else that is said to correspond among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable, it is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my thought is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without excess, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed.
We communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language. Of these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the employment of language, unaided by any supposed contact between mind and mind other than a formal medium of language, which endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyses thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
By noting that (x), (y) and (z) are not the only kinds of mental unity. Our remarks about (z), specifically about what can be integrated in focal attention, might already have suggested as much. There is unity in the exercise of our cognitive capacities, unity that consists of integration of motivating factors, perceptions, beliefs, etc., and there is unity in the outputs, unity that consists of integration of behaviour.
Human beings bring a strikingly wide range of factors to bear on a cognitive task such as seeking to characterize something or trying to decide what to do about something. For example, we can bring to bear of what we want, and what we believe, and of our attitudinal values for which we can of our own self, situation, and context, allotted from each of our various senses: It’s continuing causality in the information about the situation, other people, others' beliefs, desires, attitudes, etc.; The resources of however many languages we have possession in the availabilities for us, and include of the many-sided kinds of memory, bodily sensations, our various and very diverse problem-solving skills, . . . and so on. Not only can we bring all these elements to bear, we can integrate them in a way that is highly structured and ingeniously appropriate to our goals and the situation(s) before us. This form of mental unity could appropriately be called unity of cognition. Unity of consciousness often goes with unity of cognition because one of our means of unifying cognition with respect to some object or situation is to focus on it consciously. However, there is at least some measure of unified cognition in many situations of which we are not conscious, as is testified by our ability to balance, control our posture, manoeuver around obstacles while our
consciousness is entirely absorbed with something else, and so on.
At the other end of the cognitive process, we find an equally interesting form of unity, what we might call unity of behaviour, our ability to establish uninterruptedly some progressively rhythmic and keenly independent method for which to integrate our limbs, eyes, and bodily attitude, etc. The precision and complexity of the behavioural coordination we can achieve would be difficult to exaggerate. Think of a concert pianist performing the complicated work.
One of the most interesting ways to study psychological phenomena is to see what happens when they or related phenomena break down. Phenomena that look simple and seamless when functioning smoothly often turns out to have all sorts of structure when they begin to malfunction. Like other psychological phenomena, we would expect unified consciousness to be open to being damaged, distorted, etc., too. If the unity of consciousness is as important to cognitive functioning as we have been suggesting, such damage or distortion should create serious problems for the people to whom it happens. The unity of consciousness is damaged and distorted in both naturally-occurring and experimental situations. Some of these situations are indeed very serious for those undergoing them.
In fact, unified consciousness can break down in what look to be two distinct ways. There are situations in which saying that one unified conscious being has split into two unified conscious beings without the unity itself being destroyed is natural or even significantly damaged, and situations in which always we have one being with one instance of consciousness. However, the unity itself may be damaged or even destroyed. In the former cases, there is reason to think that a single instance of unified consciousness has become two (or something like two). In the latter cases, unity of consciousness has been compromised in some way but nothing suggests that anything have split.
The point in fact, is that it is possibly the most challenging and persuasive source of problems in the whole of philosophy. Our own consciousness may be the most basic of fact confronting us, yet it is almost impossible to say that consciousness is. Is yours like yours? Is ours like that of animals? Might machines come to have consciousness? Is it possible that there might be disembodied consciousness? Whatever complex biological and neural processes go on backstage, it is my consciousness that provides the theatre where my experiences and thoughts have their existence: Where my desires are felt and where my intentions are formed. But then how am I to conceive the “I,” or self that is the spectator of this theatre? One of the difficulties in thinking about consciousness is that the problems seem not to be scientific ones: Leibniz remarked that if we could construct a machine that could think and feel, and blow it up to the size of a mill and thus be able to examine its working parts as thoroughly as we pleased, we would still not find copiousness, and draw the conclusion that consciousness resides in simple subjects, not complex ones. Even if we are convinced that consciousness somehow emerges from the complexity of brain functioning, we may still feel baffled about the way the emergence takes place, or why it takes place in just the way it does.
Subsequently, it is natural to concede that a given thought has a natural linguistic expression. We are also saying something about how it is appropriate to characterize the contents of that thought. We are saying something about what is being thought. This “I” term is given by the sentence that follows the “that” clause in reporting a thought, a belief, or any propositional attitude. The proposal, then, is that “I”-thoughts are all and only the thoughts whose propositional contents constitutively involve the first-person pronoun. This is still not quite right, however, because thought contents can be specified in ways. They can be specified directly or indirectly.
In the examination of the functionalist account of self-reference as a possible strategy, although it is not ultimately successful, attention to the functionalist account reveal the correct approach for solving the paradox of self-consciousness. The successful response to the paradox of seif
consciousness must reject the classical view of contents. The thought that, despite all this, there are first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been provided by Hugh Mellor (1988-1989). As, the basic phenomenon in the explaining to, is what it is for a creature to have what is termed as a subjective belief, that is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. The explanation of subjective beliefs that offers to makes such beliefs independent of both linguistic abilities and conscious beliefs. From this basic account of construing an account of conscious subjective beliefs and then of the reference of the first-person pronoun “I”. These putatively more sophisticated cognitive states are causally derivable from basic subjective beliefs.
Another phenomenon where we may find something like a split without diminished or destroyed unity is hemi-neglect, the strange phenomenon of losing all sense of one side of one's body or sometimes a part of one side of the body. Whatever it is exactly that is going on in hemi-neglect, unified consciousness remains. It is just that its ‘range’ has been bizarrely circumscribed. It ranges over only half the body (in the most common situation), not seamlessly over the whole body. Where we expect proprioception and perception of the whole body, in these patients they are of (usually) only one-half of the body.
A third candidate phenomenon is what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder, now, more neutrally, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), everything about this phenomenon is controversial, including whether there is any real multiplicity of consciousness at all, but one common way of describing what is going on in at least some central cases is to say that the units if whether we call them persons, personalities, sides of a single personality, or whatever, ‘take turns’, usually with pronounced changes in personality. When one is active, the other(s) is usually(are) not. If this is an accurate description, then here to we have a breach in unity of some kind in which unity is nevertheless not destroyed. Notice that whereas in brain bisection cases the breach, whatever it is like, is synchronic (at a time), here it is diachronic (across time), different unified ‘package’ of consciousness taking turns. The breach consists primarily in some pattern of reciprocal (or sometimes one way) amnesia - some pattern of each ‘package’ not remembering having the experiences or doing the things had or done when another ‘package’ was in charge.
By contrast to brain bisection and DID cases, there are phenomena in which unified consciousness does not seem to split and does seem to be damaged or even destroyed together. In brain bisection and dissociative identity cases, the most that is happening is that unified consciousness is splitting into two or more proportionally intact units - two or more at a time or two or more across time. It is a matter of controversy whether even that is happening, especially in DID cases, but we clearly do not have more than that. In particular, the unity itself does not disappear, although it may split, but we could say, it does not shatter. There are at least three kinds of case in which unity does appear to shatter.
One is some particularly severe form of schizophrenia. Here the victim seems to lose the ability to form an integrated, interrelated representation of his or her world and his or her self together. The person speaks in ‘word salads’ that never get anywhere, indeed sometimes never become complete sentences. The person is unable to put together integrated plans of actions even at the level necessary to obtain sustenance, tend to bodily needs, or escape painful irritants. So on, here, saying that unity of consciousness has shattered seems correct than split. The behaviour of these people seems to express no more than what we might call experience-fragmentation, each lasting a tiny length of time and unconnected to any others. In particular, except for the (usually semantically irrelevant) associations that lead these people from each entry to the next in the word salads they create, to be aware of one of these states is not to be aware of any others - or so to an evidentiary proposition.
In schizophrenia of this sort, the shattering of unified consciousness is part of a general breakdown or deformation of mental functioning: pertain to, desire, belief, even memory all suffer massive distortions. In another kind of case, the normal unity of consciousness seems to be just as absent but there does not seem to be general disturbance of the mind. This is what some researchers call dysexecutive syndrome. What characterizes the breakdown in the unity of consciousness here is that subjects are unable to consider two things together, even things that are directly related to one another. For example, such people cannot figure out whether a piece of a puzzle fits into a certain place even when the piece and the puzzle are both clearly visibly and the piece obviously fits. They cannot crack an egg into a pan. So on.
A disorder presenting similar symptoms is simultagnosia or Balint's syndrome (Balint was an earlier 20th century German neurologist). In this disorder, which is fortunately rare, patients see only one object located at one ‘place’ in the visual field at a time. Outside of a few ‘degrees of arc’ in the visual field, these patients say they see nothing and seem to be receiving no information (Hardcastle, in progress). In both dysexecutive disorder and simultagnosia (if we have two different phenomena here), subjects seem not to be aware of even two items in a single conscious state.
We can pin down what is missing in each case a bit more precisely. Recall the distinction between being conscious of individual objects and having unified consciousness of a number of objects at the same time introduced at the beginning of this article. Broadly speaking, we can think of the two phenomena isolated by this distinction as two stages. First, the mind ties together various sensory information into representations of objects. In contemporary cognitive research, this activity has come to be called binding (Hardcastle 1998 is a good review). Then, the mind ties these represented objects together to achieve unified consciousness of a number of them at the same time. (The first theorist to separate these two stages was Kant, in his doctrine of synthesis.) The first stage continues to be available to dysexecutive and simultagnosia patients: They continue to be aware of individual objects, events, etc. The damage seems to be to the second stage: it is the tying of objects together in consciousness that is impaired or missing altogether. The distinction can be made this way: these people can achieve some (z), unity of focus with respect to individual objects, but little or no unified consciousness of any of the three kinds over a number of objects.
The same distinction can also help make clear what is going on in the severe forms of schizophrenia just discussed. Like dysexecutive syndrome and simultagnosia patients, severe schizophrenics lack the ability to tie represented objects together, but they also seem to lack the ability to form unified representations of individual objects. In a different jargon, these people seem to lack even the capacity for object constancy. Thus their cognitive impairment is much more severe than that experienced by dysexecutive syndrome and simultagnosia patients.
With the exception of brain bisection patients, who do not evidence distortion of consciousness outside of specially contrived laboratory situations, the split or breach occurs naturally in all the patients just discussed. Indeed, they are a central class of the so-called ‘experiments of nature’ that are the subject-matter of contemporary neuropsychology. Since all the patients in whom these problems occur naturally are severely disadvantaged by their situation, this is further evidence that the ability to unify the contents of consciousness is central to proper cognitive functioning.
Is there anything common to the six situations of breakdowns in unified consciousness just sketched? How do they relate to (x), (Y) or (z)?
In brain bisection cases, the key evidence for a duality of some kind is that there are situations in which whatever is aware of some items being represented in the body in question is not aware of other items being represented in that same body at the same time. We looked at two examples of the phenomenon connection with the word TAXABLE and the doing of arithmetic. With respect to these represented items, there is a significant and systematically extendable situation in which to be aware of some of these items is not to be aware of others of them. This seems to be what motivates the judgment in us that these patients’ evidence a split in unified consciousness. If so, brain bisection cases are a straightforward case of a failure to meet the conditions for (x). However, they are more than that. Because the ‘centres of consciousness’ created in the lab do not communicate with one another except in the way that any mind can communicate with any other mind, there is also a breakdown in (Y). One subject of experience aware of itself as the single common subject of its experience seems to become two (in some measure at least).
In DID cases, and a central feature of the case is some pattern of amnesia. Again, this is a situation in which being conscious of some represented objects goes with not being conscious of others in a systematic way. The main difference is that the breach is at a time in brain bisection cases, across time in DID cases. So again the breakdown in unity consists in a failure to meet the conditions for (x). However, DID cases for being diachronic, there is also a breakdown in (Y) across time - though there is continuity across time within each personality, there seems to be little or no continuity, conscious continuity at any rate, from one to another.
The same pattern is evident in the cases of severe schizophrenia, dysexecutive disorder and simultagnosia that we considered. In all three cases, consciousness of some items goes with lack of consciousness of others. In these cases, to be aware of a given item is precisely not to be aware of other relevant items. However, in the severe schizophrenia cases we considered, there is also a failure to meet the conditions of (z).
Hemi-neglect is a bit different. Here we do not have in company of two or more ‘packages’ of consciousness and we do not have individual conscious states that are not unified with other conscious states. Not, as far as we know - for there to be conscious states not unified with the states on which the patient can report, there would have to be consciousness of what is going on in the side neglected by the subject with whom we can communicate and there is no evidence for this. Here none of the conditions for (x), (y) or (z) fail to be met - but that may be because hemi-neglect is not a split or a breakdown in unified consciousness in the first place. It may be simply a shrinking of the range of phenomena over which otherwise intact unified consciousness amplifies.
It is interesting that none of the breakdown cases we have considered evidence damage to or destruction of the unity in (y). We have seen cases in which unified consciousness it might split at a time (brain bisection cases) or over time (DID cases) but not cases in which the unity itself is significantly damaged or destroyed. Nor is our sample unrepresentative; the cases we have considered are the most widely discussed cases in the literature. There do not seem to be many cases in which saying that is plausible (y), awareness of oneself as a single common subject, has been damaged or destroyed.
After a long hiatus, serious work on the unity of consciousness began in recent philosophy with two books on Kant, P. F. Strawson (1966) and Jonathan Bennett (1966). Both of them had an influence far beyond the bounds of Kant scholarship. Central to these works is an exploration of the relationship between unified consciousness, especially unified consciousness of self, and our ability to form an integrated, coherent representation of the world, a linkage that the authors took to be central to Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories. Whatever the merits of the claim for a sceptical judgment, their work set off a long line of writings on the supposed link. Quite recently the approach prompted a debate about unity and objectivity among Michael Lockwood, Susan Hurley and Anthony Marcel in Peacocke (1994).
Another point in fact, are the issues that led philosophers back within the unity of consciousness, is, perhaps, the next historicity, for which had the neuropsychological results of brain bisection operations, only that we can explore at an earlier time. Starting with Thomas Nagel (1971) and continuing in the work of Charles Marks (1981), Derek Parfit (1971 and 1984), Lockwood (1989), Hurley (1998) and many others, these operations have been a major themes in work on the unity of consciousness since the 1970s. Much ink has been spilled on the question of what exactly is going on in the phenomenology of brain bisection patients. Nagel goes insofar as to claim that there is no whole number of ‘centres of consciousness’ in these patients: There is too much unity to say "two,” yet too much splitting to say "one.”
Some recent work by Jocelyne Sergent (1990) might seem to support this conclusion. She found, for example, that when a sign ‘6’ was sent to one hemisphere of the brain in these subjects and a sign ‘7’ was sent to the other in such a way that a crossover of information from one hemisphere to the other was extremely unlikely, they could say that the six is a smaller number than the seven but could not say whether the signs were the same or different. It is not certain that Sergent's work does support Nagel's conclusions. First, Sergent's claims are controversial - not, but all researchers have been able to replicate them. Second, even if the data are good, the interpretation of them is far from straightforward. In particular, they seem to be consistent with there being a clear answer to any precise ‘one or two?’ Question that we could ask. (’Unified consciousness of the two signs with respect to numerical size?’ Yes. ‘Unified consciousness of the visible structure of the signs?’ No). If so, the fact that there is obviously mixed evidence, some pointing to the conclusion ‘one’, some pointing to the conclusion ‘two’, supports the view expressed by Nagel that there may be no whole number of subjects that these patients are.
Much of the work since Nagel has focussed on the same issue of the kind of split that the laboratory manipulation of brain bisection patients induces. Some attention has also been paid to the implications of these splits. For example, could one hemisphere commit a crime in such a way that the other could not justifiably be held responsible for it? Or, if such splitting occurred regularly and was regularly followed by merging with ‘halves’ from other splits, what would the implications are for our traditional notion of what philosophers call ‘personal identity’, namely, being or remaining one and the same thing. (Here we are talking about identity in the philosopher's sense of being or remaining one things, not in the sense of the term that psychologists use when they talk of such things as ‘identity crises’.)
Parfit has made perhaps the largest contributions to the issue of the implications of brain bisection cases for personal identity. Phenomena relevant to identity in things others than persons can be a matter of degree. This is well illustrated by the famous ship of Theseus examples. Suppose that over the years, a certain ship in Theseus was rebuilt, boards by board, until every single board in it has been replaced. Is the ship at the end of the process the ship that started the process or not? Now suppose that we take all those rotten, replaced boards and reassemble them into a ship? Is this ship the original ship of Theseus or not? Many philosophers have been certain that such questions cannot arise for persons; identity in persons is completely clear and unambiguous, not something that could be a matter of degree as related phenomena obviously can be with other objects is a well-known example. As Parfit argues, the possibility of persons (or at any rate minds) splitting and fusing puts real pressure on such intuitions about our specialness; perhaps the continuity of persons can be as partial and tangled as the continuity of other middle-sized objects.
Lockwood's exploration of brain bisections cases go off in a different direction, two different directions in fact (we will examine the second below). Like Nagel, Marks, and Parfit, Lockwood has written on the extent to which what he calls ‘co-consciousness’ can split. (’Co-consciousness’ is the term that many philosophers now use for the unity of consciousness; Roughly, two conscious states are said to be co-conscious when they are related to another as finding conscious states are related of yet to another in unified consciousness.) He also explores the possibility of psychological states that are not determinately in any of the available ‘centres of consciousness’ and the implications of this possibility for the idea of the specious present, the idea that we are directly and immediately aware of a certain tiny spread of time, not just the current infinitesimal moment of time. He concludes that the determinateness of psychological states being in an available ‘centre of consciousness’ and the notion that psychological states spread over at least a small amount of time in the specious might present stand or fall together.
Some philosopher’s interests in pathologies of unified consciousness examine more than brain bisection cases. In what is perhaps the most complex work on the unity of consciousness to date, Hurley examines most of the kinds of breakdown phenomena that we introduced earlier. She starts with an intuitive notion of co-consciousness that she does not formally define. She then explores the implications of a wide range of ‘experiments of nature’ and laboratory experiments for the presence or absence of co-consciousness across the psychological states of a person. For example, she considers acallosal patients (people born without a corpus callosum). When present, the corpus callosum is the chief channel of communication between the hemispheres. When it is cut, generating what looks like a possibility that two centres of consciousness, two internally co-conscious systems that are not co-consciousness with one another. Hurley argues that in patients in whom it never existed, things are not so clear. Even though the channels of communication in these patients are often in part external (behavioural cuing activity, etc.), the result may still be a single co-conscious system. That is to say, the neurological and behavioural basis of unified consciousness may be very different in different people.
Hurley also considers research by Trewarthen in which a patient is conscious of some object seen by, say, the right hemisphere until her left hand, which is controlled by the right hemisphere, reaches for it. Somehow the act of reaching for it seems to obliterate the consciousness of it. Very strange - how can something pop into and disappear from unified consciousness in this way? This leads her to consider the notion of partial unity. Could two centres of consciousness be as integrated in ‘A’, only to find of its relation to ‘B’, though not co-conscious with one another, nonetheless these of them is co-conscious with some third thing, e.g., the volitional system B (the system of intentions, desires, etc.?). If so, ‘co-conscious’ is not a transitive relationship - ‘A’ is co-conscious with ‘B’ and ‘C’ could be co-conscious with B without A being co-conscious with ‘C’. This is puzzling enough. Even more puzzling would be the question of how activation of the system ‘B’ with which both ‘A’ and ‘C’ are co-conscious could result in either ‘A’ or ‘C’ ceasing to be conscious of an object aimed at by ‘B’.
Hurleys’ response to Trewarthen's cases (and Sergent's cases that we examined in the previous section) is to accept that intention can obliterate consciousness and then distinguish times. At any given time in Trewarthen's cases, the situation with respect to unity is clear. That the picture does not conform to our usual expectations for diachronic singularity or transitivity then becomes simply an artefact of the cases, not a problem. It is not made clear how this reconciles Sergent's evidence with unity. One strategy would be that the one we considered earlier was of making questions in incomparably precise comprehension. For precise questions, there seems to be a coherent answer about unity for every phenomenon Sergent describes.
Hurleys’ consideration of what she calls Marcel's case. Here subjects are asked to report the appearance of some item in consciousness in three ways at the same time - say, by blinking, pushing a button, and saying, ‘I see it’. Remarkably, any of these acts can be done without the other two. The question is, What does this allude to unified consciousness? In a case in which the subject pushes the button but neither blinks nor says anything, for example, is the hand-controller aware of the object while the blink-controller and the speech-controller are not? How could the conscious system become fragmented in such a way?
Hurleys’ stipulation is that they cannot. What induces the appearance of incoherence about unity is the short time scale. Suppose that it takes some time to achieve unified consciousness, perhaps because some complex reaction’s processes are involved. If that were the case, then we do not have a stable unity situation in Marcel's case. The subjects are not given enough time to achieve unified consciousness of any kind.
There is a great deal more to Hurley's work. She urges, for example, that theirs a normative dimension to unified consciousness - conscious states have to cohere for unified consciousness to result. Systems in the brain have to achieve her calls ‘dynamic singularity’ - being a single system - for unified consciousness to result.
A third issue that got philosophers working on the unity of consciousness again is binding. Here the connection is more distant because binding as usually understood is not unified consciousness as we have been discussing it. Recall the two stages of cognition laid out earlier. First, the mind ties together various sensory information into representations of objects. Then the mind ties these represented objects to one other to achieve unified consciousness of a number of them at the same time. It is the first stage that is usually called binding. The representations that result at this stage need not be conscious in any of the ways delineating earlier - many perfectly good representations affect behaviour and even enter memory without ever becoming conscious. Representations resulting from the second stage need not be conscious, either, but when they are, we have at least some of the kinds of unified consciousness delineated.
In the past few decades, philosophers have also worked on how unified consciousness relates to the brain. Lockwood, for example, thinks that relating consciousness to matter will involve more issues on the side of matter than most philosophers think. (We mentioned that his work goes off in two new directions. This is the second one.) Quantum mechanics teach us that the way in which observation links to physical reality is a subtle and complex matter. Lockwood urges that our conceptions will have to be adjusted on the side of matter as much as on the side of mind if we are to understand consciousness as a physical phenomenon and physical phenomena as open to conscious observation. If it is the case not only that our understanding of consciousness is affected by how we think it might be implemented in matter but also that process of matter is affected by our (conscious) observation of them, then our picture of consciousness stands as ready to affect our picture of matter as vice-versa.
The Churchlands, Paul M. and Patricia S. and Daniel Dennett (1991) has radical views of the underlying architecture of unified consciousness. The Churchlands see unity itself much as other philosophers do. They do argue that the term ‘consciousness’ covers a range of different phenomena that need to be distinguished from another but the important point that presents to some attending characteristic is that they urge that the architecture of the underlying processes probably consist not of transformations of symbolically encoded objects of representations, as most philosophers have believed, but of vector transformations in what are called phase spaces. Dennett articulates an even more radical view, encompassing both unity and underlying architecture. For him, unified consciousness is simply a temporary ‘virtual captain’, a small group of related information-parcels that happens to gain temporary dominance in a struggle for control of such cognitive activities as self-monitoring and self-reporting in the vast array of microcircuits of the brain. We take these transient phenomena to be more than they are because each of them holds to some immediacy of ‘me’, particularly of the moment; The temporary coalition of conscious states winning at the moment is what I am, is the self. Radical implementation, narrowed range and transitoriness notwithstanding, when unified consciousness is achieved, these philosophers tend to see it in the way we have presented it.
Dennett's and the Churchlands' views fit naturally with a dynamic systems view of the underlying neural implementation. The dynamic systems view is the view that unified consciousness is a result of certain self-organizing activities in the brain. Dennett thinks that given the nature of the brain, a vast assembly of neurons receiving electrochemical signals from other neurons and passing such signals to yet other neurons, cognition could not take any form other than something like a pandemonium of competing bits of content, the ones that win the competitions being the ones that are conscious. The Churchlands nonexistence tends to agree with Dennett about this. They see consciousness as a state of the brain, the ‘wet-ware’, not a result of information processing, of ‘software’. They also advocate a different picture of the underlying neurological process. As we said, they think that transformations of complex vectors in a multi-dimensional phase space are the crucial processes, not competition among bits of content. However, they agree that it is very unlikely that the processes that subserve unified consciousness are sentence-like or language-like at all. It is too early to say whether these radically novel pictures of what the system that implements unified consciousness is like will hold any important implications for what unified consciousness is or when it is present.
Hurley is also interested in the relationship of unified consciousness to brain physiology. Saying it of her that she resists certain standard ways of linking them would be truer, however, than to say that she herself links them. In particular, while she clearly thinks that physiological phenomena have all sorts of implications and give rise to all sorts of questions about the unity of consciousness, she strongly resists any simplistic patterns of connection. Many researchers have been attracted by some variant of what she calls the isomorphism hypothesis. This is the idea that changes in consciousness will parallel changes in brain structure or function. She wants to insist, to the contrary, that often two instances of the same change in consciousness will go with very different changes in the brain. We saw an example in the last section. In most of us, unified consciousness is closely linked to an intact, functioning corpus callosum. However, in acallosal people, there may be the same unity but achieved by mechanisms such as cuing activity external to the body that are utterly different from communication though a corpus callosum. Going the opposite way, different changes in consciousness can go with the same changes to structure and function in the brain.
Two philosophers have gone off in directions different from any of the above, Stephen White (1991) and Christopher Hill (1991). White's main interest is not the unity of consciousness as such but what one might call the unified locus of responsibility - what it is that ties something together to make it a single agent of actions, i.e., something to which attributions of responsibility can appropriately be made. He argues that unity of consciousness is one of the things that go into becoming unified as such an agent but not the only thing. Focussed coherent plans, a continuing single conception of the good, with reason of a good autobiographical memory, certain future states of persons mattering to us in a special way (mattering to us because we take them to be future states of ourselves, one would say if it were not blatantly circular), a certain continuing kind and degree of rationality, certain social norms and practices, and so forth. In his picture of moral responsibility, unbroken unity of consciousness at and over time is only a small part of the story.
Hills’ fundamental claim is that a number of different relationships between psychological states have a claim to be considered unity relationships, including: Being owned by the same subject, being [phenomenally] next to (and other relationships that state in the field of consciousness appear to have to one another), as both embrace the singularity of objects contained of other conscious states, and jointly having the appropriate sorts of effects (functions). An interesting question, one that Hill does not consider, is whether all these relations are what interests us when we talk about the unity of consciousness or only some of them (and if only some of them, which ones). Hill also examines scepticism about the idea that clearly bounded individual conscious states exist. Since we have been assuming throughout that such states do exist, it is perhaps fortunate that Hill argues that we could safely do so.
In some circles, the idea that consciousness has a special kind of unity has fallen into disfavour. Nagel (1971), Donald Davidson (1982), and Dennett (1991) have all urged that the mind's unity has been greatly overstated in the history of philosophy. The mind, they say, works mostly out of the sight and the control of consciousness. Moreover, even states and acts of ours that are conscious can fail to cohere. We act against what we know perfectly well to be our own most desired courses of action, for example, or do things while telling ourselves that we must avoid doing them. There is an approach to the small incoherencies of everyday life that does not requires us to question whether consciousness is unified in this way, the Freudian approach (e.g., Freud 1916/17). This approach accepts that the unity of consciousness exists much as it presents itself but argues that the range of material over which it extends is much smaller than philosophers once thought. This latter approach has some appeal. If something is out of sight and/or control, it is out of the sight or control of what? The answer would seem to be, the unified conscious mind. If so, the only necessary difference among the pre-twentieth century visions of unified consciousness as ranging over everything in the mind and our current vision of unified consciousness is that the range of psychological phenomena over which unified consciousness ranges has shrunk.
A final historical note. At the beginning of the 21st century, work on the unity of consciousness continues apace. For example, a major conference was recently devoted to the unity of consciousness, the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Conference assembled inside Brussels in 2000, and the Encyclopaedias of philosophy (such as this one) and of cognitive science are commissioning articles on the topic. Psychologists are taking up the issue. Bernard Baars (1988, 1997) notion of the global workspace is an example. Another example is work on the role of unified consciousness in precise control of attention. However, the topic is not yet at the centre of consciousness studies. One illustration of this is that it can still be missing entirely in anthologies of current work on consciousness.
With a different issue, philosophers used to think that the unity of consciousness has huge implications for the nature of the mind, indeed entails that the mind could not be made out of matter. We also saw that the prospects for this inference are not good. What about the nature of consciousness? Does the unity of consciousness have any implications for this issue?
There are currently at least three major camps on the nature of consciousness. One camp sees the ‘felt quality’ of representations as something unique, in particular as quite different from the power of representations to change other representations and shape belief and action. On this picture, representations could function much as they do without it being like anything to have them. They would merely not be conscious. If so, consciousness may not play any important cognitive role at all, its unity included (Jackson 1986; Chalmers 1996). A second camp holds, to the contrary, that consciousness is simply a special kind of representation (Rosenthal 1991, Dretske 1995, and Tye 1995). A third holds that what we label ‘consciousness’ are really something else. On this view, consciousness will in the end be ‘analysed away’ - the term is too coarse-grained and presents things in too unquantifiable a way to have any use in a mature science of the mind.
The unity of consciousness obviously has strong implications for the truth or falsity of any of these views. If it is as central and undeniable as many have suggested, its existence may cut against the eliminativist position. With respect to the other positions, in that the unity of consciousness seems neutral.
Whatever its implications for other issues, the unity of consciousness seems to be a real feature of the human mind, indeed central to it. If so, any complete picture of the mind will have to provide an account of it. Even those who hold that the extent to which consciousness is unified has been overrated owing us and account of what has been overrated.
To say one has an experience that is conscious (in the phenomenal sense) is to say, that one is in a state of its seeming to one some way. In another formulation, to say experience is conscious is to say that there is something that stands alone, like for only one to have. Feeling pain and sensing colours are common illustrations of phenomenally conscious states. Consciousness has also been taken to consist in the monitoring of one's own state of mind (e.g., by forming thoughts about them, or by somehow "sensing" them), or else in the accessibility of information to one's capacity for rational control or self-report. Intentionality has to do with the directedness or aboutness of mental states - the fact that, for example, one's thinking is of or about something. Intentionality includes, and is sometimes taken to be equivalent to, what is called “mental representation.”
It can seem that consciousness and intentionality pervade mental life -perhaps, but one or both somehow constitute what it is to have a mind. But achieving an articulate general understanding of either consciousness or intentionality presents, an enormous challenge, part of which lies in figuring out how the two are related. Is one in some sense derived from or dependent on the other? Or are they perhaps quite independent and separate aspects of mind?
One frequent understanding among philosophers, that consciousness is a certain feature shared by sense-experience and imagery, perhaps belonging also to a broad range of other mental phenomena (e.g., episodic thought, memory, and emotion). It is the feature that consists in its seeming some way to one to have experiences. To put it another way: Conscious states are states of its seeming somehow to a subject.
For example, it seems to you some way to see red, and seems to you in another way, to hear a crash, to visualize a triangle, and to suffer pain. The sense of ‘seems’ relevant here may be brought out by noting that, in the last example, we might just as well speak of the way it feels to be in pain. And - some may say - in the same sense, it seems to you some way to think through the answer to a math problem, or to recall where you parked the car, or to feel anger, shame, or elation. (However, that it is not simply to be assumed that saying it seems some way to you to have an experience is equivalent to saying that the experience itself seems or appears some way to you - that it, is - an object of appearance. The point is just that the way something sounds to you, the way something looks to you, etc., all constitute ‘ways of seeming.’) States that are conscious in this sense are said to have some phenomenal character or other - their phenomenal character being the specific way it seems to one to have a given experience. Sometimes this is called the ‘qualitative’ or ‘subjective’ character of experience.
Another oft-used means for trying to get at the relevant notion of consciousness, preferable to some, is to say that there is, in a certain sense, always ‘something it is like’ to be in a given conscious state - something it has, in the like for one who is in that state. Relating the two locutions, we might say: There is something it is like for you to see red, to feel pain, etc., and the way it seems to you to have one of these experiences is what it is like for you to have it. The phenomenal character of an experience then, is what someone would inquire about by asking, e.g., ‘What is it like to experience orgasm?’ - and it is what we speak of when we say that we know what that is like, even if we cannot convey this to one who does not know. And, if we want to speak of persons, or other creatures (as distinct from their states) being conscious, we will say that they are conscious just if there is something it is like for them to be the creature they are - for example, something it is like to be a nocturnal creature as inferred too as a bat.
The examples of conscious states given comprise a various lot. But some sense of their putative unity as instances of consciousness might be gained by contrasting them with what we are inclined to exclude, or can at least conceive of excluding, from their company. Much of what goes on, but we would ordinarily believe is not (or at any rate, we may suppose is not) conscious in the sense at issue. The leaf's fall from a tree branch, we may suppose, is not a conscious state of the leaf - a state of its seeming somehow to the leaf. Nor, for that matter, is a person falling off a branch held of a conscious state - is rather the feeling of falling the sort of consciousness, if anything is. Dreaming of falling would also be a conscious experience in this sense. But, while we can in some way be said to sense the position of our limbs even while dreamlessly asleep, we may still suppose that this proprioception (though perhaps in some sense a mental or cognitive affair) is not conscious - we may suppose that it does not then seem (or feel) any way to us sleepers to sense our limbs, as ordinarily it does when we are awake.
The way of seeming’ or ‘what it is like’ conception of consciousness I have just invoked is sometimes marked by the term ‘phenomenal consciousness.’ But this qualifier ‘phenomenal’ suggests that there are other kinds of consciousness (or perhaps, other senses of ‘consciousness’). Indeed there are, at least, other ways of introducing notions of consciousness. And these may appear to pick out features or senses altogether distinct from that just presented. For example, it is said that some (but not all) that goes on in the mind is ‘accessible to consciousness.’ Of course this by itself does not so much specifies a sense of ‘conscious’ as put one in use. (One will want to ask: And just what is this ‘consciousness’ that has ‘access’ to some mental goings-on but not others, and what could ‘access’ efforts that mean in of having it anyway? However, some have evidently thought that, rather than speak of consciousness as what has access, we should understand consciousness as itself a certain kind of susceptibility to access. For example, Daniel Dennett (1969) once theorized that one's conscious states are just those whose contents are available to one's direct verbal report - or, at least, to the ‘speech centre’ responsible for generating such reports. And Ned Form (1995) has proposed that, on one understanding of ‘conscious,’ (to be found at work in many ‘cognitive’ theories of consciousness) a conscious state is just a ‘representation poised for free use in reasoning and other direct ‘rational’ control of action and speech.’ Form labels consciousness in this sense ‘excess consciousness.’
Forms’ would insist that we should distinguish phenomenal consciousness from ‘excess consciousness’, and he argues that a mental representation's being poised for use in reasoning and rational control of action is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the state's being phenomenally conscious. Similarly he distinguishes phenomenal consciousness from what he calls ‘reflexive consciousness’ - where this has to do with one's capacity to represent one's mind's to oneself - to have, for example, thoughts about one's own thoughts, feelings, or desires. Such a conception of consciousness finds some support in a tendency to say that conscious states of mind are those one is ‘conscious of’ or ‘aware of’ being in, and to interpret this ‘of’ to indicate some kind of reflexivity is involved - wherein one represents one's own mental representations. On one prominent variant of this conception, consciousness is taken to be a kind of scanning or perceiving of one's own psychological states or processes - an ‘inner sense.’
Forming a threefold division of our phenomenon, whereby its access, and reflexive consciousness need not be taken to reflect clear and coherent distinctions already contained in our pre-theoretical use of the term ‘conscious.’ Form seems to think that (on the contrary) our initial, ordinary use of ‘conscious’ is too confused even to count as ambiguous. Thus in articulating an interpretation, or set of interpretations, of the term adequate to frame theoretical issues, we cannot simply describe how it is currently employed - we must assign it a more definite and coherent meaning than extant in common usage.
Whether or not this is correct, getting a solid ground here is not easy, and a number of theorists of consciousness would balk at proceeding on the basis of Form's proposed threefold distinction. Sometimes the difficulty may be merely terminological. John Searle, for example, would recognize phenomenal consciousness, but deny Form's other two candidates are proper senses of ‘conscious’ at all. The reality of some sort of access and reflexivity is apparently not at issue - just whether either captures a sense of ‘conscious’ (perhaps confusedly) woven into our use of the term. However, in contrast to both Form and Searle, there are also those who raise doubt that there is a properly phenomenal sense we can apply, distinct from both of the other two, for us to pick out with any term. This is not just a dispute about words, but about what there is for us to talk about with them.
The substantive issues here are very much bound up with differences over the proper way to conceive of the relationship between consciousness and intentionality. If there are distinct senses in which states of mind could be correctly said to be ‘conscious’ (answering perhaps to something like Form's three-fold distinction), then there will be distinct questions we can pose about the relation between consciousness and intentionality. But if one of Form's alleged senses is somehow fatally confused, or if he is wrong to distinguish it from the others, or if it is the sense of no term we can with warrant apply to ourselves or our states, then there will be no separate question in which it figures we should try to answer. Thus, trying to work out a reasoned view about what we are (or should be) talking about when we talk about consciousness is an unavoidable and non-trivial part of trying to understand the relation between consciousness and intentionality.
To clarify further the disputes about consciousness and their links to questions about its relation to intentionality, we need to get an initial grasp of the relevant way the terms ‘intentionality’ and ‘intentional’ are used in philosophy of mind.
Previously, some indication of why it is difficult to get a theory of consciousness started. While the term ‘conscious’ is not esoteric, its use is not easily characterized or rendered consistent in a manner providing some uncontentious framework for theoretical discussion. Where the term ‘intentional’ is concerned, we also face initially confusing and contentious usage. But here the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the relevant use of cognate terms is simply not that found in common speech (as when we speak of doing something ‘intentionally’). Though ‘intentionality,’ in the sense here at issue, does seem to attach to some real and fundamental (maybe even defining) aspect of mental phenomena, the relevant use of the term is tangled up with some rather involved philosophical history.
One way of explaining what is meant by ‘intentionality’ in the (more obscure) philosophical sense is this: it is that aspect of mental states or events that consists in their being of or about things, as pertains to the questions, ‘What are you thinking of?’ And, what are you thinking about?’ Intentionality is the aboutness or directedness of mind (or states of mind) to things, objects, states of affairs, events. So if you are thinking about San Francisco, or about the increased cost of living there, or about your meeting someone there at Union Square - your mind, your thinking, is directed toward San Francisco, or the increased cost of living, or the meeting in Union Square. To think at all is to think of or about something in this sense. This ‘directedness’ conception of intentionality plays a prominent role in the influential philosophical writings of Franz Brentano and those whose views developed in response to his.
But what kind of ‘aboutness’ or ‘of-ness’ or ‘directedness’ is this, and to what sorts of things does it apply? How do the relevant ‘intentionality-marking’ senses of these words (‘about,’ ‘of,’ ‘directed’) differ from? : the sense in which the cat is wandering ‘about’ the room; the sense in which someone is a person ‘of’ high integrity; the sense in which the river's course is ‘directed’ toward the fields?
It has been said that the peculiarity of this kind of directedness/aboutness/of-ness lies in its capacity to relate thought or experience to objects that (unlike San Francisco) do not exist. One can think about a meeting that has not, or will never occur; One can think of Shangri La, or El Dorado, or the New Jerusalem, as one may think of their shining streets, of their total lack of poverty, or their citizens' peculiar garb. Thoughts, unlike roads, can lead to a city that is not there.
But to talk in this way only invites new perplexities. Is this to say (with apparent incoherence) that there are cities that do not exist? And what does it mean to say that, when a state of mind is in fact directed toward’ something that does exist, that state nevertheless could be directed toward something that does not exist? It can well seem to be something very fundamental to the nature of mind that our thoughts, or states of mind more generally, can be of or about things or ‘point beyond themselves.’ But a coherent and satisfactory theoretical grasp of this phenomenon of ‘mental pointing’ in all its generality is difficult to achieve.
Another way of trying to get a grip on the topic asks us to note that the potential for a mental directedness toward the non-existent be evidently closely associated with the mind's potential for falsehood, error, inaccuracy, illusion, hallucination, and dissatisfaction. What makes it possible to believe (or even just suppose) something about Shangri La is that one can falsely believe (or suppose) that something exists? In the case of perception, what makes it possible to seem to see or hear what is not there is that one's experience may in various ways be inaccurate, non-veridical, subject to illusion, or hallucinatory. And, what makes it possible for one's desires and intentions to be directed toward what does not and will never exist is that one’s desire and intentions can be unfulfilled or unsatisfied. This suggests another strategy for getting a theoretical hold on intentionality, employing a notion of satisfaction, stretched to encompass susceptibility to each of these modes of assessment, each of these ways in which something can either go right, or go wrong (true/false, veridical/nonveridical, fulfilled/unfulfilled), and speak of intentionality in terms of having ‘conditions of satisfaction.’ On John Searle's (1983) conception, intentional states are those having conditions of satisfaction. What are conditions of satisfaction? In the case of belief, these are the conditions under which the belief is true; Even so, the instance of perception, they are the conditions under which sense-experience is veridical: In the case of intention, the conditions under which an intention is fulfilled or carried out.
However, while the conditions of satisfaction approach to the notion of intentionality may furnish an alternative to introducing this notion by talking of ‘directedness to objects,’ it is not clear that it can get us around the problems posed by the ‘directedness’ talk. For instance, what are we to say where thoughts are expressed using names of nonexistent deities or fictional characters? Will we do away with a troublesome directedness to the nonexistent by saying that the thoughts that Zeus is Poseidon's brother, and that Hamlet is a prince, is just false? This is problematic. Moreover, how will we state the conditions of satisfaction of such thoughts? Will this not also involve an apparent reference to the nonexistent?
A third important way of conceiving of intentionality, one particularly central to the analytic tradition derived from the study of Frege and Russell whom asks us to concentrate on the notion of mental (or intentional) content. Often, it is assumed to have intentionality is to have content. And frequently mental content is otherwise described as representational or informational content - and ‘intentionality’ (at least, as this applies to the mind) is seen as just another word for what is called ‘mental representation,’ or a certain way of bearing or carrying information.
But what is meant by ‘content’ here? As a start we may note: The content of thought, in this sense, is what, is reported when answering the question, What does she think? By something of the form, ‘She thinks that p.’ And the content of thought is what two people are said to share, when they are said to think the same thought. (Similarly, that contents of belief are what two persons commonly share when they hold the same belief.) Content is also what may be shared in this way even while ‘psychological modes’ of states of mind may differ. For example: Believing that I will soon be bald and fearing that I will soon be a bald share in that the content of bald shares that I will soon be bald.
Also, commonly, content is taken as not only that which is shared in the ways illustrated, but that which differs in a way revealed by considering certain logical features of sentences we use to talk about states of mind. Notably: the constituents of the sentence that fills in for ‘p’ when we say ‘x thinks that p’ or ‘x believes that p’ are often interpreted in such a way that they display ‘failures of substitutivity’ of (ordinarily) co-referential or co-extensional expressions, and this appear to reflect differences in mental content. For example: if George W. Bush is the eldest son of the vice-president under Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush is the current US. President, then it can be validly inferred that the eldest son of Reagan's vice-president is the current US President. However, we cannot always make the same sort of substitutions of terms when we use them to report what someone believes. From the fact that you believe that George W. Bush is the current US. President, we cannot validly infer that you believe that the eldest son of Reagan's vice-president is the current US. President. That last may still be false, even if George W. Bush is indeed the eldest son. These logical features of the sentences ‘x believes that George W. Bush is the current US. President’ and ‘x believe that George W. Bush is the eldest son of Reagan's vice-president’ seem to reflect the fact that the beliefs reported by their use have different contents: these sentences are used by someone to state what is believed (the belief content), and what is believed in each case is not just the same. Someone's belief may have the one content without having the other.
Similar observations can be made for other intentional states and the reports made of them - especially when these reports contain an object clause beginning with ‘that’ and followed by a complete sentence (e.g., she thinks that p; He intends that p; She hopes that p and the fear that p; She sees that p). Sometimes it is said that the content of the states is ‘given’ by such a ‘that p’ clause when ‘p’ is replaced by a sentence - the so-called ‘content clause.’
This ‘possession of content’ conception of intentionality may be coordinated with the ‘conditions of satisfaction’ conception roughly as follows. If states of mind contrast in respect of their satisfaction (say, one is true and the other false), they differ in content. (One and the same belief content cannot be both true and false - at least not in the same context at the same time.) And if one says what the intentional content of a state of mind is, one says much or perhaps all of what conditions must be met if it is to be satisfied - what its conditions of truth, or veridicality, or fulfilment, are. But one should be alert to how the notion of content employed in a given philosopher's views is heavily shaped by these views. One should note how commonly it is held that the notion of the finding representation of content is of that way of an ambiguous or in need of refinement. (Consider, for example: Jerry Fodor's) defence of a distinction between ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ content, as Edward Zalta’s characterlogical distinction between ‘cognitive’ and ‘objective content’ (1988), and that of John Perry's distinction between ‘reflexive' and ‘subject-matter content’.
It is arguable that each of these gates of entry into the topic of intentionality (directedness, condition of satisfaction, and mental content) opens onto a unitary phenomenon. But evidently there is also considerable fragmentation in the conceptions of both consciousness and intentionality that are in the field. To get a better grasp of some of the ways the relationship between consciousness and intentionality can be viewed, without begging questions or trying to present a positive theory on the topic, it is useful to take a look at the recent history of thinking about intentionality, in a way that will bring several issues about its relationship with consciousness to the fore. Together with the preceding discussion, this should provide the background necessary for examining some of the differences that divide those who theorize about consciousness that is very intimately involved with views of the consciousness-intentionality relation.
If we are to acknowledge the extent to which the notion of intentionality is the creature of philosophical history, we have to come to terms with the divide in twentieth century western philosophy between so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophical traditions. Both have been significantly concerned with intentionality. But differences in approach, vocabulary, and background assumptions have made dialogue between them difficult. It is almost inevitable, in a brief exposition, to give largely independent summaries of the two. We will start with the ‘continental’ side of the story - more, specifically, with the Phenomenological movement in continental philosophy. However, while these traditions have developed without a great deal of intercommunication, they do have common sources, and have come to focus on issues concerning the relationship of consciousness and intentionality that are recognizably similar.
A thorough look at the historical roots of controversies over consciousness and intentionality would take us farther into the past than it is feasible to go in this article. A relatively recent, convenient starting point would be in the philosophy of Franz Brentano. He more than any other single thinker is responsible for keeping the term ‘intentional’ alive in philosophical discussions of the last century or so, with something like its current use, and was much concerned to understand its relationship with consciousness. However, it is worth noting that Brentano himself was very aware of the deep historical background to his notion of intentionality: He looked back through scholastic discussions (crucial to the development of Descartes' immensely influential theory of ideas), and ultimately to Aristotle for his theme of intentionality. One may go further back, to Plato's discussion (in the Sophist, and the Theaetetus) of difficulties in making sense of false belief, and yet further still, to the dawn of Western Philosophy, and Parmenides' attempt to draw momentous consequences from his alleged finding that it is not possible to think or speak of what is not.
In Brentano's treatment what seems crucial to intentionality is the mind's capacity to ‘refer’ or be ‘directed’ to objects existing solely in the mind - what he called ‘mental or intentional inexistence.’ It is subject to interpretation just what Brentano meant by speaking of an object existing only in the mind and not outside of it, and what he meant by saying that such ‘immanent’ objects of thought are not ‘real.’ He complained that critics had misunderstood him here, and appears to have revised his position significantly as his thought developed. But it is clear at least that his conception of intentionality is dominated by the first strand in thought about intentionality mentioned above - intentionality as ‘directedness toward an object’ - and whatever difficulty that brings in the point.
Brentano's conception of the relation between consciousness and intentionality can be brought out partly by noting he held that every conscious mental phenomenon is both directed toward an object, and always (if only ‘secondarily’) directed toward itself. (That is, it includes a ‘presentation’ - and ‘inner perception’ - of itself). Since Brentano also denied the existence of unconscious mental phenomena, this amounts to the view that all mental phenomena are, in a sense ‘self-presentational.’
His lectures in the late nineteenth century attracted a diverse group of central European intellectuals (including that great promoter of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud) and the problems raised by Brentano's views were taken up by a number of prominent philosophers of the era, including Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, and Kasimir Twardowski. Of these, it was Husserl's treatment of the Brentanian theme of intentionality that was to have the widest philosophical influence on the European Continent in the twentieth century - both by means of its transformation in the hands of other prominent thinkers who worked under the aegis of ‘phenomenology’ - such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty - and through its rejection by those embracing the ‘deconstructionism’ of Jacques Derrida.
In responding to Brentano, Husserl also adopted his concern with properly understanding the way in which thought and experience are “directed toward objects.” Husserl criticized Brentano's doctrine of ‘inner perception,’ and did not deny (even if he did not affirm) the reality of unconscious mentation. But Husserl retained Brentano's primary focus on describing conscious ‘mental acts.’ Also he believed that knowledge of one's own mental acts rests on an ‘intuitive’ apprehension of their instances, and held that one is, in some sense, conscious of each of one's conscious experiences (though he denied this meant that every conscious experience is an object of an intentional act). Evidently Husserl wished to deny that all conscious acts are objects of inner perception, while also affirming that some kind of reflexivity - one that is, however, neither judgment-like nor sense-like - is essentially built into every conscious act. But the details of the view are not easy to make out. (A similar (and similarly elusive) view was expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre in the doctrine that “All consciousness is a non-positional consciousness of itself.”
One of Husserl's principal points of departure in his early treatment of intentionality (in the Logical Investigations) was his criticism of (what he took to be) Brentano's notion of the ‘mental inexistence’ of the objects of thought and perception. Husserl thought it a fundamental error to suppose that the object (the ‘intentional object’) of a thought, judgment, desire, etc. is always an object ‘in’ (or ‘immanent to’) the mind of the thinker, judger, or desirer. The objects of one's ‘mental acts’ of thinking, judging, etc. are often objects that ‘transcend,’ and exist independently of these acts (states of mind) that are directed toward them (that ‘intend’ them, in Husserl's terms). This is particularly striking, Husserl thought, if we focus on the intentionality of sense perception. The object of my visual experience is not something ‘in my mind,’ whose existence depends on the experience - but something that goes beyond or ‘transcends’ any (necessarily perspectival) experience I may have of it. This view is phenomenologically based, for (Husserl says), the object is experienced as perspectivally given, hence as ‘transcendent’ in this sense.
In cases of hallucination, we should say, on Husserl's view, not that there is an object existing ‘in one's mind,’ but that the object intended does not exist at all. This does not do away with the ‘directedness’ of the experience, for that is properly understood (according to the Logical Investigations) as it is having a certain ‘matter’- where the matter of a mental act is what may be common to different acts, when, for example, one believes that it will not rain tomorrow, and hopes that it will not rain tomorrow. The difference between the mental acts illustrated (between hoping and believing) Husserl would term a difference in their ‘quality.’ Husserl was to re-interpret his notions of act-matter and quality as components of what he called (in Ideas, 1983) the ‘noema’ or ‘noematic structure’ that can be common to distinct particular acts. So intentional directedness is understood not as a relation to special (mental) objects toward which one is directed, but rather: as the possession by mental acts of matter/quality (or later, ‘noematic’) structure.
This unites Husserl's discussion with the ‘content’ conception of intentionality described above: he himself would accept that the matter of an act (later, its ‘noematic sense’) is the same as the content of judgment, belief, desire, etc., in one sense of the term (or rather, in one sense he found in the ambiguous German ‘Gestalt’). However, it is not fully clear how Husserl would view the relationship between either act-matter and noematic sense quite generally and such semantic correlates of ordinary language sentences that some would identify as the contents of states of mind reported in them. Nonetheless, this is a difficulty partly because of his later emphasis (e.g., in Experience and Judgment) on the importance of what he called ‘pre-predicative’ experience. He believed that the sort of judgments we express in ordinary and scientific languages are ‘founded on’ the intentionality of pre-predicative experience, and that it is a central task of philosophy to clarify the way in which such experience of our surroundings and our own bodies underlies judgment, and the capacity it affords us to construct an ‘objective’ conception of the world. Prepredicative experience’s are, paradigmatically, sense experience as it is given to us, independently of any active judging or predication. But did Husserl hold that what makes such experience pre-predicative is that it altogether lacks the content that is expressed linguistically in predicative judgment, or did he think that such judgment merely renders explicitly a predicative content that even ‘pre-predicative’ experience already (implicitly) has? Just what does the ‘pre-’ in ‘pre-predicative’ entail?
Perhaps this is not clear. In any case, the theme of a type of intentionality more fundamental than that involved in predicative judgments that ‘posit’ objects, and to be found in everyday experience of our surroundings, was taken up, in different ways, by later phenomenologists, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The former describes a type of ‘directed’ ‘comportment’ toward beings in which they ‘show themselves’ as ‘ready-to-hand. Heidegger thinks this characterizes our ordinary practical involvement with our surroundings, and regards it as distinct from, and somehow providing a basis for, entities showing themselves to us as ‘present-at-hand’ (or ‘occurrent’) - as they do when we take of less context-bound, and more in a theoretical stance toward the world. Later, Merleau-Ponty (1949-1962), influenced by his study of Gestalt psychology and neurological case studies describing pathologies of perception and action, held that normal perception involves a consciousness of place tied essentially to one's capacities for exploratory and goal-directed movement, which is indeterminate relative to attempts to express or characterize it in terms of ‘objective’ representations - though it makes such an objective conception of the world possible.
Whether Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's moves in these directions actually contradict Husserl, they clearly go beyond what he says. Another basic, exegetically complex, apparent difference between Husserl and the two later philosophers, pertinent to the relationship of consciousness and intentionality, there lies the disputation over Husserl's proposed ‘Phenomenological reduction.’ Husserl claimed it is possible (and, indeed, essential to the practice of phenomenology) that one conduct and investigation into the structure of consciousness that carefully abstains from affirming the existence of anything in spatial-temporal reality. By this ‘bracketing’ of the natural world, by reducing the scope of one's assertions first to the subjective sphere of consciousness, then to its abstract (or ‘ideal’) atemporal structure, one is able to apprehend what consciousness. Its various forms essentially are, in a way that supplies a foundation to the philosophical study of knowledge, meaning and value. Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (along with a number of Husserl's other students) appear to have questioned whether it is possible to reduce one's commitments as thoroughly as Husserl appears to have prescribed through a ‘mass abstention’ from judgment about the world, and thus whether it is correct to regard one's intentional experience as a whole as essentially detachable from the world at which it is directed. Seemingly crucial to their doubts about Husserl's reduction is their belief that an essential part of intentionality consists in a distinctively practical involvement with the world that cannot be broken by any mere abstention from judgment.
The Phenomenological themes just hinted at (the notion of a ‘pre-predicative’ type of intentionality; the (un)detachability of intentionality from the world) link with issues regarding consciousness and intentionality as these are understood outside the Phenomenological tradition - in particular, the notion of non-conceptual content, and the internalism/externalism debate, to be considered in Section (4). But it is by no means a straightforward matter to describe these links in detail. Part of the reason lies in the general difficulty in being clear about whether what one philosopher means by ‘consciousness’ (or its standard translations) is close enough to what another means for it to be correct to see them as speaking to the same issues. And while some of the Phenomenological philosophers (Brentano, Husserl, Sartre) make thematically central use of terms cognate with ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality,’ and consider questions about intentionality first and foremost as questions about the intentionality of consciousness, they do not explicitly address much that (in the latter half of the twentieth century) came to seem problematic about consciousness and intentionality. Is their ‘consciousness’ the phenomenal kind? Would they reject theories of consciousness that reduce it to a species of access to content? If so, on what grounds? (Given their interest in the relation of consciousness, inner perception, and reflection, it may be easier to discern what their stances on reductive ‘higher order representation’ theories of consciousness would be.)
In some ways the situation is more difficult still in the cases of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. For the former, though he willingly enough uses’ words standardly translated as ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality,’ says little to explain how he understands such terms generally. And the latter deliberately avoid these terms in his central work, Being and Time, in order to forge a philosophical vocabulary free of errors in which they had, he thought, become enmeshed. However, it is not obvious how to articulate the precise difference between what Heidegger rejects, in rejecting the alleged error-laden understanding of ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality’, or their German translations, by what he accepts when he speaks of being to his ‘showing’ or ‘disclosing’ them to us, and of our ‘comportment’ directed toward them.
Nevertheless, one can plausibly read Brentano's notion of ‘presentation’ as equivalent to the notion of phenomenally conscious experience, as this is understood in other writers. For Brentano says, ‘We speak of presentation whenever something appears to us.’ And one may take ways of appearing as equivalent to ways of seeming, in the sense proper to phenomenal consciousness. Further, Brentano's attempt to state that through his analysis as described through that of ‘descriptive or Phenomenological psychology,’ became atypically based on how intentional manifestations are to present of themselves, the fundamental kinds to which they belong and their necessary interrelationships, may plausibly be interpreted as an effort to articulate the philosophical salient, highly general phenomenal character of intentional states (or acts) of mind. And Husserl's attempts to delineate the structure of intentionality as it is ‘given’ in consciousness, as well as the Phenomenological productions of Sartre, can arguably be seen as devoted to laying bare to thought the deepest and most general characteristics of phenomenal consciousness, as they are found in ‘directed’ perception, judgment, imagination, emotion and action. Also, one might reasonably regard Heideggerean disclosure of the ready-to-hand and Merleau-Ponty's ‘motor-intentional’ consciousness of place as forms of phenomenally conscious experience - as long as one's conception of phenomenal consciousness is not tied to the notion that the subjective ‘sphere’ of consciousness is, in essence, independent of the world revealed through it.
In any event, to connect classic Phenomenological writings with current discussions of consciousness and its relation to intentionality, more background is needed on aspects of the other main current of Western philosophy in the past century particularly relevant to the topic of intentionality - broadly labelled ‘analytic’.
It seems fair to say that recent work in philosophy of mind in the analytic tradition that has focussed on questions about the nature of intentionality (or ‘mental content’) has been most formed not by the writings of Brentano, Husserl and their direct intellectual descendants, but by the seminal discussions of logico-linguistic concerns found in Gottlob Frége's (1892) “On Sense and Reference,” and Bertrand Russell's “On Denoting” (1905).
But Frége and Russell's work comes from much the same era, and from much the same intellectual environment as Brentano and the early Husserl. And fairly clear points of contact have long been recognized, such as: Russell's criticism of Meinong's ‘theory of objects’. The similarities between Husserl's meaning/object distinction (in Logical Investigation I) and Frége's (prior) sense/reference distinction. Indeed the case has been influentially made (by Follesdal 1969, 1990) that Husserl's ‘meaning/object’ distinction is borrowed from Frege (though with a change in terminology) and that Husserl's ‘noema’ is properly interpreted as having the characteristics of Fregean ‘sense.’
Nonetheless, a number of factors make comparison and integration of debates within the two traditions complicated and strenuous. Husserl's notion of noema (hence his notion of intentionality) is most fundamentally rooted, not in reflections on the logical features of language, but in a contrast between the object of an intentional act, and the object ‘as intended’ (the way in which it is intended), and in the idea that a structure would remain to perceptual experience, even if it were radically non-veridical. And what Husserl seeks is a ‘direct’ characterization of this (and other) kinds of experience from the point of view of the experiencer. On the other hand, Frége and Russell's writings bearing on the topic of intentionality concentrate mainly and most explicitly on issues that grow from their own pioneering achievements in logic, and have given rise to ways of understanding mental states primarily through questions about the logic and semantics of the language used to speak of them.
Broadly speaking, logico-linguistic concerns have been methodologically and thematically dominant in the analytic Frége-Russell tradition, while the Phenomenological Brentano-Husserl lineage is rooted in attempts to characterize experience as it is evident from the subject's point of view. For this reason perhaps, discussions of consciousness and intentionality are more obviously intertwined from the start in the Phenomenological tradition than in the analytic one. The following sketch of relevant background in the latter case will, accordingly, most directly concern the treatment of intentionality. But by the end, the bearing of this on the treatment of consciousness in analytic philosophy of mind will have become more evident, and it will be clearer how similar issues concerning the consciousness-intentionality relationship arise in each tradition.
Central to Frége's legacy for discussions of mental or intentional content has been his distinction between ‘sense’ (Sinn) and ‘reference’ (Bedeutung), and his application in his distinction is to cope with an apparent failure of substitutivity to something of an ordinary co-referential expression. In that contexts created by psychological verbs, the sort mentioned in exposition of the notion of mental content - a task important to his development of logic. The need for a distinction between the sense and reference of an expression became evident to Frége, when he considered that, even if ‘a’ is identical to ‘b’, and you understand both ‘a’ and ‘b,’ still, it can be for you a discovery, an addition to your knowledge, that a = b. This is intelligible, Frege thought, only if you have different ways of understanding the expressions ‘a’ and ‘b’ - only if they involve for your distinct ‘modes of presentation’ of the self-same object to which they refer. In Frége's celebrated example: you may understand the expressions ‘The Morning Star’ and ‘The Evening Star’ and use them to refer to what is one and the same object - the planet Venus. But this is not sufficient for you to know that the Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star. For the ways in which an object (‘the reference’) is ‘given’ to your mind when you employ these expressions (the senses or Sinne you ‘grasp’ when you use them) may differ in such a manner that ignorance of astronomy would prevent your realizing that they are but two ways in which the same object can be given.
The relevance of all this to intentionality becomes clearer, once we see how Frege applied the sense/reference distinction to whole sentences. The sentence, ‘The Evening Star = The Morning Star’ has a different sense than the sentence ‘The Evening Star = The Evening Star’, even if their reference (according to Frége, their truth value) is the same. The failure of substitutivity of co-referential expressions in ‘that p’ contexts created by psychological verbs can consequently be understood (Frége proposed) in this way: The reference of the terms shifts in these contexts, so that, for example, ‘the Evening Star’ no longer refers to its customary reference (the planet Venus), but to a sense that functions, for the subject of the verb (the person who thinks, judges, desires) as his or her mode of presentation of this object. The sentence occurring in this context no longer refers to its truth value, but to the sense in which the mode of presentation is embedded - which might otherwise be called the ‘thought’ - or, by other philosophers, the ‘content’ of the subject's state of mind. This thought or content representation is to be understood not as a mental image, or literally as anything essentially private is the assemblage of its thinking mind - but as one and the same abstract entity that can be ‘grasped’ by two minds, and that must be so grasped if communication is to occur.
While on the surface this story may appear to be only about logic and semantics, and though Frege did not himself elaborate a general account of intentionality, what he says readily suggests the following picture. Intentional states of mind - thinking about Venus, wishing to visit it - involve some special relation (such as ‘mental grasping’)- not ‘in one's mind,’ nor to any imagery, but to an abstractive entity, a thought, which also constitutes the sense of a linguistic expression that can be used to report one's state of mind, a sense that is grasped or understood by speakers who use it.
This style of account, together with the Fregean thesis that ‘sense determines reference,’ and the history of criticisms both have elicited, form much of the background of contemporary discussions of mental content. It is often assumed, with Frege, that we must recognize (as some thinkers in the empiricist tradition allegedly did not) that thoughts or contents cannot consist in images or essentially private ‘ideas.’ But philosophers have frequently criticized Frége's view of thought as some abstract entity ‘grasped’ or ‘present to’ the mind, and have wanted to replace Frége's unanalyzed ‘grasping’ with something more ‘naturalistic.’
Relatedly, it may be granted that the content of the thought reported is to be identified with the sense of the expression with which we report it. But then, it is argued, the identity of this content will not be determined individualistically, and may, in some respect’s lay beyond the grasp (or not be fully ‘present to’ the mind of) the psychological subject. For what determines the reference of an expression may be a natural causal relation to the world - as influentially argued is true for proper names, like ‘Nixon’ and ‘Cicero,’ and ‘natural kind’ terms like ‘gold’ and ‘water.’ Or (as Tyler Burge (1979) has influentially argued) two speakers who, considered as individuals, are qualitatively the same, may nevertheless each assert something different simply because of differing relations they bear to their respective linguistic communities. (For example, what one speaker's utterance of ‘arthritis’ means is determined not by what is ‘in the head’ of that speaker, but by the medical experts in his or her community.) And, if referentially truth conditions of expressions by which one's thought is reported or expressed are not determined by what is in one's head, and the content of one's thought determines their reference and truth conditions, then the content of one's thought is also not determined individualistically. Rather, it is necessarily bound up with one's causal relations to certain natural substances, and one's membership in a certain linguistic community. Both linguistic meaning and mental contents are ‘externally’ determined.
The development of such ‘externalist’ conceptions of intentionality informs the reception of Russell's legacy in contemporary philosophy of mind as well. Russell also helped to put in play a conception of the intentionality of mental states, according to which each such state is seen as involving the individual's ‘acquaintance with a proposition’ (counterpart to Fregean ‘grasping’) - which proposition is at once both what is understood in understanding expressions by which the state of mind is reported, and the content of the individual's state of mind. Thus, intentional states are ‘propositional attitudes.’ Also importantly, Russell's famous analysis of definite descriptions into phrases employing existential quantifiers and general predicates underlay many subsequent philosophers' rejection of any conception of intentionality (like Meinong's) that sees in it a relation to non-existent objects. And, Russell's treatment drew attention to cases of what he called ‘logically proper names’ that apparently defies such analysis in descriptive terms (paradigmatically, the terms ‘this’ and ‘that’), and which (he thought) thus must refer ‘directly’ to objects. Reflection on such ‘demonstratives’ and ‘indexical’ (e.g., ‘I,’ ‘here,’ ‘now’) reference has led some to maintain that the content of our states of mind cannot always be constituted by Fregean senses but must be seen as consisting partly of the very objects in the world outside our heads to which we refer, demonstratively, indexically - another source of support for an ‘externalist’ view of mental content, hence, of intentionality.
Yet another important source of externalist proclivities in twentieth century philosophy lies in the thought that the meaningfulness of a speaker's utterances depends on its potential intelligibility to hearers: language must be public - an idea that has found varying and influential expression in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, W.V.O. Quine, and Donald Davidson. This, coupled with the assumption that intentionality (or ‘thought’ in the broad (Cartesian) sense) must be expressible in language, has led some to conclude that what determines the content of one's mind must lie in the external conditions that enable others to attribute content.
However, the movement from Frege and Russell toward externalist views of intentionality should not simply be accepted as yielding a fund of established results: it has been subject to powerful and detailed challenges, but without plunging into the details of the internalism/externalism debate about mental content, we can recognize, in the issues just raised, certain themes bearing particularly on the connection between consciousness and intentionality.
For example: it is sometimes assumed that, whatever may be true of content or intentionality, the phenomenal character of one's experience, at least, is ‘fixed internally’ -, i.e., it involves no necessary relations to the nature of particular substances in one's external environment or to one's linguistic community. But then the purported externalist finding that meaning nor contents are ‘in the head’ and, of course, be read as showing the insufficiency of phenomenal consciousness to determine any intentionality or content. Something like this consequence is drawn by Putnam (1981), who takes the stream of consciousness to comprise nothing more than sensations and images, which (as Frege saw) should be sharply distinguished from thought and meaning. This interpretation of the import of externalist arguments may be reinforced by a tendency to tie (phenomenal) consciousness to non-intentional sensations, sensory qualities, or ‘raw feels,’ and hence to dissociate consciousness from intentionality (and allied notions of meaning and reference), a tendency that has been prominent in the analytic tradition.
But it is not at all evident that externalist theories of content require us to estrange consciousness from intentionality. One might argue (as do Martin Davies (1997) and Fred Dretske (1997)) that in certain relevant respects the phenomenal character of experience is also essentially determined by causal environmental connections. By contrast, one may argue (as do Ludwig (1996b) and Horgan and Tienson (2002)) that since it is conceivable that a subject has experience is much like our own in phenomenal character, but radically different in external causes from what we take our own to be (in the extreme case, a mind bewitched by a Cartesian demon into massive hallucination), there must indeed be a realm of mental content that is not externally determined.
One other aspect of the Frége-Russell tradition of theorizing about content that impinges on the consciousness/intentionality connection is this. If ‘content’ is identified with the sense or the truth-condition determiners of the expressions used in the object-clause reporting intentional states of mind, it will seem natural to suppose that possession of mental content requires the possession of conceptual capacities of the sort involved in linguistic understanding - ‘grasping senses.’ But then, to the extent the phenomenal character of experience is inadequate to endow a creature with such capacities, it may seem that phenomenal consciousness has little to do with intentionality.
However, this raises large issues. One is this: it should not be granted without question that the phenomenal character of our experience could be as it is in the absence to the sorts of conceptual capacities sufficient for (at least some types of) intentionality. And this is tied to the issue of whether or not the phenomenal character of experience is (as some suppose) a purely sensory affair. Some would maintain, on the contrary, that thought (not just imagistic, but conceptual thought) has phenomenal character too. If so, then it is very far from clear that phenomenal character can be divorced from whatever conceptual capacities are necessary for intentionality.
Moreover, we may ask: Are concepts, properly speaking, always necessary for intentionality anyway? Here another issue rears its head: is there not perhaps a form of sensory intentionality, which does not require anything as distinctively intellectual or conceptual as is needed for the grasping of linguistic senses or propositions? (This presumably would be a kind of intentionality had by the pre-linguistic (e.g., babies) or by non-linguistic creatures (e.g., dogs).) Suppose that there is, and that this type of intentionality is inseparable from the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. Then, even if one assumes that such phenomenal consciousness is insufficient to guarantee the possession of concepts, it would be wrong to say that it has little to do with intentionality. (Advocates of varying versions of the idea that there is a distinctively ‘non-conceptual’ kind of content include Bermudez 1998, Crane 1992, Evans 1982, Peacocke 1992, and Tye 1995 - for a notable voice of opposition to this trend, see McDowell 1994.) A deep difficulty in assessing these debates lies in getting an acceptable conception of concepts with which to work. We need to understand clearly what ‘having a concept of F’ does and does not require, before we can be clear about the content of and justification for the thesis of non-conceptual content.
These proposals about non-conceptual content bear some affinity with aspects of the Phenomenological tradition eluded too earlier: Husserl's notion of ‘pre-predicative’ experience as to Heidegger's procedures of ‘ready-to-hand;’ and Merleau-Ponty's idea that in normal active perception we are conscious of place, not via a determinate ‘representation’ of it, but rather, relative to our capacities for goal-directed bodily behaviour. Though to see the extent to which any of these are ‘non-conceptual’ in character would require not only more clarity about the conceptual/non-conceptual contrast, save that a considerable novel exegesis of these philosophers' works.
Also, one may plausibly try to find an affinity between externalist views in analytic philosophy, and the later phenomenologists' rejection of Husserl's reduction, based on their doubt that we can prise consciousness off from the world at which it is directed, and study its ‘intentional essence’ in solipsistic isolation. But if externalism can be defined broadly enough to encompass Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Kripke, and Burge, still the comparison is strained when we take account of the different sources of ‘externalism’ in the phenomenologists. These have to do it seems (very roughly) with the idea that the way we are conscious of things (or at least, for Heidegger, the way they ‘show themselves’ to us) in our everyday activity cannot be quite generally separated from our actual engagement with entities of which we are thus conscious (which show themselves in this way). Also relevant is the idea that one's use of language (hence one's capacity for thought) requires gearing one's activity to a social world or cultural tradition, in which antecedently employed linguistic meaning is taken up and made one's own through one's relation with others. All this is supposed to make it infeasible to study the nature of intentionality by globally uprooting, in thought, the connection of experience with one's spatial surroundings (and - crucially for Merleau-Ponty - one's own body), and one's social environment. Whatever the merits of this line of thought, we should note: Neither a causal connection with ‘natural kinds’ unmediated by reference-determining ‘modes of presentation,’ nor deference to the linguistic usage of specialists, nor belief in the need to reconstruct speakers’ meaning from observed behaviour, plays a role in the phenomenologists' doubts about the reduction.
The arduous exegesis required for a clearer and more detailed comparison of these views is not possible here. Nevertheless, following some of the main lines of thought in treatments of intentionality, descending on the one hand, primarily from Brentano and Husserl, and on the other, from Frége and Russell, certain fundamental issues concerning its relationship to consciousness have emerged. These include, first, the connection between consciousness and self-directed and self-reflexive intentionality. (It has already been seen that this topic preoccupied Brentano, Husserl and Sartre; its emergence as an important issue in analytic philosophy of mind will become more evident below, Second, there is concern with the way in which (and the extent to which) mind is world-involving. (In the Phenomenological tradition this can be seen in controversy over Husserl's Phenomenological reduction; That within Frégean cognitive traditions are exhibited through some formal critique as drawn upon sensationalism, in which only internalism/externalism are argued traditionally atypically in the passage through which are formally debated. Third, there is the putative distinction between conceptual and theoretical, and sensory or practical forms of intentionality. (In phenomenology this shows up in Husserl's contrast between judgment and pre-predicative experience, and related notions of his successors; In analytic philosophy this shows up in the (more recent) attention to the notion of ‘non-conceptual’ content.)
For more clarity regarding the consciousness-intentionality relationship and how these three topics figure prominently in views about it, it is necessary now to turn attention back to philosophical disagreements regarding consciousness that abruptly have of an abounding easy to each separate relation, til their distinctions have of occurring.
Consider the proposal that sense experience manifests a kind of intentionality distinct from and more basic than that involved in propositional thought and conceptual understanding. This might help form the basis for an account of consciousness. Perhaps conscious states of mind are distinguished partly by their possession of a type of content proper to the sensory subdivision of mind.
One source of the idea that a difference in type of content helps constitute a distinction between what is and is not phenomenally conscious, lies in the apparent distinction between sense experience and judgment. To have conscious visual experience of a stimulus - for it to look some way to you - is one thing. To make judgments about it is something else. (This seems evident in the persistence of a visual illusion, even once one has become convinced of the error.) However, on some accounts of consciousness, this distinction itself is doubtful, since conscious sense experience is taken to be nothing more than a form of judging. However, such to this view is expressed by Daniel Dennett (1991), who takes the relevant form of judging to consist in one's possession of information or mental content available to the appropriate sort of ‘probes’ - the availability of content he calls ‘cerebral celebrity.’ For Dennett what distinguishes conscious states of mind is not their possession of a distinctive type of intentional content, but rather the richness of that content, and its availability to the appropriate sort of cognitive operations. (Since the relevant class of operations is not sharply defined, neither, for Dennett, is the difference between which states of mind are conscious and which are not.)
Recent accounts of consciousness that, by contrast, give central place to a distinction between (conceptual) judgment and (non-conceptual - but still intentional) sense-experience includes Michael Tye's (1995) theory, holding that it is (by metaphysical necessity) sufficient to have a conscious sense-perception that some representation of sensory stimuli is formed in one's head, ‘map-like’ in character, whose (‘non-conceptual’) content is ‘poised’ to affect one's (conceptual) beliefs. This form of mental representation Tye would contrast with the ‘sentential’ form proper to belief and judgment - and in that way, he might preserve the judgment/experience contrast as Dennett does not. Consider also Fred Dretske's (1995) view, that phenomenally conscious sensory intentionality consists in a kind of mental representation whose content is bestowed through a naturally selected ‘function to indicate.’ Such natural (evolution-implanted) sensory representation can arise independently of learning (unlike the more conceptual, language dependent sort), and is found widely distributed among evolved lives.
Both Tye and Dretske's views of consciousness (unlike Dennett's) make crucial use of a contrast between the types of intentionality proper to sense-experience, and that proper to linguistically expressed judgment. On the other hand, there is also some similarity among the theories, which can be brought out by noting a criticism of Dennett's view, analogues of which arise for Tye and Dretske's views as well.
Some might think Dennett's account concerns only some variety of what Form would call ‘ascensive consciousness’. For on Dennett's account, it seems, to speak of visual consciousness is to speak of nothing over and above the sort of availability of informational content that is evinced in unprompted verbal discriminations of visual stimuli. And this view has been criticized for neglecting phenomenal consciousness. It seems we may conceive of a capacity for spontaneous judgment triggered by and responsive to visual stimuli, which would occur in the absence of the judger's phenomenally conscious visual experience of the stimuli: The stimuli do not look in any way impulsively subjective, and yet they trigger accurate judgments about their presence. The notion of such a (hypothetical) form of ‘blindsight’ may be elaborated in such a way that we conceive of the judgment it affords for being at least as finely discriminatory (and as fine in informational content) as that enjoyed by those with extremely poor, blurry and un-acute conscious visual experience (as in the ‘legally blind’). But a view like Dennett's seems to make this scenario inconceivable.
However, this kind of criticism does not concern only those theories that would elide any experience/judgment distinction. For Tye and Dretske's theories, though they depend on forms of that contrast (and are offered as theories of phenomenal consciousness), can raise similar concerns. For one might think that the hypothetical blindsighter would be as rightly regarded as having Tye ‘support’ some maplike representations in her visual system as would be someone with a comparable form of conscious vision. And one might find it unclear why we should think the visual system of such a blindsighter must be performing naturally endowed indicating functions more poorly than the visual system of a consciously sighted subject would.
Whatever the cogency of these concerns, one should note their distinctness from the issues about ‘kinds of intentionality’ that appear to separate both Tye and Dretske from Dennett. The notion that there is a fundamental distinction to be drawn in kinds of intentional content (separating the more intellectual from the more sensory departments of mind) sometimes forms the basis of an account of consciousness (as with Dretske and Tye's, though not with Dennett's). But it is also important to recognize what unites Dennett, Tye, and Dretske. Despite their differences, all propose to account for consciousness by starting with a general understanding of intentionality (or mental content or representation) to which consciousness is inessential. They then offer to explain consciousness as a special case of intentionality thus understood - so, in terms of the operations the content is available for, or the form in which it is represented, or the nature of its external source. The blindsight-based objection to Dennett, and its possible extension to Dretske and Tye, helps bring this commonality to light. The last of these issues showed how some theories purport to account for consciousness on the basis of intentionality, in a way that focuses attention on attempts to discern a distinctively sensory type of intentionality. A different strategy for explaining consciousness via intentionality highlights the importance of clarity regarding the connection between consciousness and reflexivity. On such a view (roughly): Experiences or states of mind are conscious just insofar as the mind represents itself as having them.
In David Rosenthal's variant of this approach, a state is conscious just when it is a kind of (potentially non-conscious) mental state one has, which one (seemingly without inference) thinks that one is in. A theory of this sort starts with some way of classifying mental states that is supposed to apply to conscious and non-conscious states of mind alike. The proposal then is that such a state is conscious just when it belongs to one of those mental kinds, and the (‘higher order’) thought occurs to the person in that state that he or she is in a state of that kind. So, for example it is maintained that certain non-conscious states of mind can possess ‘sensory qualities’ of various sorts - one may, in a sense, be in pain without feeling pain, one may have a red sensory quality, even when nothing looks red to one. The idea is that one has a conscious visual experience of red, or a conscious pain sensation, just when one has such a red sensory quality, or pain-quality, and the thought (itself also potentially non-conscious) occurs to one that one has a red sensory quality, or pain-quality.
This way of accounting for consciousness in terms of intentionality may, like theories mentioned, provoke the concern that the distinctively phenomenal sense of consciousness has been slighted - though this time, not in favour of some ‘access’ consciousness, but in favour of reflexive consciousness. One focus of such criticism lies in the idea that such higher-order thought requires the possession of concepts - concepts of types of mental states - that may be lacking in creatures with first order mentality. And it is unclear (in fact it seems false to say) these beings would therefore have no conscious sensory experience in the phenomenal sense. Might that they enduringly exist in a way the world looks to rabbits, dogs, monkeys, and human babies, and might they agreeably feel pain, though they lack the conceptual wherewithal to think about their own experience?
One line of response to such concerns is simply to bite the bullet: dogs, babies and the like might altogether lack higher order thought, but that is no problem for the theory because, indeed, they also altogether lack feelings. Rosenthal, for his part, takes a different line: lack of cognitive sophistication need not instantly disqualify one for consciousness, since the possession of primitive mentalistic concepts requires so little that practically any organism we would consider a serious candidate for sensory consciousness (certainly babies, dogs and bunnies) would obviously pass conscription.
A number of additional worries have been raised about both the necessity and the sufficiency of ‘higher order thought’ for conscious sense experience. In the face of such doubts, one may preserve the idea that consciousness consists in some kind of higher order representation - the mind's ‘scanning’ itself - by abandoning ‘higher order thought’ for another form of representation: one that is not thought-like or conceptual, but somehow sensory in character. Maybe somewhat as we can distinguish between primitive sensory perception of things in our environment, and the more intellectual, conceptual operations based on them, so we can distinguish the thoughts we have about our own (‘inner’) mental goings-on from the (‘inner’) sensing of them. And, if we propose that consciousness consist in this latter sort of higher order representation, it seems we will escape the worries occasioned by the Rosenthalian variant of the ‘reflexivist’ doctrine. In considering such theories, two of the consciousness-themes that earlier discern had in coming together, namely the reflexivity of thought, or higher order representations, and, by contrast, between the conceptual and non-conceptual presentations, as sensory data,
Criticism of ‘inner sense’ theories is likely to focus not so much on the thought that such inner sensing can occur without phenomenal consciousness, or that the latter can occur without the former, as on the difficulty in understanding just what inner sensing (as distinct from higher order thought) is supposed to be, and why we should think we have it. It seems the inner sense theorist’s share with those who distinguish between conceptual and non-conceptual (or sensory) flavours of intentionality the challenge of clarifying and justifying some version of this distinction. But they bear the additional burden of showing how such a distinction can be applied not just to intentionality directed at tables and chairs, but at the "furniture of the mind" as well. One may grant that there are non-conceptual sensory experiences of objects in one's external environment while doubting one has anything analogous regarding the ‘inner’ landscape of mind.
It should be noted that, in spite of the difficulties faced by higher order representation theories, they draw on certain perennially influential sources of philosophical appeal. We do have some willingness to speak of conscious states of mind as states we are conscious or aware of being in. It is tempting to interpret this as indicating some kind of reflexivity. And the history of philosophy reveals many thinkers attracted to the idea that consciousness is inseparable from some kind of self-reflexivity of mind. As noted, varying versions of this idea can be found in Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre, as well as we can go further back in which case of Kant (1787) who spoke explicitly of ‘inner sense,’ and Locke (1690) defined consciousness as the ‘perception of what passes in a man's mind.’ Brentano (controversially) interpreted Aristotle's enigmatic and terse discussion of “seeing that one sees” in De Anima, as an anticipation of his own ‘inner perception’ view. However, there is this critical difference between the thinkers just cited and contemporary purveyors of higher order representation theories. The former does not maintain, as do the latter, that consciousness consists in one's forming the right sort of higher order representation of a possible non-conscious type of mental state. Even if they think that consciousness is inseparable from some sort of mental reflexivity, they do not suggest that consciousness can, so to speak, be analysed into mental parts, none of which they essentially require consciousness. (Some could not maintain this, since they explicitly deny mentality without consciousness.) There is a difference between saying that reflexivity is essential to consciousness and saying that consciousness just consists in or is reducible to a species of mental reflexivity. Advocacy of the former without advocacy of the latter is certainly possible.
Suppose one holds that phenomenal consciousness is distinguishable both from ‘access’ and ‘reflexivity,’ and that it cannot be explained as a special case of intentionality. One might conclude from this that phenomenal consciousness and intentionality are two composite structures exhibiting of themselves of distinct realms as founded in the psychic domain as called the mental, and embrace the idea that the phenomenal are a matter of non-intentional qualia or raw feels. One important current in the analytic tradition has evinced this attitude - it is found, for example, in Wilfrid Sellars' (1956) distinction between ‘sentience’ (sensation) and ‘sapience.’ Whereas the qualities of feelings involved in the former - mere sensations - require no cognitive sophistication and are readily attributable to brutes, the latter - involving awareness of, awareness that - requires that one have the appropriate concepts, which cannot be guaranteed by just having sensations; one needs learning and inferential capacities of a sort Sellars believed possibly only with language. “Awareness,” Sellars says, “is a linguistic affair.”
Thus we may arrive at a picture of mind that places sensation on one side, and thought, concepts, and ‘propositional attitudes’ on the other. If one recognizes the distinctively phenomenal consciousness not captured in ‘representationalist’ theories of the kinds just scouted, one may then want to say: that is because the phenomenal belong to mere sentience, and the intentional to sapience. Other influential philosophers of mind have operated with a similar picture. Consider Gilbert Ryle's (1949) contention that the stream of consciousness contains nothing but sensations that provide “no possibility of deciding whether the creature that had these was an animal or a human being; An ignoramus, simpletons, or a sane man, only from which nothing is appropriately asked of whether it is correct or incorrect, veridical or nonveridical. And Wittgenstein's (1953) influential criticism of the notion of understanding as an ‘inner process,’ and of the idea of a language for private sensation divorced from public criteria, could be interpreted in ways that sever (phenomenal) consciousness from intentionality. (Such an interpretation would assume that if consciousness could secure understanding, understanding would be an ‘inner process,’ and if phenomenal character bore intentionality with it, private sensations could impart meaning to words.) Also recall Putnam's conviction that the (internal) stream of consciousness cannot furnish the (externally fixed) content of meaning and belief. A similar attitude is evident in Donald Davidson's distinction between sensation and thought (the former is nothing more than a causal condition of knowledge, while the latter can furnish reasons and justifications, but cannot occur without language). Richard Rorty (1979) makes a Sellarsian distinction between the phenomenal and the intentional key to his polemic against epistemological philosophy overall, and ‘foundationalism’ in particular (and takes a generally deflationary view of the phenomenal or ‘qualitative’ side of this divide).
But it is possible to reject attempts to subsume the phenomenal under the intentional as in the ‘representationalist’ accounts of consciousness variously exemplified in Dennett, Dretske, Lycan, Rosenthal, and Tye, without adopting this ‘two separate realms’ conception. We can believe that there is no conception of the intentional from which the phenomenal can be explanatorily derived that does not already include the phenomenal, but still believe also that the phenomenal character of experience cannot be separated from its intentionality, and that having experience of the right sort of phenomenal character is sufficient for having certain forms of intentionality.
Here one might leave open the question whether there is also some kind of phenomenal character (perhaps that involved in some kinds of bodily sensation or after-images) whose possession is not sufficient for intentionality. (Though if we say there is such non-intentional phenomenal character, this would give us a special reason for rejecting the representationalist explanations of phenomenal consciousness) on the other hand, we say phenomenal character always brings intentionality with it, that might be ‘representational’’ of a sort. But its endorsement is consistent with a rejection of attempts to derive phenomenality from intentionality, or reduce the former to a species of the latter, which commonly attract the ‘representationalist’ label. We should distinguish the question of whether the phenomenal can be explained by the intentional from the question of whether the phenomenal are separable from the intentional.
Closer consideration of two of the three themes earlier identified as common to Phenomenological and analytic traditions is needed to come to grips with the latter question. It is necessary to inquire: (1) whether an externalist conception of intentionality can justify separating phenomenal character from intentionality. And one needs to ask: (2) whether one's verdict on the ‘separability’ question stands or falls with acceptance of some version of a distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual (or distinctively sensory) form of intentionality.
The dialectical situation regarding (1) is complex. One way it may seem plausible to answer question (1) in the affirmative, and restrict phenomenal character and intentionality to different sides of some internal/external divide, is to conduct a Cartesian thought experiment, in which one conceives of consciousness with all its subjective riches surviving the utter annihilation of the spatial realm of nature. (Similarly, but less radical, one may conceive of a ‘brain in a vat’ generating an extended history of sense experience indistinguishable in phenomenal character from that of an embodied subject.) If one is committed to an externalist view of intentionality - but rejects the intentionalizing strategies for dealing with consciousness - one may conclude that phenomenal character is altogether separable from (and insufficient for) intentionality. However, one may draw rather different conclusions from the Cartesian thought experiment - turning it against externalism. It may seem to one that, since the intentionality of experience would apparently survive along with its phenomenal character, one may then infer that the causal tie between the mind's content and the world of objects beyond it that (according to some versions of externalism) fixes content, is in reality and in at least some cases (or for some contents), no more than contingent. Alternatively, whatever one relies on to argue that this or that relation of experience and world is essential to having any intentionality at all, one might take this to show that phenomenal character is also externally determined in a way that renders the Cartesian scenario of consciousness totally unmoored from the world an illusion. And, if Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger thinks that Husserl's Phenomenological reduction to a sphere of ‘pure’ consciousness cannot be completed, and their reasons make them externalists of some sort, it hardly seems to establish that they are committed to a realm of raw sensory phenomenal consciousness, devoid of intentionality. In fact their rejection of Husserl's notion of ‘uninterpreted’ sensory or ‘hyletic’ data in experience would seem to indicate them, at least, would strongly deny they held such views.
In this arena it is far from clear what we are entitled to regard as secure ground and what as ‘up for grabs.’ However, there do seem to be ways in which all would probably admit that the phenomenal character of experience and externally individuated content come apart, ways in which such content goes beyond anything phenomenal consciousness can supply. For the way it seems to me to experience this computer screen may be no different from the way it seems to my twin to experience some entirely distinct one. Thus where intentional contents are distinguished in such a way as to include the particular objects experienced or thought of, phenomenal character cannot determine the possession of content. Still, that does not show that no content of any sort is fixed by phenomenal character. Perhaps, as some would say, phenomenal character determines ‘narrow’ or ‘notional’ content, but not ‘wide’ (externally ‘fixed’) content. Nor is it even clear that we must judge the sufficiency of phenomenal character for intentionality by adopting some general account of content and its individuation (as ‘narrow’ or ‘wide’ for instance), and then ask whether one's possession of content so considered is entailed by the phenomenal character of one's experience. One may argue that the phenomenal character of one's experience suffices for intentionality as long as having it makes one assessable for truth, accuracy (or other sorts of ‘satisfaction’) without the addition of any interpretation, properly so-called, such as is involved in assessment of the truth or accuracy of sentences or pictures.
Even if one does not globally divide phenomenal character from intentionality along some inner/outer boundary line, to address questions of the sufficiency of phenomenal character for intentionality (and thus of the separability of the latter from the former), one still needs to look at question (2) as above, and the potential relevance of distinctions that have been proposed between conceptual and non-conceptual forms of content or intentionality. Again the situation is complex. Suppose one regards the notion of non-conceptual intentionality or content as unacceptable on the grounds that all content is conceptual. But suppose one also thinks it is clear that phenomenal character is confined to sensory experience and imagery, and that this cannot bring with it the rational and inferential capacities required for genuine concept possession. Then one will have accepted the separability of phenomenal consciousness from intentionality. However, one may, by contrast, take the apparent susceptiblity of phenomenally conscious sense experience to assessment for accuracy, without need for additional, potentially absent interpretation, to show that the phenomenal character of experience is inherently intentional. Then one will say that the burden lies on anyone who claims conceptual powers are crucial to such assessability and can be detached from the possession of such experience: They must identify those powers and show that they are both crucial and detachable in this way. Additionally, one may reasonably challenge the assumption that phenomenal consciousness is indeed confined to the sensory realm; One may say that conceptual thought also has phenomenal character. Even if one does not, one may still base one's confidence in the sufficiency of phenomenal character for intentionality on one's confidence that there is a kind of non-conceptual intentionality that clearly belongs essentially to sense experience.
These considerations, we can see that it is critical to answer the following questions in order to decide whether or not phenomenal character is wholly or significantly separable from intentionality. Does every sort of intentionality that belongs to thought and experiences require an external connection, for which phenomenal characters are insufficient?
Does every sort of intentionality that belongs to sense-experience and sensory imageries require conceptual abilities for which phenomenal character is insufficient? And does every sort of intentionality that belongs to thought require conceptual capacities for which phenomenal character is insufficient?
Suppose one finds phenomenal character quite generally inadequate for the intentionality of thought and sense-experience by answering ‘yes’ either to (i), or to both (ii) and (iii). And suppose one makes the plausible (if non-trivial) assumption that what guarantees’ intentionality for neither sensory experience, nor imagery, nor conceptual thought, guarantees no intentionality that belongs to our minds (including that of emotion, desire and intention - for these later presuppose the former). Then one will find phenomenal character altogether separable from intentionality. Phenomenal character could be as it is, even if intentionality were completely taken away. There is no form of phenomenal consciousness, and no sort of intentionality, such that the first suffices for the second.
A more moderate view might merely answer only one of either (ii) or (iii) in the affirmative (and probably (iii) would be the choice). But still, in that case one recognizes some broad mental domain whose intentionality is in no respect guaranteed by phenomenal character. And that too would mark a considerable limitation on the extent to which phenomenal consciousness brings intentionality with it.
On the other hand, suppose that one answer ‘no’ to (i), and to either (ii) or (iii). Now, external connections and conceptual capacities seem to be what we might most plausibly regard as conditions necessary for the intentionality of thought and experience that could be stripped away while phenomenal character remains constant. So if one thinks that actually neither are generally essential to intentionality and removable while phenomenal character persists unchanged, and one can think of nothing else that is essential for thought and experience to have any intentionality, but for which phenomenal character is insufficient, it seems reasonable to conclude that phenomenal character is indeed sufficient for intentionality of some sort. If one has gone this far, it seems unlikely that one will then think that actual differences in phenomenal character still leave massively underdetermined the different forms of intentionality we enjoy in perceiving and thinking. So, one will probably judge that some kind of phenomenal character suffices for, and is inseparable from, many significant forms of intentionality in at least one of these domains (sensory or cognitive): There are many differences in phenomenal character, and many in intentionality, such that you cannot have the former without the latter. If one also rejects both (ii) and (iii), then one will accept that appropriate forms of phenomenal consciousness are sufficient for a very broad and important range of human intentionality.
Suppose one rejects both the views that consciousness is explanatorily derived from a more fundamental intentionality, as well as the view that phenomenal character is insufficient for intentionality because it is a matter of a purely inward feeling. It seems one might then press farther, and argue for what Flanagan calls ‘consciousness essentialism’ - the view that the phenomenal character of experience is not only sufficient for various forms of intentionality, but necessary also.
This type of thesis needs careful formulation. It does not necessarily commit one to a Cartesian (or Brentanian or Sartrean) claim that all states of mind are conscious - a total denial of the reality of the unconscious. A more qualified thesis does seem desirable. Freud's waning prestige has weakened tendencies to assume that he had somehow demonstrated the reality of unconscious intentionality, the rise of cognitive science has created a new climate of educated opinion that also takes elaborate non-conscious mental machinations for granted. Even if we do not acquiesce in this view, we do (and long have) appealed to explanations of human behaviour that recognize some sort of intentional state other than phenomenally conscious experiences and thoughts.
The way of maintaining the necessity of consciousness to mind that can preserve some space for mind that is not conscious is Searle's agreement, roughly, that we should first distinguish between what he calls ‘intrinsic’ intentionality on the one hand, and merely ‘as if’ intentionality, and ‘interpreter relative’ intentionality, on the other. We may sometimes speak as if artifacts (like thermostats) had beliefs or desires - but this is not to be taken literally. And we may impose ‘conditions of satisfaction’ on our acts and creations (words, pictures, diagrams, etc.) by our interpretation of them - but they have no intentionality independent of our interpretive practices. Intrinsic intentionality, on the other hand - the kind that pertains to our beliefs, perception, and intentions - is neither a mere ‘manner of speech,’ nor our possession of it derived from others' interpretive stance toward us. But then, Searle asks, what accounts for the fact that some state of affairs in the world for which in having an intrinsic intentionality - that they are directed at objects under aspects - and why they are directed under the aspects they are (why they have the content they do)? With conscious states of mind, Searle says, their phenomenal or subjective character determines their ‘aspectual shape.’ Where non-conscious states of mind are concerned, there is nothing to do the job, but their relationship to consciousness. The right relationship, he holds, is this non-conscious state of mind and must be ‘potentially conscious.’ If some psychological theories (of language, of vision) postulated an unconscious so deeply buried that its mental representations cannot even potentially become conscious, so much the worse for those theories.
Searle's views have aroused a number of criticisms. Among the problems areas are these. First, how are we to explain the requirement that intrinsically intentional states be ‘potentially conscious,’ without making it either too easy or too difficult to satisfy? Second, just why is it that the intrinsic intentionality of non-conscious states need’s accounting for, while conscious states are somehow unproblematic. Third, it appears Searle's argument does not offer some general reason to rule out all efforts to give ‘naturalistic’ accounts of conditions sufficient to impose - without the help of consciousness - genuine and not merely interpreter relative intentionality.
Another approach is taken by Kirk Ludwig, who argues that there is nothing to determine whose state of mind a given non-conscious state of mind is, unless that state consists in a disposition to produce a conscious mental state of the right sort. Alleged mental processes that did not tend to produce someone's conscious states of mind appropriately would be no one's, which is to say that they would not be mental states at all. Roughly: consciousness is needed to provide that unity of mind without which there would be no mind. And Ludwig argues that it is therefore a mistake to attribute many of the unconscious inferences with which psychological theorists have long been wont to populate our minds.
The persuasiveness of Searle and Ludwig's arguments depends heavily on demonstrating the failure of alternative accounts of the job that they enlist consciousness to do (such as secure ‘aspectual shape,’ or ownership). One may grant (as does Colin McGinn 1991) that phenomenal character is inseparable from intentionality, but cannot be explained by it, while still maintaining that genuine intentionality (mental content) is quite adequately imposed on animal brains by their acquisition of natural functions of content-bearing - in which consciousness evidently plays no essential role. Or one may (like Jerry Fodor 1987) maintain a robust realist ‘representational theory of mind,’ proposing that the content of mental symbols is stamped on them by their being in the ‘right causal relation’ to the world - while despairing of the prospects for a credible naturalistic theory of consciousness.
The preceding discussion has conveyed some of the complexities and potential ambiguities in talk of ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality’ that must be appreciated if one is to resolve questions about the relationship between consciousness and intentionality with any clarity. Brief surveys of relevant aspects of Phenomenological and analytic traditions have brought out some shared areas of interest, namely: The relationship of consciousness to reflexivity and ‘self-directed’ intentionality manages to distinguish events between conceptual and non-conceptual (or sensory) forms of intentionality, and the concerns with which the extent is characterized by either conscious experience or intentional states of mind is essentially ‘world-involving.’ These concerns were seen to bear on attempts to account for consciousness in terms of intentionality, and on questions that arise even if those attempts are rejected - questions regarding the separability of phenomenal consciousness and intentionality. Some attention is given to views that, in some sense, reverse the order of explanation proposed by intentionalizing views of consciousness, and take the facts of consciousness to explain the facts of intentionality. Now it is possible to step back and distinguish four general views of the consciousness-intentionality relationship discernable in the philosophical positions canvassed above, as follows.
(1) Consciousness is explanatorily derived from intention
(2) Consciousness is explanatorily derived from intentionality.
(3) Consciousness is underived and separable from intentionality.
(4) Consciousness is underived but also inseparable from intentionality.
(5) Consciousness is underived from, inseparable from, and essential to intentionality.
To adopted view (1) is to accept some intentionalizing strategy with respect to consciousness, such as is variously represented by Dennett, Dretske, Lycan, Rosenthal, and Tye. These views differ importantly among themselves. Their differences have much to do with how they treat consciousness-reflexivity issues and the conceptual/non-conceptual (or conceptual/sensory) contrast, and how they view the intersection between the two. But if we accept (1), then our answer to the question of what consciousness has to do with intentionality will ultimately be given in some prior general account of content or intentionality. And there will be no special issue regarding the internal or external fixation of the phenomenal character of experience, over and above what arises for mental content generally.
On the other hand, suppose one reject (1), and holds that experiences are conscious in a phenomenal sense that does not yield to an approach in which one conceives of intentionality (or content, or information bearing) independently of consciousness, and then, by adverting to special operations, or sources, or contents, tells us what consciousness is. At this point, one would face a choice between (2) and (3).
By embracing (2) we yield the ‘raw feel’ in its conception of phenomenality seemingly implicit in Sellars and Ryle. If, on the other hand, we accept (3), we endorse a much more intimate relationship between consciousness and intentionality. Without proposing to account for the former on the basis of the latter, we would hold that phenomenal character is sufficient for intentionality.
But adoption of (3) leaves open a further basic question. Consciousness (of the appropriate sort) may be sufficient, but underived from intentionality. Yet, intentionality does not require consciousness. Thus we come to ask whether having conscious experience of an appropriate sort is necessary to having either sensory or more-than-sensory (conceptual) intentionality. Adopting theses (4), we say ‘yes’ - that such intentionality can come only with consciousness - we will probably have gone as far in making consciousness fundamental to mind as one reasonably can. Again, this is not necessarily to deny the reality of non-conscious mental phenomena. But it could, in a broad way, be interpreted as siding with Husserl, Ludwig and Searle in thinking of consciousness as the irreplaceable source of intentionality and meaning.
This abstract list of four options might leave one without a sense of what is at stake in adopting this or that view. Perhaps the positions themselves will become a little clearer if we make explicit four broad areas of philosophical concern to which the choice among them is relevant.
First, they are relevant to the issue of how to conceive of the mind or the domain of psychology as a whole. Is there some unity to the concept of mind or psychologically phenomenal? Is there something that deserves to be considered the essence of the mental? If consciousness can be thoroughly intentionalized (as (1) would have it), maybe (with suitable qualifications), we could uphold the thesis that intentionality is the "mark of the mental." If we disapprove of (1) and embrace (3), seeing intentionality as inseparable from the phenomenal character of experience, then we still might maintain that both consciousness and intentionality are necessary for real minds - at least, if we adopt (4) as well. But a unified view of the mind seems difficult (if possible) to maintain if one segregates phenomenal character to non-intentional sensation - as in (2). Even if one does not, one may lack a unifying conception of the mental domain, if one is not satisfied with arguments that show that phenomenal consciousness is essential to genuine (not merely “as if” or “interpreter derived”) intentionality. In any case, both consciousness and intentionality signify a broad enough psychological categories, in that one's view of their extension and relationship will do much to draw one's map of psychology's terrain.
Second (and relatedly), views about the consciousness-intentionality relationship bear significantly on general questions about the explanation of mental phenomena. One may ask what kinds of things we might try to explain in the mental domain, what sorts of explanations we should seek, and what prospects of success we have in finding them. If we accept (1) and some intentionalizing account of consciousness, we will not suppose as do some (Chalmers 1996, Levine 2001, McGinn 1991, and Nagel 1974) those phenomenal consciousness poses some specially recalcitrant (maybe hopelessly unsolvable) problem for reductive physicalist or materialist explanations. Rather, we will see the basic challenge as that of giving a natural scientific account of intentionality or mental representation. And this indeed is a reason some are attracted to (1). One may believe that it offers us the only hope for a natural scientific understanding of consciousness. The underlying thought is that a science of consciousness must adopt this strategy: First conceive of intentionality (or content or mental representation) in a way that separates it from consciousness, and see intentionality as the outcome of familiar (and non-intentional) natural causal processes. Then, by further specifying the kind of intentionality involved (in terms of its use, its sources, its content), we can account for consciousness. In other words: ‘naturalize’ intentionality, then intentionalized consciousness, and mind has found its place in nature.
However, we should recognize a distinction between those whose envisioned naturalistic explanation would require underlying forms of necessity and impossibility stronger that pertaining to laws of nature generally - such as either conceptual or ‘metaphysical’ necessity - and those who see the link between explanans and explanandum as simply one of natural scientific law. David Chalmers' (1996) proposals for ‘naturalistic dualism’ (unlike those of the aforementioned naturalizers) put him in the second group. He argues that phenomenal consciousness in its various forms supervenes (not conceptually or metaphysically but only as a matter of nature's laws) on functional organization, and that this permits us to envisage (‘non-reductive’) ways of explaining consciousness by appeal to such organization.
Those who reject attempts to explain the phenomenal consciousness via a theory of intentionality still may reasonably proclaim allegiance to ‘naturalism.’ One may take phenomenal consciousness to be, in a sense, psychologically basic (if all that is mental is phenomenally either conscious or intentional, and no intentionalizing account of phenomenal character is feasible). But one might still hold that some non-intentional neuropsychological, or other recognizable physicalist, there to some explanation of the phenomenal character of experience is to be had, because the explanatory link is otherwise to exhibit an appropriately strong conceptual or metaphysical necessity. Only for measures for which are regarded to that of nothing stronger than psychophysical laws of nature are needed to give us the prospect of a natural scientific account of consciousness.
However, if we not only reject intentionalizing accounts of phenomenal character, but also see it as inseparable from intentionality (if we reject both (1) and (2) and agree to whatever problems are attached to physicalist explanations of consciousness will also infect prospects for explaining intentionality - to some extent at least. And this will hold, even if we remain aloof from (d), and do not claim that phenomenal consciousness is essential to intentionality. For if we think that much of the intentionality we have in perceiving, imagining, and thinking is integral to the phenomenal character of such experience, then without a reductive explanation of that phenomenal character, our possession of the intentionality it brings with it will not be reductively explained either.
Finally, it should be noted that if one holds (4), this may have important consequences for what forms of psychological explanation that once acceptably found the remaining agreement stems for that which one's mental processes must have the right relationship to one's conscious experiences to count as one's mental processes at all. If they are right, postulated processes that do not bear this relation to our experiential lives cannot be going on in our minds.
Regardlessly, another enlarging area of concern is of choice, in that between (1)-(4) tells of a direction among proven rights is to continue in having epistemological connections, in that if one is to embrace of (2), and something like a Sellarsian or Davidsonian distinction between sensation and thought, putting phenomenal character exclusively on the ‘sensation’ side, and intentionality exclusively on the ‘thought’ side of this divide, the place of consciousness in a philosophical account of knowledge will likely be meager - at most phenomenal character will be a causal condition, without a role to play in the warrant or justification of claims to knowledge. However, if one takes routes (1) or (3) the situation will appear rather different. If one is to consider the consequent for, either of which is to internationalize consciousness, or else views intentionality as inseparable from phenomenal character, there will then be more room to view consciousness as central to accounts of the warrant involved in first-person (‘introspective’) knowledge of mind, and empirical or perceptual knowledge. Though just how one goes about this, and with what success, will depend on how (if one chooses (1)) one intentionalizes consciousness, and (if one chooses (1) or (3), that will depend on what sort of intentionality or content one thinks phenomenal consciousness brings with it. The place of consciousness in one's understanding of introspective or empirical knowledge will be rather different, depending on how one resolves the issues regarding: Reflexivity, the conceptual/non-conceptual distinction, and externalisms.
A fourth area of philosophical concern we may indicate broadly, closely bound to our conception of the relation of consciousness and intentionality, has to do with value. How intimately is consciously bound up with those features of our own and others' lives that give them intrinsic or non-instrumental value for us? We may think that the pleasure and suffering that demand our ethical concern are necessarily phenomenally conscious - and that this evaluative significance remains even if phenomenal character is non-intentional. However, the more intentionality is seen as inherent to the phenomenal character of experience, the more the latter will be bound to manifestations of intelligence, emotion, and understanding that appear to give human (and perhaps at least another animal life) its special importance for us. It may seem that those opting for (3) share at least this much ground with their intentionalizing opponents who go for (1): They both (unlike those who adopt (2)) are in a position to claim consciousness is crucial to whatever special moral regard we think appropriate only toward those whose psychologies involve a kind of intentionality for which possession of painful or pleasant experience is not sufficient. However, this needs qualification on two counts. First, if one's embrace of (1) includes an intentionalizing strategy that limits phenomenal character to the sensory realm, one will limit the moral significance of phenomenal consciousness accordingly. Second, to those who hold, it may seem their opponents' intentionalizing theories remove from view those very qualities of experience that make life worth living, and so they will hardly seem like allies on the issue of value. Further, if the proponent of hesitant anticipations were in going insofar as to be taken on (4) - conscious essentialism - those who make that additional commitment might wonder how those who do not could ultimately accord the possession of consciousness much greater non-instrumental value than the possession of a sophisticated but totally non-conscious mind.
From this survey it seems fair to conclude that working out a detailed view of the relation between consciousness and intentionality is hardly a peripheral matter philosophically. Potentially it has extensive consequences for one's views concerning these four important, broad topics: (I) The unity of mental phenomena (Do consciousness or intentionality (or both together) somehow unifies the domain of the psychological?) (II) The explanation of mental phenomena (Can consciousness and intentionality are explained separately? (III) Is explaining the one key to explaining the other? Introspective and empirical knowledge (What relation to intentionality would give consciousness a central epistemological role in either?) (IV) The value of human and other animal life. (What relation of consciousness and intentionality (if any) underlies the non-instrumental value we accord ourselves and others?)
We collectively glorify our ability to think as the distinguishing characteristic of humanity; We personally and mistakenly glorify our thoughts as the distinguishing pattern of whom we are. From the inner voice of thought-as-words to the wordless images within our minds, thoughts create and limit our personal world. Through thinking we abstract and define reality, reason about it, react to it, recall past events and plan for the future. Yet thinking remains both woefully underdeveloped in most of us, as well as grossly overvalued. We can best gain some perspective on thinking in terms of energies.
Automatic thinking draws us away from the present, and wistfully allows our thoughts to meander where they would, carrying our passive attention along with them. Like water running down a mountain stream, thoughts running on auto-pilot careens through the spaces of perception, randomly triggering associative links within our vast storehouse of memory. By way of itself, such associative thought is harmless. However, our tendency to believe in, act upon, and drift away with such undirected thought keeps us operating in an automatic mode. Lulled into an inner passivity by our daydreams and thought streams, we lose contact with the world of actual perceptions, of real life. In the automatic mode of thinking, I am completely identified with my thoughts, believing my thoughts are I, and believing that I am the conceptualization forwarded by me to think of thoughts that are sometimes thought as unthinkable.
Another mode of automatic thinking consists of repetitious and habitual patterns of thought. These thought tapes and our running commentary on life, unexamined by the light of awareness, keep us enthralled, defining who we are and perpetuating all our limiting assumptions about what is possible for us. Driving and driven by our emotions, these ruts of thought create our false persona, the mask that keeps us disconnected from others and from our own authentic self. More than any other single factor, automatic thinking hinders our contact with presence, limits our being, and Forms our path. The autopilot of thought constantly calls us away from the most recent or the current of immediacy. Thus, keeping us fixed on the most superficial levels of our being.
Sometimes we even notice strange, unwanted thoughts that we consider horrible or shameful. We might be upset or shaken that we would think such thoughts, but those reactions only serves to sustain the problematic thoughts by feeding them energy. Furthermore, that self-disgust is based on the false assumption that we are our thoughts, that even unintentional thoughts, arising from our conditioned minds, are we. They are not we and we need not act upon or react to them. They are just thoughts with no inherent power and no real message about whom we are. We can just relax and let them go - or not. Troubling thoughts that recur over a long period and hinder our inner work may require us to examine and heal their roots in our conditioning, perhaps with the help of a psychotherapist.
Sensitive thinking puts us in touch with the meaning of our thoughts and enables us to think logically, solve problems, make plans, and carry on a substantive conversation. A good education develops our ability to think clearly and intentionally with the sensitive energy. With that energy level in our thinking brain, no longer totally submerged in the thought stream, we can move about in it, choosing among and directing our thoughts based on their meaning.
Conscious thinking means stepping out of the thought stream altogether, and surveying it from the shore. The thoughts themselves may even evaporate, leaving behind a temporary empty streambed. Consciousness reveals the banality and emptiness of ordinary thinking. Consciousness also permits us to think more powerfully, holding several ideas, their meanings and ramifications in our minds at once.
When the creative energy reaches thought, truly new ideas spring up. Creative thinking can happen after a struggle, after exhausting all known avenues of relevant ideas and giving up, shaping and emptying the stage so the creative spark may enter. The quiet, relaxed mind also leaves room for the creative thought, a clear channel for creativity. Creative and insightful thoughts come to all of us in regard to the situations we face in life. The trick is to be aware enough to catch them, to notice their significance, and if they withstand the light of sober and unbiased evaluation, to act on them.
In the spiritual path, we work to recognize the limitations of thought, to recognize its power over us, and especially to move beyond it. Along with Descartes, we subsist in the realm of “thoughts‘, but thoughts are just thoughts. They are not we. They are not who we are. No thought can enter the spiritual realms. Rather, the material world defines the boundaries of thought, despite its power to conceive lofty abstractions. We cannot think our way into the spiritual reality. On the contrary, identification with thinking prevents us from entering the depths. As long as we believe that refined thinking represents our highest capacity, we shackle ourselves exclusively to this world. All our thoughts, all our books, all our ideas wither before the immensity of the higher realms.
A richly developed body of spiritual practices engages of thought, from repetitive prayer and mantras, to contemplation of an idea, to visualizations of deities. In a most instructive and invaluable exercise, we learn to see beyond thought by embracing the gaps, the spaces between thoughts. After sitting quietly and relaxing for some time, we turn our attention toward the thought stream within us. We notice thoughts come and go of their own accord, without prodding or pushing from us. If we can abide in this relaxed watching of thought, without falling into the stream and flowing away with it, the thought stream begins to slow, the thoughts fragment. Less enthralled by our thoughts, we begin to see that we are not our thoughts. Less controlled by, and at the mercy of, our thoughts, we begin to be aware of the gaps between thought particles. These gaps open to consciousness, underlying all thought. Settling into these gaps, we enter and become the silent consciousness beneath thought. Instead of being in our thoughts, our thoughts are in us.
There is potentially a rich and productive interface between neuroscience/cognitive science. The two traditions, however, have evolved largely independent, based on differing sets of observations and objectives, and tend to use different conceptual frameworks and vocabulary representations. The distributive contributions to each their dynamic functions of finding a useful common reference to further exploration of the relations between neuroscience/cognitive science and psychoanalysis/psychotherapy.
Recent historical gaps between neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy are being productively closed by, among other things, the suggestion that recent understandings of the nervous system as a modeler and predictor bear a close and useful similarity to the concepts of projection and transference. The gap could perhaps be valuably narrowed still further by a comparison in the two traditions of the concepts of the "unconscious" and the "conscious" and the relations between the two. It is suggested that these be understood as two independent "story generators" - each with different styles of function and both operating optimally as reciprocal contributors to each others' ongoing story evolution. A parallel and comparably optimal relation might be imagined for neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy.
For the sake of argument, imagine that human behaviour and all that it entails (including the experience of being a human and interacting with a world that includes other humans) is a function of the nervous system. If this were so, then there would be lots of different people who are making observations of (perhaps different) aspects of the same thing, and telling (perhaps different) stories to make sense of their observations. The list would include neuroscientists and cognitive scientists and psychologists. It would include as well psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and social workers. If we were not too fussy about credentials, it should probably include as well educators, and parents and . . . babies? Arguably, all humans, from the time they are born, spend a considerable reckoning of time making observations of how people (others and themselves) behave and why, and telling stories to make sense of those observations.
The stories, of course, all differ from one another to greater or lesser degrees. In fact, the notion that "human behaviour and all that it entails . . . are a function of the nervous system" is itself a story used to make sense of observations by some people and not by any other? It is not my intent here to try to defend this particular story, or any other story for that matter. Very much to the contrary, what I want to do is to explore the implications and significance of the fact that there are different stories and that they might be about the same (some)thing.
In so doing, I want to try to create a new story that helps to facilitate an enhanced dialogue between neuroscience/cognitive science, on the one hand, and psychotherapy, on the other. That new stories of itself are stories of conflicting historical narratives . . . what is within being called the "nervous system" but others are free to call the "self," "mind," "soul," or whatever best fits their own stories. What is important is the idea that multiple things, evident by their conflicts, may not in fact be disconnected and adversarial entities but could rather be fundamentally, understandably, and valuably interconnected parts of the same thing.
"Non-conscious Prediction and a Role for Consciousness in Correcting Prediction Errors" by Regina Pally (Pally, 2004) is the take-off point for my enterprise. Pally is a practising psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and psychotherapist who have actively engaged with neuroscientists to help make sense of her own observations. I am a neuroscientist who recently spent two years as an Academic Fellow of the Psychoanalytic Centre of Philadelphia, an engagement intended to expand my own set of observations and forms of story-telling. The significance of this complementarity, and of our similarities and differences, is that something will emerge in this commentary.
Many psychoanalysts (and psychotherapists too, I suspect) feel that the observations/stories of neuroscience/cognitive science are for their own activities at best, find to some irrelevance, and at worst destructive or are they not the same probability that holds for many neuroscientists/cognitive scientists. Pally clearly feels otherwise, and it is worth exploring a bit why this is so in her case. A general key, I think, is in her line "In current paradigms, the brain has intrinsic activity, is highly integrated, is interactive with the environment, and is goal-oriented, with predictions operating at every level, from lower systems to . . . the highest functions of abstract thought.” Contemporary neuroscience/cognitive science has indeed uncovered an enormous complexity and richness in the nervous system, "making it not so different from how psychoanalysts (or most other people) would characterize the self, at least not in terms of complexity, potential, and vagary." Given this complexity and richness, there is substantially less reason than there once was to believe psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are dealing with two fundamentally different things.
Pally suspect, more aware of this than many psychotherapists because she has been working closely with contemporary neuroscientists who are excited about the complexity to be found in the nervous system. And that has an important lesson, but there is an additional one at least as important in the immediate context. In 1950, two neuroscientists wrote that, "the sooner we recognize the certainty of the complexity that is highly functional, just as those who recognize the Gestalts under which they leave the reflex physiologist confounded, in fact they support the simplest functions in the sooner that we will see that the previous terminological peculiarities that seem insurmountably carried between the lower levels of neurophysiology and higher behavioural theory simply dissolve away."
And in 1951 another said: " I am coming more to the conviction that the rudiments of every behavioural mechanism will be found far down in the evolutionary scale and represented in primitive activities of the nervous system."
Neuroscience (and what came to be cognitive science) was engaged from very early on in an enterprise committed to the same kind of understanding sought by psychotherapists, but passed through a phase (roughly from the 1950 through to the 1980's) when its own observations and stories were less rich in those terms. It was a period that gave rise to the notion that the nervous system was "simple" and "mechanistic," which in turn made neuroscience/cognitive science seem less relevant to those with broader concerns, perhaps even threatening and apparently adversarial if one equated the nervous system with "mind," or "self," or "soul," since mechanics seemed degrading to those ideas. Arguably, though, the period was an essential part of the evolution of the contemporary neuroscience/cognitive science story, one that laid needed groundwork for rediscovery and productive exploration of the richness of the nervous system. Psychoanalysis/psychotherapy, and, of course, move through their own story of evolution over its presented time. That the two stories seemed remote from one another during this period was never adequate evidence that they were not about the same thing but only an expression of their needed independent evolutions.
An additional reason that Pally is comfortable with the likelihood that psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are talking about the same thing is her recognition of isomorphisms (or congruities, Pulver 2003) between the two sets of stories, places where different vocabularies in fact seem to be representing the same (or quite similar) things. I am not sure I am comfortable calling these "shared assumptions" (as Pally does) since they are actually more interesting and probably more significant if they are instead instances of coming to the same ideas from different directions (as I think they are). In this case, the isomorphisms tend to imply that rephrasing Gertrude Stein, that "there proves to be the actualization in the exception of there.” Regardless, Pally has entirely appropriately and, I think, usefully called attention to an important similarity between the psychotherapeutic concept of "transference" and an emerging recognition within neuroscience/cognitive science that the nervous system does not so much collect information about the world as generate a model of it, act in relation to that model, and then check incoming information against the predictions of that model. Pally's suggestion that this model reflects in part early interpersonal experiences, can be largely "unconscious," and so may cause inappropriate and troubling behaviour in current time seems to be entirely reasonable. So too, are those that constitute her thought, in that of the interactions with which an analyst can help by bringing the model to "consciousness" through the intermediary of recognizing the transference onto the analyst.
The increasing recognition of substantial complexity in the nervous system together with the presence of identifiable isomorphisms that provide a solid foundation for suspecting that psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are indeed talking about the same thing. But the significance of different stories for better understanding a single thing lies as much in the differences between the stories as it does in their similarities/isomorphisms, in the potential for differing and not obviously isomorphic stories to modify another productively, and yielding a new story in the process. With this thought in mind, I want to call attention to some places where the psychotherapeutic and the neuroscientific/cognitive scientific stories have edges that rub against one another than smoothly fitting together. And perhaps to ways each could be usefully further evolved in response to those non-isomorphisms.
Unconscious stories and "reality.” Though her primary concern is with interpersonal relations, Pally clearly recognizes that transference and related psychotherapeutic phenomena are one (actually relatively small) facet of a much more general phenomenon, the creation, largely unconsciously, of stories that are understood to be but are not that any necessary thoughtful pronunciations inclined for the "real world.” Ambiguous figures illustrate the same general phenomenon in a much simpler case, that of visual perception. Such figures may be seen in either of two ways; They represent two "stories" with the choice between them being, at any given time, largely unconscious. More generally, a serious consideration of a wide array of neurobiological/cognitive phenomena clearly implies that, as Pally says, we do not see "reality," but only have stories to describe it that result from processes of which we are not consciously aware.
All of this raises some quite serious philosophical questions about the meaning and usefulness of the concept of "reality." In the present context, what is important is that it is a set of questions that sometimes seem to provide an insurmountable barrier between the stories of neuroscientists/cognitive scientists, who largely think they are dealing with reality, and psychotherapists, who feel more comfortable in more idiosyncratic and fluid spaces. In fact, neuroscience and cognitive science can proceed perfectly well in the absence of a well-defined concept of "reality" and, without being fully conscious of it, committing to fact as they do so. And psychotherapists actually make more use of the idea of "reality" than is entirely appropriate. There is, for example, a tendency within the psychotherapeutic community to presume that unconscious stories reflect "traumas" and other historically verifiable events, while the neurobiological/cognitive science story says quite clearly that they may equally reflect predispositions whose origins reflect genetic information and hence bear little or no relation to "reality" in the sense usually meant. They may, in addition, reflect random "play," putting them even further out of reach of easy historical interpretation. In short, with regard to the relation between "story" and "reality," each set of stories could usefully be modified by greater attention to the other. Differing concepts of "reality" (perhaps the very concept itself) gets in the way of usefully sharing stories. The mental/cognitive scientists' preoccupation with "reality" as an essential touchstone could valuably be lessened, and the therapist's sense of the validation of stories in terms of personal and historical idiosyncracies could be helpfully adjusted to include a sense of actual material underpinnings.
The Unconscious and the Conscious. Pally appropriately makes a distinction between the unconscious and the conscious, one that has always been fundamental to psychotherapy. Neuroscience/cognitive science has been slower to make a comparable distinction but is now rapidly beginning to catch up. Clearly some neural processes generate behaviour in the absence of awareness and intent and others yield awareness and intent with or without accompanying behaviour. An interesting question however, raised at a recent open discussion of the relations between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, is whether the "neurobiological unconscious" is the same thing as the "psychotherapeutic unconscious," and whether the perceived relations between the "unconscious" and the"conscious" are the same in the two sets of stories. Is this a case of an isomorphism or, perhaps more usefully, a masked difference?
An oddity of Pally's article is that she herself acknowledges that the unconscious has mechanisms for monitoring prediction errors and yet implies, both in the title of the paper, and in much of its argument, that there is something special or distinctive about consciousness (or conscious processing) in its ability to correct prediction errors. And here, I think, there is evidence of a potentially useful "rubbing of edges" between the neuroscientific/cognitive scientific tradition and the psychotherapeutic one. The issue is whether one regards consciousness (or conscious processing) as somehow "superior" to the unconscious (or unconscious processing). There is a sense in Pally of an old psychotherapeutic perspective of the conscious as a mechanism for overcoming the deficiencies of the unconscious, of the conscious as the wise father/mother and the unconscious as the willful child. Actually, Pally does not quite go this far, as I will point out in the following, but there is enough of a trend to illustrate the point and, without more elaboration, I do not think of many neuroscientists/cognitive scientists will catch Pally's more insightful lesson. I think Pally is almost certainly correct that the interplay of the conscious and the unconscious can achieve results unachievable by the unconscious alone, but think also that neither psychotherapy nor neuroscience/cognitive science are yet in a position to say exactly why this is so. So let me take a crack here at a new, perhaps bi-dimensional story that could help with that common problem and perhaps both traditions as well.
A major and surprising lesson of comparative neuroscience, supported more recently by neuropsychology (Weiskrantz, 1986) and, more recently still, by artificial intelligence, is that an extraordinarily rich repertoire of adaptive behaviour can occur unconsciously, in the absence of awareness of intent (be supported by unconscious neural processes). It is not only modelling the world and prediction. Error correction that can occur this way but virtually (and perhaps literally) the entire spectrum of behaviour externally observed, including fleeing from a threat, and of approaching good things, generating novel outputs, learning from doing so, and so on.
This extraordinary terrain, discovered by neuroanatomists, electrophysiologists, neurologists, behavioural biologists, and recently extended by others using more modern techniques, is the unconscious of which the neuroscientist/cognitive scientist speaks. It is the area that is so surprisingly rich that it creates, for some people, the puzzle about whether there is anything else at all. Moreover, it seems, at first glance, to be a totally different terrain from that of the psychotherapist, whose clinical experience reveals a territory occupied by drives, unfulfilled needs, and the detritus with which the conscious would prefer not to deal.
As indicated earlier, it is one of the great strengths of Pally's article to suggest that the two areas may in fact, turns out to be the same as in many ways that if they are of the same, then its question only compliments in what way are the "unconscious" and the "conscious" of showing to any difference? Where now are the "two stories?” Pally touches briefly on this point, suggesting that the two systems differ not so much (or at all?) In what they do, but rather in how they do it. This notion of two systems with different styles seems to me worth emphasizing and expanding. Unconscious processing is faster and handles many more variables simultaneously. Conscious processing is slower and handles numerously fewer variables at one time. It is likely that their equalling a host of other differences in style as well, in the handling of number for example, and of time.
In the present context, however, perhaps the most important difference in style is one that Lacan called attention to from a clinical/philosophical perspective - the conscious (conscious processing) have in itself forwarded by some objective "coherence," that it attempts to create a story that makes sense simultaneously of all its parts. The unconscious, on the other hand, is much more comfortable with bits and pieces lying around with no global order. To a neurobiologist/cognitive scientist, this makes perfectly good sense. The circuitry embodies that of the unconscious (sub-cortical circuitry?) Is an assembly of different parts organized for a large number of different specific purposes, and only secondarily linked together to try to assure some coordination? The circuitry, has, once, again, to involve in conscious processing (neo-cortical circuitry?) On the other hand, seems to both be more uniform and integrated and to have an objective for which coherence is central.
That central coherence is well-illustrated by the phenomena of "positive illusions,” exemplified by patients who receive a hypnotic suggestion that there is an object in a room and subsequently walk in ways that avoid the object while providing a variety of unrelated explanations for their behaviour. Similar "rationalization" is, of course, seen in schizophrenic patients and in a variety of fewer dramatic forms in psychotherapeutic settings. The "coherent" objective is to make a globally organized story out of the disorganized jumble, a story of (and constituting) the "self."
What all this introduces that which is the mind or brain for which it is actually organized to be constantly generating at least two different stories in two different styles. One, written by conscious processes in simpler terms, is a story of/about the "self" and experienced as such, for developing insights into how such a story can be constructed using neural circuitry. The other is an unconscious "story" about interactions with the world, perhaps better thought of as a series of different "models" about how various actions relate to various consequences. In many ways, the latter are the grist for the former.
In this sense, we are safely back to the two stories that are ideologically central in their manifestations as pronounced in psychotherapy, but perhaps with some added sophistication deriving from neuroscience/cognitive science. In particular, there is no reason to believe that one story is "better" than the other in any definitive sense. They are different stories based on different styles of story telling, with one having advantages in certain sorts of situations (quick responses, large numbers of variables, more direct relation to immediate experiences of pain and pleasure) and the other in other sorts of situations (time for more deliberate responses, challenges amenable to handling using smaller numbers of variables, more coherent, more able to defer immediate gratification/judgment.
In the clinical/psychotherapeutic context, an important implication of the more neutral view of two story-tellers outlined above is that one ought not to over-value the conscious, nor to expect miracles of the process of making conscious what is unconscious. In the immediate context, the issue is if the unconscious is capable of "correcting prediction errors,” then why appeal to the conscious to achieve this function? More generally, what is the function of that persistent aspect of psychotherapy that aspires to make the unconscious conscious? And why is it therapeutically effective when it is? Here, it is worth calling special attention to an aspect of Pally's argument that might otherwise get a bit lost in the details of her article: . . . the therapist encourages the wife consciously to stop and consider her assumption that her husband does not properly care about her, and effortfully to consider an alternative view and inhibit her impulse to reject him back. This, in turn, creates a new type of experience, one in which he is indeed more loving, such that she can develop new predictions."
It is not, as Pally describes it, the simple act of making something conscious that is therapeutically effective. What is necessary is to decompose the story consciously (something that is made possible by its being a story with a small number of variables) and, even what is more important, to see if the story generates a new "type of experience" that in turn causes the development of "new predictions." The latter, is an effect of the conscious on the unconscious, an alteration of the unconscious brought about by hearing, entertaining, and hence acting on a new story developed by the conscious. It is not "making things conscious" that is therapeutically effective; it is the exchange of stories that encourages the creation of a new story in the unconscious.
For quite different reasons, Grey (1995) earlier made a suggestion not dissimilar to Pally's, proposing that consciousness was activated when an internal model detected a prediction failure, but acknowledged he could see no reason "why the brain should generate conscious experience of any kind at all." Seemingly, in spite of her title, there seems of nothing really to any detection of prediction errors, especially of what is important that Pally's story is the detection of mismatches between two stories. One unconscious and the other conscious, and the resulting opportunity for both to shape a less trouble-making new story. That, briefly may be why the brain "should generate conscious experience,” to reap the benefits of having a second story teller with a different style. Paraphrasing Descartes, one might say "I am, and I can think, therefore I can change who I am.” It is not only the neurobiological "conscious" that can undergo change; it is the neurobiological "unconscious" as well.
More generally, I want to suggest that the most effective psychotherapy requires the recognitions, rapidly emanating from the neuro- sciences and their cognitive counterpart for which are exposed of each within the paradigms of science, that the brain/mind has evolved with two (or more) independent story tellers and has done so precisely because there are advantages to having independent story tellers that generate and exchange different stories. The advantage is that each can learn from the other, and the mechanisms to convey the stories and forth and for each story teller to learn from the stories of the others occurring as a part of our evolutionary endowment as well. The problems that bring patients into a therapist's office are problems in the breakdown of story exchange, for any of a variety of reasons, and the challenge for the therapist is to reinstate the confidence of each story teller in the value of the stories created by the other. Neither the conscious nor the unconscious is primary; they function best as an interdependent loop with each developing its own story facilitated by the semi-independent story of the other. In such an organization, there are not only no "real,” and no primacy for consciousness, there is only the ongoing development and, ideally, effective sharing of different stories.
There are, in the story I am outlining, implications for neuroscience/cognitive science as well. The obvious key questions are what does one mean (in terms of neurons and neuronal assemblies) by "stories," and in what ways are their construction and representation different in unconscious and conscious neural processing. But even more important, if the story I have outlined makes sense, what are the neural mechanisms by which unconscious and conscious stories are exchanged and by which each kind of story impacts on the other? And why (again in neural terms) does the exchange sometimes break down and fail in a way that requires a psychotherapist - an additional story teller - to be repaired?
Just as the unconscious and the conscious are engaged in a process of evolving stories for separate reasons and using separate styles, so too have been and will continue to be neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy. And it is valuable that both communities continue to do so. But there is every reason to believe that the different stories are indeed about the same thing, not only because of isomorphisms between the differing stories but equally because the stories of each can, if listened to, are demonstrably of value to the stories of the other. When breakdowns in story sharing occur, they require people in each community who are daring enough to listen and be affected by the stories of the other community. Pally has done us all a service as such a person. I hope to further the constructs that bridge her to lay, and that others will feel inclined to join in an act of collectivity such that has enormous intellectual potential and relates directly too more seriously psychological need in the mental health arena. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that an enhanced skill at hearing, respecting, and learning from differing stories about similar things would be useful in a wide array of contexts.
The physical basis of consciousness appears to be the major and most singular challenge to the scientific, reductionist world view. In the closing years of the second millennium, advances in the ability to record the activity of individual neurons in the brains of monkeys or other animals while they carry out particular tasks, combined with the explosive development of functional brain imaging in normal humans, has lead to a renewed empirical program to discover the scientific explanation of consciousness. This article reviews some of the relevant experimental work and argues that the most advantageous strategy for now is to focus on discovering the neuronal correlates of consciousness.
Consciousness is a puzzling state-dependent property of certain types of complex, adaptive systems. The best example of one type of such systems is a healthy and attentive human brain. If the brain is anaesthetized, consciousness ceases. Small lesions in the midbrain and thalamus of patients can lead to a complete loss of consciousness, while destruction of circumscribed parts of the cerebral cortex of patients can eliminate very specific aspects of consciousness, such as the ability to be aware of motion or to recognize objects as faces, without a concomitant loss of vision usually. Given the similarity in brain structure and behaviour, biologists commonly assume that at least some animals, in particular non-human primates, share certain aspects of consciousness with humans. Brain scientists, in conjunction with cognitive neuroscientists, are exploiting a number of empirical approaches that shed light on the neural basis of consciousness. Since it is not known to what extent, artificial systems, such as computers and robots, can become conscious, this article will exclude these from consideration.
Largely, neuroscientists have made a number of working assumptions that, in the fullness of time, need to be justified more fully.
(1) There is something to be explained; that is, the subjective content associated with a conscious sensation - what philosophers point to the qualia - does exist and has its physical basis in the brain. To what extent qualia and all other subjective aspects of consciousness can or cannot be explained within some reductionist framework remains highly controversially.
(2) Consciousness is a vague term with many usages and will, in the fullness of time, be replaced by a vocabulary that more accurately reflect the contribution of different brain processes (for a similar evolution, consider the usage of memory, that has been replaced by an entire hierarchy of more specific concepts). Common to all forms of consciousness is that it feels like something (e.g., to “see blue," to “experience a head-ache,” or to "reflect upon a memory"). Self-consciousness is but one form of consciousness.
It is possible that all the different aspects of consciousness (smelling, pain, visual awareness, effect, self-consciousness, and so on) employ a basic common mechanism or perhaps a few such mechanisms. If one could understand the mechanism for one aspect, then one will have gone most of the way toward understanding them all.
(3) Consciousness is a property of the human brain, a highly evolved system. It therefore must have a useful function to perform. Crick and Koch (1998) assumes that the function of the neuronal correlate of consciousness is to produce the best current interpretation of the environment-in the light of past experiences-and to make it available, for a sufficient time, to the parts of the brain that contemplate, plan and execute voluntary motor outputs (including language). This needs to be contrasted with the on-line systems that bypass consciousness but that can generate stereotyped behaviours.
Note that in normally developed individuals motor output is not necessary for consciousness to occur. This is demonstrated by lock-in syndrome in which patients have lost (nearly) all ability to move yet are clearly conscious.
(4) At least some animal species posses some aspects of consciousness. In particular, this is assumed to be true for non-human primates, such as the macaque monkey. Consciousness associated with sensory events in humans is likely to be related to sensory consciousness in monkeys for several reasons. Firstly, trained monkeys show similar behaviour to that of humans for many low-level perceptual tasks (e.g., detection and discrimination of visual motion or depth. Secondly, the gross neuroanatomy of humans and non-human primates are rather similar once the difference in size has been accounted for. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging of human cerebral cortex is confirming the existence of a functional organization in sensory cortical areas similar to that discovered by the use of single cell electrophysiology in the monkey. As a corollary, it follows that language is not necessary for consciousness to occur (although it greatly enriches human consciousness).
It is important to distinguish the general, enabling factors in the brain that are needed for any form of consciousness to occur from modulating ones that can up-or-down regulate the level of arousal, attention and awareness and from the specific factors responsible for a particular content of consciousness.
An easy example of an enabling factor would be a proper blood supply. Inactivate the heart and consciousness ceases within a fraction of a minute. This does not imply that the neural correlate of consciousness is in the heart (as Aristotle thought). A neuronal enabling factor for consciousness is the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus. Acute bilateral loss of function in these small structures that are widely and reciprocally connected to the basal ganglia and cerebral cortex leads to an immediate coma or profound disruption in arousal and consciousness.
Among the neuronal modulating factors are the various activities in nuclei in the brain stem and the midbrain, often collectively referred to as the reticular activating system, that control in a widespread and quite specific manner the level of noradrenaline, serotonin and acetylcholine in the thalamus and forebrain. Appropriate levels of these neurotransmitters are needed for sleep, arousal, attention, memory and other functions critical to behaviour and consciousness.
Yet any particular content of consciousness is unlikely to arise from these structures, since they probably lack the specificity necessary to mediate a sharp pain in the right molar, the percept of the deep, blue California sky, the bouquet associated with a rich Bordeaux, a haunting musical melody and so on. These must be caused by specific neural activity in cortex, thalamus, basal ganglia and associated neuronal structures. The question motivating much of the current research into the neuronal basis of consciousness is the notion of the minimal neural activity that is sufficient to cause a specific conscious percept or memory.
For instance, when a subject consciously perceives a face, the retinal ganglion cells whose axons make up the optic nerve that carries the visual information to the brain proper are firing in response to the visual stimulus. Yet it is unlikely that this retinal activity directly correlates with visual perception. While such activity is evidently necessary for seeing a physical stimulus in the world, retinal neurons by themselves do not give rise to consciousness.
Given the comparative ease with which the brains of animals can be probed and manipulated, it seems opportune at this point in time to concentrate on the neural basis of sensory consciousness. Because primates are highly visual animals and much is known about the neuroanatomy, psychology and computational principles underling visual perception, visions has proven to be the most popular model systems in the brain sciences.
Cognitive and clinical research demonstrates that much complex information processing can occur without involving consciousness. This includes visual, auditory and linguistic priming, implicit memory, the implicit recognition of complex sequences, automatic behaviours such as driving a car or riding a bicycle and so on (Velmans 1991). The dissociations found in patients with lesions in the cerebral cortex (e.g., such as residual visual functions in the professed absence of any visual awareness known as clinical blind-sight in patients with lesions in preliminary visual cortex.
It can be said, that if one is without idea, then one is without concept, and as well, if one is without concept one is without an idea. An idea (Gk., eidos, visible form) be it a notion stretching all the way from one pole, where it denotes a subjective, internal presence in the mind, somehow thought of as representing something about the world, to the other pole, where it represents an eternal, timeless unchanging form or concept: The concept o the number series or of justice, for example, thought of as independent objected of enquiry and perhaps of knowledge. These two poles are not distinct meanings of the therm, although they give rise to many problems of interpretation, but between tem they define a space of philosophical problems. On the other hand, ideas are that with which er think, or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may be employed about in thinking. Looked at that way they seem to be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presences. On the other hand, ideas provide the way in which objective knowledge can be expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. Plato’s theory of Forms is a celebration of objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and in his hands ideas are reified to the point where they make up the only rea world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin. This doctrine, notable in the Timaeus, opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other-worldly aspect until after Descartes ideas become assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being.
The philosophical doctrine that reality is somehow mind-correlatives or mind co-ordinated - that the real objects comprising the “external world” are mot independent of cognizing minds, but only exist as in some way correlative to the mental operations. The doctrine centres on the conception that reality as we understand it reflects the working of mind. And it construes this as meaning that the inquiring mind itself to make a formative contribution not merely to our understanding character we attribute to it.
The cognitive scientist Jackendoff (1987) argues at length against the notion that consciousness and thoughts are inseparable and that introspection can reveal the contents of the mind. What is conscious about thoughts, are sensory aspects, such as visual images, sounds or silent speech? Both the process of thought and its content are not directly accessible to consciousness. Indeed, one tradition in psychology and psychoanalysis - going back to Sigmund Freud-hypothesizes that higher-level decision making and creativity are not accessible at a conscious level, although they influence behaviour.
Within the visual modality, Milner and Goodale (1995) have made a masterful case for the existence of so-called on-line systems that by-pass consciousness. Their function is to mediate relative stereotype visuo-motor behaviours, such as eye and arm movements, reaching, grasping, and postural adjustment and so on. In a very rapid, reflex-like manner. On-line systems work in egocentric coordinate systems, and lack certain types of perceptual illusions (e.g., size illusion) as well as direct access to working memory. These contrasts are well within the function of consciousness as alluded to from above, namely to synthesize information from many different sources and use it to plan behavioural patterns over time. Milner and Goodale argue that on-line systems are associated with the dorsal stream of visual information in the cerebral cortex, originating in the primary visual cortex and terminating in the posterior parietal cortex. The problem of consciousness can be broken down into several separate questions. Most, if not all of these, can then be subjected to scientific inquiry.
The major question that neuroscience must ultimately answer can be bluntly stated as follows: It is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes in our head correlates with consciousness, while others do not; what is the difference between them? The specific processes that correlate with the current content of consciousness are referred to as the neuronal correlate of consciousness, or as the NCC. Whenever some information is represented in the NCC, it is represented in consciousness. The NCC is the minimal (minimal, since it is known that the entire brain is sufficient to give rise to consciousness) set of neurons, most likely distributed throughout certain cortical and subcortical areas, whose firing directly correlates with the perception of the subject at the time. Conversely, stimulating these neurons in the right manner with some yet unheard of technology should give rise to the same perception as before.
Discovering the NCC and its properties will mark a major milestone in any scientific theory of consciousness.
What is the character of the NCC? Most popular has been the belief that consciousness arises as an emergent property of a very large collection of interacting neurons (for instance, Libet 1993). In this view, it would be foolish to locate consciousness at the level of individual neurons. An alternative hypothesis is that there are special sets of “consciousness" neurons distributed throughout cortex and associated systems. Such neurons represent the ultimate neuronal correlate of consciousness, in the sense that the relevant activity of an appropriate subset of them is both necessary and sufficient to give rise to an appropriate conscious experience or percept (Crick and Koch 1998). Generating the appropriate activity in these neurons, for instance by suitable electrical stimulation during open skull surgery, would give rise to the specific percept.
Any-one subtype of NCC neurons would, most likely, be characterized by a unique combination of molecular, biophysical, pharmacological and anatomical traits. It is possible, of course, that all cortical neurons may be capable of participating in the representation of one percept or another, though not necessarily doing so for all percepts. The secret of consciousness would then be the type of activity of a temporary subset of them, consisting of all those cortical neurons that represent that particular percept at that moment. How activity of neurons across a multitude of brain areas that encode all of the different aspects associated with an object (e.g., the colour of the face, its facial expression, its gender and identity, the sound issuing from its mouth) is combined into some single percept remains puzzling and is known as the binding problem.
What, if anything, can we infer about the location of neurons whose activity correlates with consciousness? In the case of visual consciousness, it was surmised that these neurons must have access to visual information and project to the planning stages of the brain; That is to premotor and frontal areas. Since no neurons in the primary visual cortex of the macaque monkey project to any area forward of the central sulcus, Crick and Koch (1998) propose that neurons in V1 do not give rise to consciousness (although it is necessary for most forms of vision, just as the retina is). Ongoing electro physiological, psycho physical and imaging research in monkeys and humans is evaluating this prediction.
While the set of neurons that can express anyone particular conscious percept might constitute a relative small fraction of all neurons in anyone area, many more neurons might be necessary to support the firing activity leading up to the NCC. This might resolve the apparent paradox between clinical lessoning data suggesting that small and discrete lesions in the cortex can lead to very specific deficits (such as the inability to see colours or to recognize faces in the absence of other visual losses) and the functional imaging data that anyone visual stimulus can activate large swaths of cortex.
Conceptually, several other questions need to be answered about the NCC. What type of activity corresponds to the NCC (it has been proposed as long ago as the early part of the twentieth century that spiking activity synchronized across a population of neurons is a necessary condition for consciousness to occur)? What causes the NCC to occur? And, finally, what effect does the NCC have on postsynaptic structures, including motor output.
A promising experimental approach to locate the NCC is the use of bistable percepts in which a constant retinal stimulus gives rise to two percepts alternating in time, as in a Necker cube (Logothetis 1998). One version of this is binocular rivalry in which small images, say of a horizontal grating, are presented to the left eye and another image, say the vertical grating is shown to the corresponding location in the right eye. In spite of the constant visual stimulus, observers “see" the horizontal grating alternately every few seconds with the vertical one (Blake 1989). The brain does not allow for the simultaneous perception of both images.
It is possible, though difficult, to train a macaque monkey to report whether it is currently seeing the left or the right image. The distribution of the switching times and the way in which changing the contrast in one eye affects these leaves little to doubt, in that monkeys and humans experience the same basic phenomenon. In a series of elegant experiments, Logothetis and colleagues (Logothetis 1998) recorded from a variety of visual cortical areas in the awake macaque monkey while the animal performed a binocular rivalry task. In undeveloped visual cortices, only a small fraction of cells modulates their response as a function of the percept of the monkey, while 20 to 30% of neurons in higher visual areas in the cortex do so. The majority of cells increased their firing rate in response to one or the other retinal stimulus with little regard to what the animal perceives at the time. In contrast, in a high-level cortical area such as the inferior temporal cortex, almost all neurons responded only to the perceptual dominant stimulus (in other words, a “face” cell only fired when the animal indicated by its performance that it saw the face and not the pattern presented to the other eye). This makes it likely that the NCC involves activity in neurons in the inferior temporal lobe. Lesions in the homologous area in the human brain are known to cause very specific deficits in the conscious face or object recognition. However, it is possible that specific interactions between IT cells and neurons in parts of the prefrontal cortex are necessary in order for the NCC to be generated
Functional brain imaging in humans undergoing binocular rivalry has revealed that areas in the right prefrontal cortex are in activating during the perceptual switch from one percept to the other.
A number of alternate experimental paradigms are being investigated using electro physiological recordings of individual neurons in behaving animals and human patients, combined with functional brain imaging. Common to these is the manipulation of the complex and changing relationship between physical stimulus and the conscious percept. For instance, when subjects are forced rapidly to respond to a low saliency target, both monkeys and human’s sometimes claim to perceive such a target in the absence of any physical target consciously (false alarm) or fail to respond to a target (miss). The NCC in the appropriate sensory area should mirror the perceptual report under these dissociated conditions. Visual illusions constitute another rich source of experiments that can provide information concerning the neurons underlying these illusory percepts. A classical example is the motion affected in which a subject stares at a constantly moving stimulus (such as a waterfall) for a fraction of a minute or longer. Immediately after this conditioning period, a stationary stimulus will appear to move in the opposite direction. Because of the conscious experience of motion, one would expect, the subject’s cortical motion areas to be activated in the absence of any moving stimulus.
Future techniques, most likely based on the molecular identification and manipulation of discrete and identifiable subpopulations of cortical cells in appropriate animals, will greatly help in this endeavour
Identifying the type of activity and the type of neurons that gives rise to specific conscious percept in animals and humans would only be the first, even if critical, step in understanding consciousness. One also needs to know where these cells project to, their postsynaptic action, how they develop in early childhood, what happens to them in mental diseases known to affect consciousness in patients, such as schizophrenia or autism, and so on. And, of course, a final theory of consciousness would have to explain the central mystery, why a physical system with particular architectures gives rise to feelings and qualia.
The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.
Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practised in various guises for centuries, however, its maturing qualities have begun in the early parts of the 20th century. The works that have dramatically empathized the growths of phenomenology are accredited through the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind.
Phenomenology is commonly understood in either of two ways: as a disciplinary field in philosophy, or as a movement in the history of philosophy.
The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of "phenomena": Appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meaning’s things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: Ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.
The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophical tradition launched in the first half of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre. In that movement, the discipline of phenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of all philosophy - as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. The methods and characterization of the discipline were widely debated by Husserl and his successors, and these debates continue to the present day. (The definitions of Phenomenological offered above will thus be debatable, for example, by Heideggerians, but it remains the starting point in characterizing the discipline.)
In recent philosophy of mind, the term "phenomenology" is often restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc.: What it is like to have sensations of various kinds. However, our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. Accordingly, in the Phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our "life-world.”
Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition of continental European philosophy throughout the 20th century, while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the 20th century. Yet the fundamental character of our mental activity is pursued in overlapping ways within these two traditions. Accordingly, the perspective on phenomenology drawn in this article will accommodate both traditions. The main concern here will be to characterize the discipline of phenomenology, in contemporary views, while also highlighting the historical tradition that brought the discipline into its own.
Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called "intentionality,” that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experiences abide toward the direction that represents or "intends" of things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean.
The basic intentional structure of consciousness, we come to find in reflection or analysis, in that of which involves further forms of experience. Thus, phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness (within the stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably in perception), attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or "horizonal" awareness), awareness of one's own experience (self-consciousness, in one sense), self-awareness (awareness-of-oneself), the self in different roles (as thinking, acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of one's movement), determination or intention represents its desire for action (more or less explicit), awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity, collectivity), linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication, understanding others), social interaction (including collective action), and everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in a particular culture).
Furthermore, in a different dimension, we find various grounds or enabling conditions - conditions of the possibility - of intentionality, including embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context, language and other social practices, social background, and contextual aspects of intentional activities. Thus, phenomenology leads from conscious experience into conditions that help to give experience its intentionality. Traditional phenomenology has focussed on subjective, practical, and social conditions of experience. Recent philosophy of mind, however, has focussed especially on the neural substrate of experience, on how conscious experience and mental representation or intentionality is grounded in brain activity. It remains a difficult question how much of these grounds of experience fall within the province of phenomenology as a discipline. Cultural conditions thus seem closer to our experience and to our familiar self-understanding than do the electrochemical workings of our brain, much less our dependence on quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which we may belong. The cautious thing to say is that phenomenology leads in some ways into at least some background conditions of our experience.
The discipline of phenomenology is defined by its domain of study, its methods, and its main results. Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant conditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the world.
We all experience various types of experience including perception, imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition, and action. Thus, the domain of phenomenology is the range of experiences including these types (among others). Experience includes not only relatively passive experience as in vision or hearing, but also active experience as in walking or hammering a nail or kicking a ball. (The range will be specific to each species of being that enjoys consciousness; Our focus is on our own human experience. Not all conscious beings will, or will be able to, practice phenomenology, as we do.)
Conscious experiences have a unique feature: we experience them, we live through them or perform them. Other things in the world we may observe and engage. But we do not experience them, in the sense of living through or performing them. This experiential or first-person feature - that of being experienced - is an essential part of the nature or structure of conscious experience: as we say, "I see/think/desire/do . . ." This feature is both a Phenomenological and an ontological feature of each experience: it is part of what it is for the experience to be experienced (Phenomenological) and part of what it is for the experience to be (ontological).
How shall we study conscious experience? We reflect on various types of experiences just as we experience them. That is to say, we proceed from the first-person point of view. However, we do not normally characterize an experience at the time we are performing it. In many cases we do not have that capability: a state of intense anger or fear, for example, consumes the entire focus at the time. Rather, we acquire a background of having lived through a given type of experience, and we look to our familiarity with that type of experience: hearing a song, seeing a sunset, thinking about love, intending to jump a hurdle. The practice of phenomenology assumes such familiarity with the type of experiences to be characterized. Importantly, also, it is types of experience that phenomenology pursues, rather than a particular fleeting experience - unless its type is what interests us.
Classical phenomenologists practised some three distinguishable methods. (1) We describe a type of experience just as we find it in our own (past) experience. Thus, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty spoke of pure description of lived experience. (2) We interpret a type of experience by relating it to relevant features of context. In this vein, Heidegger and his followers spoke of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation in context, especially social and linguistic context. (3) We analyse the form of a type of experience. In the end, all the classical phenomenologists practised analysis of experience, factoring out notable features for further elaboration.
These traditional methods have been ramified in recent decades, expanding the methods available to phenomenology. Thus: (4) In a logico-semantic model of phenomenology, we specify the truth conditions for a type of thinking (say, where I think that dogs chase cats) or the satisfaction conditions for a type of intention (say, where I intend or will to jump that hurdle). (5) In the experimental paradigm of cognitive neuroscience, we design empirical experiments that tend to confirm or refute aspects of experience (say, where a brain scan shows electrochemical activity in a specific region of the brain thought to subserve a type of vision or emotion or motor control). This style of "neurophenomenology" assumes that conscious experience is grounded in neural activity in embodied action in appropriate surroundings - mixing pure phenomenology with biological and physical science in a way that was not wholly congenial to traditional phenomenologists.
What makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness one has of the experience while living through or performing it. This form of inner awareness has been a topic of considerable debate, centuries after the issue arose with Locke's notion of self-consciousness on the heels of Descartes' sense of consciousness (conscience, co-knowledge). Does this awareness-of-experience consist in a kind of inner observation of the experience, as if one were doing two things at once? (Brentano argued no.) Is it a higher-order perception of one's mind's operation, or is it a higher-order thought about one's mental activity? (Recent theorists have proposed both.) Or is it a different form of inherent structure? (Sartre took this line, drawing on Brentano and Husserl.) These issues are beyond the scope of this article, but notice that these results of Phenomenological analysis, that shape the characterlogical domain of study and the methodology appropriate to the domain. For awareness-of-experience is a defining trait of conscious experience, the trait that gives experience a first-person, lived character. It is that lived character of experience that allows a first-person perspective on the object of study, namely, experiences, and that perspective is characteristic of the methodology of phenomenology.
Conscious experience is the starting point of phenomenology, but experience shades off into fewer overtly conscious phenomena. As Husserl and others stressed, we are only vaguely aware of things in the margin or periphery of attention, and we are only implicitly aware of the wider horizon of things in the world around us. Moreover, as Heidegger stressed, in practical activities like walking along, or hammering a nail, or speaking our native tongue, we are not explicitly conscious of our habitual patterns of action. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts have stressed, much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at all, but may become conscious in the process of therapy or interrogation, as we come to realize how we feel or think about something. We should allow, then, that the domain of phenomenology - our own experience - spreads out from conscious experience into semi-conscious and even unconscious mental activity, along with relevant background conditions implicitly invoked in our experience. (These issues are subject to debate; the point here is to open the door to the question of where to draw the boundary of the domain of phenomenology.)
To begin an elementary exercise in phenomenology, consider some typical experiences one might have in everyday life, characterized in the first person: (1) I see that fishing boat off the coast as dusk descends over the Pacific. (2) I hear that helicopter whirring overhead as it approaches the hospital. (3) I am thinking that phenomenology differs from psychology. (4) I wish that warm rain from Mexico were falling like last week. (5) I imagine a fearsome creature like that in my nightmare. (6) I intend to finish my writing by noon. (7) I walk carefully around the broken glass on the sidewalk. (8) I stroke a backhand cross-court with that certain underspin. (9) I am searching for the words to make my point in conversation.
Here are rudimentary characterizations of some familiar types of experience. Each sentence is a simple form of Phenomenological description, articulating in everyday English the structure of the type of experience so described. The subject term "I" indicate the first-person structure of the experience: The intentionality proceeds from the subject. The verb indicates the type of intentional activity describing recognition, thought, imagination, etc. Of central importance is the way that objects of awareness are presented or intended in our experiences, especially, the way we see or conceive or think about objects. The direct-object expression ("that fishing boat off the coast") articulates the mode of presentation of the object in the experience: the content or meaning of the experience, the core of what Husserl called noema. In effect, the object-phrase expresses the noema of the act described, that is, to the extent that language has appropriate expressive power. The overall form of the given sentence articulates the basic form of intentionality in the experience: Subject-act-content-object.
Rich Phenomenological description or interpretation, as in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty et al., will far outrun such simple Phenomenological descriptions as above. But such simple descriptions bring out the basic form of intentionality. As we interpret the Phenomenological description further, we may assess the relevance of the context of experience. And we may turn to wider conditions of the possibility of that type of experience. In this way, in the practice of phenomenology, we classify, describe, interpret, and analyse structures of experiences in ways that answer to our own experience.
In such interpretive-descriptive analyses of experience, we immediately observe that we are analysing familiar forms of consciousness, conscious experience of or about this or that. Intentionality is thus the salient structure of our experience, and much of the phenomenology proceeds as the study of different aspects of intentionality. Thus, we explore structures of the stream of consciousness, the enduring self, the embodied self, and bodily action. Furthermore, as we reflect on how these phenomena work, we turn to the analysis of relevant conditions that enable our experiences to occur as they do, and to represent or intend as they do. Phenomenology then leads into analyses of conditions of the possibility of intentionality, conditions involving motor skills and habits, backgrounding social practices, and often language, with its special place in human affairs, presents the following definition: "Phoneme, . . .”
The Oxford English Dictionary indicated of its knowledge, where science as itself is a contained source of phenomena as distinct from being (ontology). That division of any science that describes and classifies its phenomena. From the Greek phainomenon, appearance. In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, amid debates of theory and methodology. In physics and philosophy of science, the term is used in the second sense, but only occasionally.
So its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study of phenomena: Literally, appearances as opposed to reality. This ancient distinction launched philosophy as we emerged from Plato's cave. Yet the discipline of phenomenology did not blossom until the 20th century and remains poorly understood in many circles of contemporary philosophy. What is that discipline? How did philosophy move from a root concept of phenomena to the discipline of phenomenology?
Originally, in the 18th century, "phenomenology" meant the theory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especially sensory appearances. The term seems to have been introduced by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. Subsequently, Immanuel Kant used the term occasionally in various writings, as did Johann Gottlieb Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel. By 1889 Franz Brentano used the term to characterize what he called "descriptive psychology. From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for his new science of consciousness, and the rest is history.
Suppose we say phenomenology study’s phenomena: Of what appears to us - and its appearing. How shall we understand phenomena? The term has a rich history in recent centuries, in which we can see traces of the emerging discipline of phenomenology.
In a strict empiricist vein, what appears before the mind accedes of sensory data or qualia: either patterns of one's own sensations (seeing red here now, feeling this ticklish feeling, hearing that resonant bass tone) or sensible patterns of worldly things, say, the looks and smells of flowers (what John Locke called secondary qualities of things). In a strict rationalist vein, by contrast, what appears before the mind of ideas, rationally formed "clear and distinct ideas" (in René Descartes' ideal). In Immanuel Kant's theory of knowledge, fusing rationalist and empiricist aims, what appears to the mind are phenomena defined as things-as-they-appear or things-as-they-are-represented (in a synthesis of sensory and conceptual forms of objects-as-known). In Auguste Comte's theory of science, phenomena (phenomenes) are the facts (faits, what occurs) that a given science would explain.
In 18th and 19th century epistemology, then, phenomena are the starting points in building knowledge, especially science. Accordingly, in a familiar and still current sense, phenomena are whatever we observe (perceive) and seek to explain. Discipline of psychology emerged late in the 19th century, however, phenomena took on a somewhat different guise. In Franz Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), phenomena are of what is to occur in the mind: Mental phenomena are acts of consciousness (or their contents), and physical phenomena are objects of external perception starting with colours and shapes. For Brentano, physical phenomena exist "intentionally" in acts of consciousness. This view revives a Medieval notion Brentano called "intentional in-existence. Nevertheless, the ontology remains undeveloped (what is it to exist in the mind, and do physical objects exist only in the mind?). More generally, we might say that phenomena are whatever we are conscious of: objects and events around us, other people, ourselves, even (in reflection) our own conscious experiences, as we experience these. In a certain technical sense, phenomena are things as they are given to our consciousness, whether in perception or imagination or thought or volition. This conception of phenomena would soon inform the new discipline of phenomenology.
Brentano distinguished descriptive psychology from genetic psychology. Where genetic psychology seeks the causes of various types of mental phenomena, descriptive psychology defines and classifies the various types of mental phenomena, including perception, judgment, emotion, etc. According to Brentano, every mental phenomenon, or act of consciousness, is directed toward some object, and only mental phenomena are so directed. This thesis of intentional directedness was the hallmark of Brentano's descriptive psychology. In 1889 Brentano used the term "phenomenology" for descriptive psychology, and the way was paved for Husserl's new science of phenomenology.
Phenomenology as we know it was launched by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations (1900-01). Two importantly different lines of theory came together in that monumental work: Psychological theory, on the heels of Franz Brentano (and William James, whose Principles of Psychology appeared in 1891 and greatly impressed Husserl); Its logically semantic theory, are the heels of Bernard Bolzano and Husserl's contemporaries who founded modern logic, including Gottlob Frege. (Interestingly, both lines of research trace back to Aristotle, and both reached importantly new results in Husserl's day.)
Husserl's Logical Investigations was inspired by Bolzano's ideal of logic, while taking up Brentano's conception of descriptive psychology. In his Theory of Science (1835) Bolzano distinguished between subjective and objective ideas or representations (Vorstellungen). In effect Bolzano criticized Kant and before him the classical empiricists and rationalists for failing to make this sort of distinction, thereby rendering phenomena merely subjective. Logic studies objective ideas, including propositions, which in turn make up objective theories as in the sciences. Psychology would, by contrast, study subjective ideas, the concrete contents (occurrences) of mental activities in particular minds at a given time. Husserl was after both, within a single discipline. So phenomena must be reconceived as objective intentional contents (sometimes called intentional objects) of subjective acts of consciousness. Phenomenology would then study this complex of consciousness and correlated phenomena. In Ideas I (Book One, 1913) Husserl introduced two Greek words to capture his version of the Bolzanoan distinction: noesis and noema (from the Greek verb noéaw, meaning to perceive, thinks, intend, from where the noun nous or mind). The intentional process of consciousness is called noesis, while its ideal content is called noema. The noema of an act of consciousness Husserl characterized both as an ideal meaning and as "the object as intended.” Thus the phenomenon, or object-as-it-appears, becomes the noema, or object-as-it-is-intended. The interpretations of Husserl's theory of noema have been several and amount to different developments of Husserl's basic theory of intentionality. (Is the noema an aspect of the object intended, or rather a medium of intention?)
For Husserl, then, phenomenology integrates a kind of psychology with a kind of logic. It develops a descriptive or analytic psychology in that it describes and Analysed types of subjective mental activity or experience, in short, act of consciousness. Yet it develops a kind of logic - a theory of meaning (today we say logical semantics) - in that it describes and Analysed objective contents of consciousness: Ideas, concepts, images, propositions, in short, ideal meanings of various types that serve as intentional contents, or noematic meanings, of various types of experience. These contents are shareable by different acts of consciousness, and in that sense they are objective, ideal meanings. Following Bolzano (and to some extent the platonistic logician Hermann Lotze), Husserl opposed any reduction of logic or mathematics or science to mere psychology, to how the public happens to think, and in the same spirit he distinguished phenomenology from mere psychology. For Husserl, phenomenology would study consciousness without reducing the objective and shareable meanings that inhabit experience to merely subjective happenstances. Ideal meaning would be the engine of intentionality in acts of consciousness.
A clear conception of phenomenology awaited Husserl's development of a clear model of intentionality. Indeed, phenomenology and the modern concept of intentionality emerged hand-in-hand in Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900-01). With theoretical foundations laid in the Investigations, Husserl would then promote the radical new science of phenomenology in Ideas I (1913). And alternative visions of phenomenology would soon follow.
Phenomenology matured and was nurtured through the works of Husserl, much as epistemology came about by means of its own nutrition but through Descartes study, and ontology or metaphysics came into its own with Aristotle on the heels of Plato. Yet phenomenology has been practised, with or without the name, for many centuries. When Hindu and Buddhist philosophers reflected on states of consciousness achieved in a variety of meditative states, they were practising phenomenology. When Descartes, Hume, and Kant characterized states of perception, thought, and imagination, they were practising phenomenology. When Brentano classified varieties of mental phenomena (defined by the directedness of consciousness), he was practising phenomenology. When William James appraised kinds of mental activity in the stream of consciousness (including their embodiment and their dependence on habit), he too was practising phenomenology. And when recent analytic philosophers of mind have addressed issues of consciousness and intentionality, they have often been practising phenomenology. Still, the discipline of phenomenology, its roots tracing back through the centuries, came full to flower in Husserl.
Husserl's work was followed by a flurry of Phenomenological writing in the first half of the 20th century. The diversity of traditional phenomenology is apparent in the Encyclopaedic of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, Dordrecht and Boston), which features separate articles on some seven types of phenomenology. (1) Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in pure or transcendental consciousness, setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world around us. (2) Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology studies how consciousness constitutes or takes things in the world of nature, assuming with the natural attitude that consciousness is part of nature. (3) Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence, including our experience of free choice or action in concrete situations. (4) Generative historicist phenomenology studies how meaning, as found in our experience, is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time. (5) Genetic phenomenology studies the genesis of meanings of things within one's own stream of experience. (6) Hermeneutical phenomenology studies interpretive structures of experience, how we understand and engage things around us in our human world, including ourselves and others. (7) Realistic phenomenology studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality, assuming it occurs in a real world that is largely external to consciousness and not somehow brought into being by consciousness.
The most famous of the classical phenomenologists were Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. In these four thinkers we find different conceptions of phenomenology, different methods, and different results. A brief sketch of their differences will capture both a crucial period in the history of phenomenology and a sense of the diversity of the field of phenomenology.
In his Logical Investigations (1900-01) Husserl outlined a complex system of philosophy, moving from logic to philosophy of language, to ontology (theory of universals and parts of wholes), to a Phenomenological theory of intentionality, and finally to a Phenomenological theory of knowledge. Then in Ideas I (1913) he focussed squarely on phenomenology itself. Husserl defined phenomenology as "the science of the essence of consciousness,” entered on the defining trait of intentionality, approached explicitly "in the first person." In this spirit, we may say phenomenology is the study of consciousness - that is, conscious experience of various types - as experienced from the first-person point of view. In this discipline we study different forms of experience just as we experience them, from the perspective of the subject living through or performing them. Thus, we characterize experiences of seeing, hearing, imagining, thinking, feeling (i.e., emotion), wishing, desiring, willing, and acting, that is, embodied volitional activities of walking, talking, cooking, carpentering, etc. However, not just any characterization of an experience will do. Phenomenological analysis of a given type of experience will feature the ways in which we ourselves would experience that form of conscious activity. And the leading property of our familiar types of experience is their intentionality, their being a consciousness of or about something, something experienced or presented or engaged in a certain way. How I see or conceptualize or understand the object I am dealing with defines the meaning of that object in my current experience. Thus, phenomenology features a study of meaning, in a wide sense that includes more than what is expressed in language.
In Ideas I Husserl presented phenomenology with a transcendental turn. In part this means that Husserl took on the Kantian idiom of "transcendental idealism,” looking for conditions of the possibility of knowledge, or of consciousness generally, and arguably turning away from any reality beyond phenomena. But Husserl's transcendental, turn also involved his discovery of the method of epoché (from the Greek skeptics' notion of abstaining from belief). We are to practice phenomenology, Husserl proposed, by "bracketing" the question of the existence of the natural world around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to the structure of our own conscious experience. Our first key result is the observation that each act of consciousness is a consciousness of something, that is, intentional, or directed toward something. Consider my visual experience wherein I see a tree across the square. In Phenomenological reflection, we need not concern ourselves with whether the tree exists: my experience is of a tree whether or not such a tree exists. However, we do need to concern ourselves with how the object is meant or intended. I see a Eucalyptus tree, not a Yucca tree; I see that object as a referentially exposed Eucalyptus tree, with certain shape and with bark stripping off, etc. Thus, bracketing the tree itself, we turn our attention to my experience of the tree, and specifically to the content or meaning in my experience. This tree-as-perceived Husserl calls the noema or noematic sense of the experience.
Philosophers succeeding Husserl debated the proper characterization of phenomenology, arguing over its results and its methods. Adolf Reinach, an early student of Husserl's (who died in World War I), argued that phenomenology should remain merged with a total inference by some realistic ontologism, as in Husserl's Logical Investigations. Roman Ingarden, a Polish phenomenologist of the next generation, continued the resistance to Husserl's turn to transcendental idealism. For such philosophers, phenomenology should not bracket questions of being or ontology, as the method of epoché would suggest. And they were not alone. Martin Heidegger studied Husserl's early writings, worked as Assistant to Husserl in 1916, and in 1928, succeeded Husserl in the prestigious chair at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger had his own ideas about phenomenology.
In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger unfurled his rendition of phenomenology. For Heidegger, we and our activities are always "in the world,” our being is being-in-the-world, so we do not study our activities by bracketing the world, rather we interpret our activities and the meaning things have for us by looking to our contextual relations to things in the world. Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenology resolves into what he called "fundamental ontology.” We must distinguish beings from their being, and we begin our investigation of the meaning of being in our own case, examining our own existence in the activity of "Dasein" (that being whose being is in each case my own). Heidegger resisted Husserl's neo-Cartesian emphasis on consciousness and subjectivity, including how perception presents things around us. By contrast, Heidegger held that our more basic ways of relating to things are in practical activities like hammering, where the phenomenology reveals our situation in a context of equipment and in being-with-others.
In Being and Time Heidegger approached phenomenology, in a quasi-poetic idiom, through the root meanings of "logos" and "phenomena,” so that phenomenology is defined as the art or practice of "letting things show themselves.” In Heidegger's inimitable linguistic play on the Greek roots, “phenomenology” means . . . - to let that which shows itself to be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. Here Heidegger explicitly parodies Husserl's call, "To the things themselves,” or "To the phenomena themselves!" Heidegger went on to emphasize practical forms of comportment or better relating (Verhalten) as in hammering a nail, as opposed to representational forms of intentionality as in seeing or thinking about a hammer. Much, of Being and Time develops an existential interpretation of our modes of being including, famously, our being-toward-death.
In a very different style, in clear analytical prose, in the text of a lecture course called The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), Heidegger traced the question of the meaning of being from Aristotle through many other thinkers into the issues of phenomenology. Our understanding of beings and their being comes ultimately through phenomenology. Here the connection with classical issues of ontology is more apparent, and consonant with Husserl's vision in the Logical Investigations (an early source of inspiration for Heidegger). One of Heidegger's most innovative ideas was his conception of the "ground" of being, looking to modes of being more fundamental than the things around us (from trees to hammers). Heidegger questioned the contemporary concern with technology, and his writing might suggest that our scientific theories are historical artifacts that we use in technological practice, rather than systems of ideal truth (as Husserl had held). Our deep understanding of being, in our own case, comes rather from phenomenology, Heidegger held.
In the 1930s phenomenology migrated from Austrian and then German philosophy into French philosophy. The way had been paved in Marcel Proust's in Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator recounts in close detail his vivid recollections of experiences, including his famous associations with the smell of freshly baked madeleines. This sensibility to experience traces to Descartes' work, and French phenomenology has been an effort to preserve the central thrust of Descartes' insights while rejecting mind-body dualism. The experience of one's own body, or one's lived or living body, has been an important motif in many French philosophers of the 20th century
In the novel Nausea (1936) Jean-Paul Sartre described a bizarre course of experience in which the protagonist, writing in the first person, describes how ordinary objects lose their meaning until he encounters pure being at the foot of a chestnut tree, and in that moment recovers his sense of his own freedom. In Being and Nothingness (1943, written partly while a prisoner of war), Sartre developed his conception of Phenomenological ontology. Consciousness is a consciousness of objects, as Husserl had stressed. In Sartre's model of intentionality, the central player in consciousness is a phenomenon, and the occurrence of a phenomenon is just a consciousness-of-an-object. The chestnut tree I see is, for Sartre, such a phenomenon in my consciousness. Indeed, all things in the world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath or behind which lies their "being-in-itself.” Consciousness, by contrast, has "being-for-itself,” inasmuch as consciousness is not only a consciousness-of-its-object but also a pre-reflective consciousness-of-itself (conscience de soi). Yet for Sartre, unlike Husserl, that "I" or self is nothing but a sequence of acts of consciousness, notably including radically free choices (like a Humean bundle of perceptions).
For Sartre, the practice of phenomenology proceeds by a deliberate reflection on the structure of consciousness. Sartre's method is in effect a literary style of interpretive description of different types of experience in relevant situations - a practice that does not really fit the methodological proposals of either Husserl or Heidegger, but makes use of Sartre's great literary skill. (Sartre wrote many plays and novels and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.)
Sartre's phenomenology in Being and Nothingness became the philosophical foundation for his popular philosophy of existentialism, sketched in his famous lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1945). In Being and Nothingness Sartre emphasized the experience of freedom of choice, especially the project of choosing oneself, the defining pattern of one's past actions. Through vivid description of the "look" of the Other, Sartre laid groundwork for the contemporary political significance of the concept of the Other (as in other groups or ethnicities). Indeed, in The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's life-long companion, launched contemporary feminism with her nuance account of the perceived role of women as Other.
In 1940s Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined with Sartre and Beauvoir in developing phenomenology. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty developed a rich variety of phenomenology emphasizing the role of the body in human experience. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty looked to experimental psychology, analysing the reported experience of amputees who felt sensations in a phantom limb. Merleau-Ponty rejected both associationist psychology, focussed on correlations between sensation and stimulus, and intellectualist psychology, focussed on rational construction of the world in the mind. (Think of the behaviorist and computationalist models of mind in more recent decades of empirical psychology.) Instead, Merleau-Ponty focussed on the "body image,” our experience of our own body and its significance in our activities. Extending Husserl's account of the lived body (as opposed to the physical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesian separation of mind and body. For the body image is neither in the mental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm. Rather, my body is, as it were, me in my engaged action with things I perceive including other people.
The scope of Phenomenology of Perception is characteristic of the breadth of classical phenomenology, not least because Merleau-Ponty drew (with generosity) on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre while fashioning his own innovative vision of phenomenology. His phenomenology addressed the role of attention in the phenomenal field, the experience of the body, the spatiality of the body, the motility of the body, the body in sexual being and in speech, other selves, temporality, and the character of freedom so important in French existentialism. Near the end of a chapter on the cogito (Descartes' "I think, therefore I am"), Merleau-Ponty succinctly captures his embodied, existential form of phenomenology, writing: Insofar as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity [= consciousness] is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, for when taken seriously, is inseparable from this body and this world. In short, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and equally body is infused with consciousness (with cognition of the world).
In the years since Hussserl, Heidegger, et al. wrote that phenomenologists have dug into all these classical issues, including intentionality, temporal awareness, intersubjectivity, practical intentionality, and the social and linguistic contexts of human activity. Interpretation of historical texts by Husserl et al. has played a prominent role in this work, both because the texts are rich and difficult and because the historical dimension is itself part of the practice of continental European philosophy. Since the 1960s, philosophers trained in the methods of analytic philosophy have also dug into the foundations of phenomenology, with an eye to 20th century work in philosophy of logic, language, and mind.
Phenomenology was already linked with logical and semantic theory in Husserl's Logical Investigations. Analytic phenomenology picks up on that connection. In particular, Dagfinn F¿llesdal and J. N. Mohanty have explored historical and conceptual relations between Husserl's phenomenology and Frége's logical semantics (in Frége's "On Sense and Reference,” 1892). For Frege, an expression refers to an object by way of a sense: Thus, two expressions (say, "the morning star" and "the evening star") may refer to the same object (Venus) but express different senses with different manners of presentation. For Husserl, similarly, an experience (or an act of consciousness) intends or refers to an object by way of a noema or noematic sense: Thus, two experiences may refer to the same object but have different noematic senses involving different ways of presenting the object (for example, in seeing the same object from different sides). Indeed, for Husserl, the theory of intentionality is a generalization of the theory of linguistic reference: as linguistic reference is mediated by sense, so intentional reference is mediated by noematic sense.
More recently, analytic philosophers of mind have rediscovered phenomenologically issues of mental representation, intentionality, consciousness, sensory experience, intentional content, and context-of-thought. Some of these analytic philosophers of mind hark back to William James and Franz Brentano at the origins of modern psychology, and some look to empirical research in today's cognitive neuroscience. Some researchers have begun to combine Phenomenological issues with issues of neuroscience and behavioural studies and mathematical modelling. Such studies will extend the methods of traditional phenomenology as the Zeitgeist moves on. We address philosophy of mind below.
The discipline of phenomenology forms one basic field in philosophy among others. How is phenomenology distinguished from, and related to, other fields in philosophy?
Traditionally, philosophy includes at least four core fields or disciplines: Ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic. Suppose phenomenology joins that list. Consider then these elementary definitions of field: (1) Ontology is the study of beings or their being - what is. (2) Epistemology is the study of knowledge - how we know. (3) Logic is the study of valid reasoning - how to reason. (4) Ethics is the study of right and wrong - how we should act. (5) Phenomenology is the study of our experience - how we experience. The domains of study in these five fields are clearly different, and they seem to call for different methods of study.
Philosophers have sometimes argued that one of these fields is "first philosophy,” the most fundamental discipline, on which all philosophy or all knowledge or wisdom rests. Historically (it may be argued), Socrates and Plato put ethics first, then Aristotle put metaphysics or ontology first, then Descartes put epistemology first, then Russell put logic first, and then Husserl (in his later transcendental phase) put phenomenology first.
Consider epistemology. As we saw, phenomenology helps to define the phenomena on which knowledge claims rest, according to modern epistemology. On the other hand, phenomenology itself claims to achieve knowledge about the nature of consciousness, a distinctive description of the first-person knowledge. Through a form of intuition, consider logic, as a logical theory of meaning led Husserl into the theory of intentionality, the heart of phenomenology. On one account, phenomenology explicates the intentional or semantic force of ideal meanings, and propositional meanings are central to logical theory. But logical structure is expressed in language, either ordinary language or symbolic languages like those of predicate logic or mathematics or computer systems. It remains an important issue of debate where and whether language shapes specific forms of experience (thought, perception, emotion) and their content or meaning. So there is an important (if disputed) relation between phenomenology and logico-linguistic theory, especially philosophical logic and philosophy of language (as opposed to mathematical logic per se)
Consider ontology. Phenomenology studies (among other things) the nature of consciousness, which is a central issue in metaphysics or ontology, and one that leads into the traditional mind-body problem. Husserlian methodology would bracket the question of the existence of the surrounding world, thereby separating phenomenology from the ontology of the world. Yet Husserl's phenomenology presupposes theory about species and individuals (universals and particulars), relations of part and whole, and ideal meanings - all parts of ontology
Now consider ethics: Phenomenology might play a role in ethics by offering analyses of the structure of will, valuing, happiness, and care for others (in empathy and sympathy). Historically, though, ethics has been on the horizon of phenomenology. Husserl largely avoided ethics in his major works, though he featured the role of practical concerns in the structure of the life-world or of Geist (spirit, or culture, as in Zeitgeist). He once delivered a course of lectures giving ethics (like logic) a basic place in philosophy, indicating the importance of the phenomenology of sympathy in grounding ethics. In Being and Time Heidegger claimed not to pursue ethics while discussing phenomena ranging from care, conscience, and guilt to "fallenness" and "authenticity" (all phenomena with theological echoes). In Being and Nothingness Sartre Analysed with subtlety the logical problem of "bad faith,” yet he developed an ontology of value as produced by willing in good faith (which sounds like a revised Kantian foundation for morality). Beauvoir sketched an existentialist ethics, and Sartre left unpublished notebooks on ethics. However, an explicit Phenomenological approach to ethics emerged in the works of Emannuel Levinas, a Lithuanian phenomenologist who heard Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg before moving to Paris. In Totality and Infinity (1961), modifying themes drawn from Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas focussed on the significance of the "face" of the other, explicitly developing grounds for ethics in this range of phenomenology, writing an impressionistic style of prose with allusions to religious experience.
Allied with ethics are political and social philosophies. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were politically engaged, in 1940s Paris and their existential philosophies (phenomenologically based) suggest a political theory based in individual freedom. Sartre later sought an explicit blend of existentialism with Marxism. Still, political theory has remained on the borders of phenomenology. Social theory, however, has been closer to phenomenology as such. Husserl Analysed the Phenomenological structure of the life-world and Geist generally, including our role in social activity. Heidegger stressed social practice, which he found more primordial than individual consciousness. Alfred Schutz developed a phenomenology of the social world. Sartre continued the Phenomenological appraisal of the meaning of the other, the fundamental social formation. Moving outward from Phenomenological issues, Michel Foucault studied the genesis and meaning of social institutions, from prisons to insane asylums. And Jacques Derrida has long practised a kind of phenomenology of language, pursuing sociologic meaning in the "deconstruction" of wide-ranging texts. Aspects of French "poststructuralist" theory are sometimes interpreted as broadly Phenomenological, but such issues are beyond the present purview.
Classical phenomenology, then, ties into certain areas of epistemology, logic, and ontology, and leads into parts of ethical, social, and political theory.
It ought to be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in the area called philosophy of mind. Yet the traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind have not been closely joined, despite overlapping areas of interest. So it is appropriate to close this survey of phenomenology by addressing philosophy of mind, one of the most vigorously debated areas in recent philosophy.
The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20th century, with analyses of language, notably in the works of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of language about different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will. Though Ryle is commonly deemed a philosopher of ordinary language, Ryle himself said The Concept of Mind could be called phenomenology. In effect, Ryle Analysed our Phenomenological understanding of mental states as reflected in ordinary language about the mind. From this linguistic phenomenology Ryle argued that Cartesian mind-body dualism involves a category mistake (the logic or grammar of mental verbs - "believe,” "see,” etc. - does not mean that we ascribe belief, sensation, etc., to "the ghost in the machine"). With Ryle's rejection of mind-body dualism, the mind-body problem was re-awakened: What is the ontology of mind/body, and how are mind and body related?
René Descartes, in his epoch-making Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), had argued that minds and bodies are two distinct kinds of being or substance with two distinct kinds of attributes or modes: Bodies are characterized by spatiotemporal physical properties, while minds are characterized by properties of thinking (including seeing, feeling, etc.). Centuries later, phenomenology would find, with Brentano and Husserl, that mental acts are characterized by consciousness and intentionality, while natural science would find that physical systems are characterized by mass and force, ultimately by gravitational, electromagnetic, and quantum fields. Where do we find consciousness and intentionality in the quantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that, by hypothesis, orders everything in the natural world in which we humans and our minds exist? That is the mind-body problem today. In short, phenomenology by any other name lies at the heart of the contemporary, mind-body problem.
After Ryle, philosophers sought a more explicit and generally naturalistic ontology of mind. In the 1950s materialism was argued anew, urging that mental states are identical with states of the central nervous system. The classical identity theory holds that each token mental state (in a particular person's mind at a particular time) is identical with a token brain state (in that a person's brain at that time). The weaker of materialisms, holds instead, that each type of mental state is identical with a type of brain state. But materialism does not fit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how conscious mental states as we experience them - sensations, thoughts, emotions - can simply be the complex neural states that somehow subserve or implement them. If mental states and neural states are simply identical, in token or in type, where in our scientific theory of mind does the phenomenology occur - is it not simply replaced by neuroscience? And yet experience is part of what is to be explained by neuroscience.
In the late 1960s and 1970s the computer model of mind set it, and functionalism became the dominant model of mind. On this model, mind is not what the brain consists in (electrochemical transactions in neurons in vast complexes). Instead, mind is what brains do: They are function of mediating between information coming into the organism and behaviour proceeding from the organism. Thus, a mental state is a functional state of the brain or of the human (or an animal) organism. More specifically, on a favourite variation of functionalism, the mind is a computing system: Mind is to brain as software is to hardware; Thoughts are just programs running on the brain's "NetWare.” Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences - from experimental studies of cognition to neuroscience - have tended toward a mix of materialism and functionalism. Gradually, however, philosophers found that Phenomenological aspects of the mind pose problems for the functionalist paradigm too.
In the early 1970s Thomas Nagel argued in "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) that consciousness itself - especially the subjective character of what it is like to have a certain type of experience - escapes physical theory. Many philosophers pressed the case that sensory qualia - what it is like to feel pain, to see red, etc. - are not addressed or explained by a physical account of either brain structure or brain function. Consciousness has properties of its own. And yet, we know, it is closely tied to the brain. And, at some level of description, neural activities implement computation.
In the 1980s John Searle argued in Intentionality (1983) (and further in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1991)) that intentionality and consciousness are essential properties of mental states. For Searle, our brains produce mental states with properties of consciousness and intentionality, and this is all part of our biology, yet consciousness and intentionality require to "first-person" ontology. Searle also argued that computers simulate but do not have mental states characterized by intentionality. As Searle argued, a computer system has a syntax (processing symbols of certain shapes) but has no semantics (the symbols lack meaning: we interpret the symbols). In this way Searle rejected both materialism and functionalism, while insisting that mind is a biological property of organisms like us: our brains "secrete" consciousness
The analysis of consciousness and intentionality is central to phenomenology as appraised above, and Searle's theory of intentionality reads like a modernized version of Husserl's. (Contemporary logical theory takes the form of stating truth conditions for propositions, and Searle characterizes a mental state's intentionality by specifying its "satisfaction conditions"). However, there is an important difference in background theory. For Searle explicitly assumes the basic worldview of natural science, holding that consciousness is part of nature. But Husserl explicitly brackets that assumption, and later phenomenologists - including Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty - seem to seek a certain sanctuary for phenomenology beyond the natural sciences. And yet phenomenology itself should be largely neutral about further theories of how experience arises, notably from brain activity.
The philosophy or theory of mind overall may be factored into the following disciplines or ranges of theory relevant to mind: Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced, analysing the structure - the types, intentional forms and meanings, dynamics, and (certain) enabling conditions - of perception, thought, imagination, emotion, and volition and action.
Neuroscience studies the neural activities that serve as biological substrate to the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience. Neuroscience will be framed by evolutionary biology (explaining how neural phenomena evolved) and ultimately by basic physics (explaining how biological phenomena are grounded in physical phenomena). Here lie the intricacies of the natural sciences. Part of what the sciences are accountable for is the structure of experience, Analysed by phenomenology.
Cultural analysis studies the social practices that help to shape or serve as cultural substrate of the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience. Here we study the import of language and other social practices.
Ontology of mind studies the ontological type of mental activity in general, ranging from perception (which involves causal input from environment to experience) to volitional action (which involves causal output from volition to bodily movement).
This division of labour in the theory of mind can be seen as an extension of Brentano's original distinction between descriptive and genetic psychology. Phenomenology offers descriptive analyses of mental phenomena, while neuroscience (and wider biology and ultimately physics) offers models of explanation of what causes or gives rise to mental phenomena. Cultural theory offers analyses of social activities and their impact on experience, including ways language shapes our thought, emotion, and motivation. And ontology frames all these results within a basic scheme of the structure of the world, including our own minds.
Meanwhile, from an epistemological standpoint, all these ranges of theory about mind begin with how we observe and reason about and seek to explain phenomena we encounter in the world. And that is where phenomenology begins. Moreover, how we understand each piece of theory, including theory about mind, is central to the theory of intentionality, as it was, the semantics of thought and experience in general. And that is the heart of phenomenology.
The discipline of phenomenology may be defined as the study of structures of experience or consciousness. Literally. , Phenomenology is the
Study of "phenomena": Appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meaning’s things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.
The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophical tradition launched in the first half of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre. In that movement, the discipline of phenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of all philosophy - as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. The methods and characterization of the discipline were widely debated by Husserl and his successors, and these debates continue to the present day. (The definition of phenomenology offered above will thus is debatable, for example, by Heideggerians, but it remains the starting point in characterizing the discipline.)
In recent philosophy of mind, the term "phenomenology" is often restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of various kinds. However, our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. Accordingly, in the Phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our "life-world.”
Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition of continental European philosophy throughout the 20th century, while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the 20th century. Yet the fundamental character of our mental activity is pursued in overlapping ways within these two traditions. Accordingly, the perspective on phenomenology drawn in this article will accommodate both traditions. The main concern here will be to characterize the discipline of phenomenology, in contemporary views, while also highlighting the historical tradition that brought the discipline into its own.
Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called "intentionality,” that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience remains directed towardly and represented or "intends" - things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean.
The basic intentional structure of consciousness, we find in reflection or analysis, involves further forms of experience. Thus, phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness (within the stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably in perception), attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or "horizonal" awareness), awareness of one's own experience (self-consciousness, in one sense), self-awareness (awareness-of-oneself), the self in different roles (as thinking, acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of one's movement), purposive intention for its desire for action (more or less explicit), awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity, collectivity), linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication, understanding others), social interaction (including collective action), and everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in a particular culture).
Furthermore, in a different dimension, we find various grounds or enabling conditions -conditions of the possibility - of intentionality, including embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context, language and other social practices, social background, and contextual aspects of intentional activities. Thus, phenomenology leads from conscious experience into conditions that help to give experience its intentionality. Traditional phenomenology has focussed on subjective, practical, and social conditions of experience. Recent philosophy of mind, however, has focussed especially on the neural substrate of experience, on how conscious experience and mental representation or intentionality is grounded in brain activity. It remains a difficult question how much of these grounds of experience fall within the province of phenomenology as a discipline. Cultural conditions thus seem closer to our experience and to our familiar self-understanding than do the electrochemical workings of our brain, much less our dependence on quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which we may belong. The cautious thing to say is that phenomenology leads in some ways into at least some background conditions of our experience.
Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant conditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the world.
We all experience various types of experience including perception, imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition, and action. Thus, the domain of phenomenology is the range of experiences including these types (among others). Experience includes not only relatively passive experience as in vision or hearing, but also active experience as in walking or hammering a nail or kicking a ball. (The range will be specific to each species of being that enjoys consciousness; Our focus is on our own, human, experience. Not all conscious beings will, or will be able to, practice phenomenology, as we do.)
Conscious experiences have a unique feature: We experience them, we live through them or perform them. Other things in the world we may observe and engage. But we do not experience them, in the sense of living through or performing them. This experiential or first-person feature - that of being experienced -is an essential part of the nature or structure of conscious experience: as we say, "I see / think / desire / do . . ." This feature is both a Phenomenological and an ontological feature of each experience: it is part of what it is for the experience to be experienced (Phenomenological) and part of what it is for the experience to be (ontological).
How shall we study conscious experience? We reflect on various types of experiences just as we experience them. That is to say, we proceed from the first-person point of view. However, we do not normally characterize an experience at the time we are performing it. In many cases we do not have that capability: a state of intense anger or fear, for example, consumes the entire focus at the time. Rather, we acquire a background of having lived through a given type of experience, and we look to our familiarity with that type of experience: While hearing a song, seeing the sun set, thinking about love, intending to jump a hurdle. The practice of phenomenology assumes such familiarity with the type of experiences to be characterized. Importantly, it is atypical of experience that phenomenology pursues, rather than a particular fleeting experience - unless its type is what interests us.
Classical phenomenologists practised some three distinguishable methods. (1) We describe a type of experience just as we find it in our own (past) experience. Thus, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty spoke of pure description of lived experience. (2) We interpret a type of experience by relating it to relevant features of context. In this vein, Heidegger and his followers spoke of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation in context, especially social and linguistic context. (3) We analyse the form of a type of experience. In the end, all the classical phenomenologists practised analysis of experience, factoring out notable features for further elaboration.
These traditional methods have been ramified in recent decades, expanding the methods available to phenomenology. Thus: (4) In a logico-semantic model of phenomenology, we specify the truth conditions for a type of thinking (say, where I think that dogs chase cats) or the satisfaction conditions for a type of intention (say, where I intend or will to jump that hurdle). (5) In the experimental paradigm of cognitive neuroscience, we design empirical experiments that tend to confirm or refute aspects of experience (say, where a brain scan shows electrochemical activity in a specific region of the brain thought to subserve a type of vision or emotion or motor control). This style of "neurophenomenology" assumes that conscious experience is grounded in neural activity in embodied action in appropriate surroundings - mixing pure phenomenology with biological and physical science in a way that was not wholly congenial to traditional phenomenologists.
What makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness one has of the experience while living through or performing it. This form of inner awareness has been a topic of considerable debate, centuries after the issue arose with Locke's notion of self-consciousness on the heels of Descartes' sense of consciousness (conscience, co-knowledge). Does this awareness-of-experience consist in a kind of inner observation of the experience, as if one were doing two things at once? (Brentano argued no.) Is it a higher-order perception of one's mind's operation, or is it a higher-order thought about one's mental activity? (Recent theorists have proposed both.) Or is it a different form of inherent structure? (Sartre took this line, drawing on Brentano and Husserl.) These issues are beyond the scope of this article, but notice that these results of Phenomenological analysis shape the characterization of the domain of study and the methodology appropriate to the domain. For awareness-of-experience is a defining trait of conscious experience, the trait that gives experience a first-person, lived character. It is that a living characterization resembling its self, that life is to offer the experience through which allows a first-person perspective on the object of study, namely, experience, and that perspective is characteristic of the methodology of phenomenology.
Conscious experience is the starting point of phenomenology, but experience shades off into fewer overtly conscious phenomena. As Husserl and others stressed, we are only vaguely aware of things in the margin or periphery of attention, and we are only implicitly aware of the wider horizon of things in the world around us. Moreover, as Heidegger stressed, in practical activities like walking along, or hammering a nail, or speaking our native tongue, we are not explicitly conscious of our habitual patterns of action. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts have stressed, much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at all, but may become conscious in the process of therapy or interrogation, as we come to realize how we feel or think about something. We should allow, then, that the domain of phenomenology - our own experience - spreads out from conscious experience into semiconscious and even unconscious mental activity, along with relevant background conditions implicitly invoked in our experience. (These issues are subject to debate; the point here is to open the door to the question of where to draw the boundary of the domain of phenomenology.)
To begin an elementary exercise in phenomenology, consider some typical experiences one might have in everyday life, characterized in the first person: (1) “I” witnesses that fishing boat off the coast as dusk descends over the Pacific. (2) I hear that helicopter whirring overhead as it approaches the hospital. (3) I am thinking that phenomenology differs from psychology. (4) I wish that warm rain from Mexico were falling like last week. (5) I imagine a fearsome creature like that in my nightmare. (6) I intend to finish my writing by noon. (7) I walk carefully around the broken glass on the sidewalk. (8) I stroke a backhand cross-court with that certain underspin. (9) I am searching for the words to make my point in conversation.
Here are rudimentary characterizations of some familiar types of experience. Each sentence is a simple form of Phenomenological description, articulating in everyday English the structure of the type of experience so described. The subject term of "I,” indicates the first-person structure of the experience: The intentionality proceeds from the subject. As the verb indicates, the type of intentional activity so described, as perception, thought, imagination, etc. Of central importance is the way that objects of awareness are presented or intended in our experiences, especially, the way we see or conceive or think about objects. The direct-object expression ("that fishing boat off the coast") articulates the mode of presentation of the object in the experience: The content or meaning of the experience, the core of what Husser called noema. In effect, the object-phrase expresses the noema of the act described, that is, to the extent that language has appropriate expressive power. The overall form of the given sentence articulates of a basic form of intentionality, in that of an experience has to its own subject-act-content-object.
Fruitful Phenomenological description or interpretation, as in Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, will far outrun such simple Phenomenological descriptions as above. But such simple descriptions bring out the basic form of intentionality. As we interpret the Phenomenological description further, we may assess the relevance of the context of experience. And we may turn to wider conditions of the possibility of that type of experience. In this way, in the practice of phenomenology, we classify, describe, interpret, and analyse structures of experiences in ways that answer to our own experience.
In such interpretive-descriptive analyses of experience, we immediately observe that we are analysing familiar forms of consciousness, conscious experience of or about this or that. Intentionality is thus the salient structure of our experience, and much of the phenomenology proceeds as the study of different aspects of intentionality. Thus, we explore structures of the stream of consciousness, the enduring self, the embodied self, and bodily action. Furthermore, as we reflect on how these phenomena work, we turn to the analysis of relevant conditions that enable our experiences to occur as they do, and to represent or intend as they do. Phenomenology then leads into analyses of conditions of the possibility of intentionality, conditions involving motor skills and habits, backgrounding to social practices, and often language, with its special place in human affairs. The Oxford English Dictionary presents the following definition: "Phenomenology. (i) The science of phenomena as distinct from being (ontology). (ii) That division of any science that describes and classifies its phenomena. From the Greek phainomenon, appearance." In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, amid debates of theory and methodology. In physics and philosophy of science, the term is used in the second sense, even if only occasionally.
In its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study of phenomena: Literally, appearances as opposed to reality. This ancient distinction launched philosophy as we emerged from Plato's cave. Yet the discipline of phenomenology did not blossom until the 20th century and remains poorly understood in many circles of contemporary philosophy. What is that discipline? How did philosophy move from a root concept of phenomena to the discipline of phenomenology?
Originally, in the 18th century, "phenomenology" meant the theory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especially sensory appearances. The term seems to have been introduced by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. Subsequently, Immanuel Kant used the term occasionally in various writings, as did Johann Gottlieb Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel. By 1889 Franz Brentano used the term to characterize what he called "descriptive psychology.” From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for his new science of consciousness, and the rest is history.
Suppose we say phenomenology study’s phenomena: what appears to us - and its appearing? How shall we understand phenomena? The term has a rich history in recent centuries, in which we can see traces of the emerging discipline of phenomenology.
In a strict empiricist vein, what appears before the mind are sensory data or qualia: either patterns of one's own sensations (seeing red here now, feeling this ticklish feeling, hearing that resonant bass tone) or sensible patterns of worldly things, say, the looks and smells of flowers (what John Locke called secondary qualities of things). In a strict rationalist vein, by contrast, what appears before the mind are ideas, rationally formed "clear and distinct ideas" (in René Descartes' ideal). In Immanuel Kant's theory of knowledge, fusing rationalist and empiricist aims, what appears to the mind are phenomena defined as things-as-they-appear or things-as-they-are-represented (in a synthesis of sensory and conceptual forms of objects-as-known). In Auguste Comte's theory of science, phenomena (phenomenes) are the facts (faits, what occurs) that a given science would explain.
In 18th and 19th century epistemology, then, phenomena are the starting points in building knowledge, especially science. Accordingly, in a familiar and still current sense, phenomena are whatever we observe (perceive) and seek to explain.
As the discipline of psychology emerged late in the 19th century, however, phenomena took on a somewhat different guise. In Franz Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), phenomena are of what occurs in the mind: Mental phenomena are acts of consciousness (or their contents), and physical phenomena are objects of external perception starting with colours and shapes. For Brentano, physical phenomena exist "intentionally" in acts of consciousness. This view revives a Medieval notion Brentano called "intentional in-existence. However, the ontology remains undeveloped (what is it to exist in the mind, and do physical objects exist only in the mind?). Moreover, phenomenons are whatever we are conscious of, as a phenomenon might that its events lay succumbantly around us, other people, ourselves. Even (in reflection) our own conscious experiences, as we experience these. In a certain technical sense, phenomena are things as they are given to our consciousness, whether in perception or imagination or thought or volition. This conception of phenomena would soon inform the new discipline of phenomenology.
Brentano distinguished descriptive psychology from genetic psychology. Where genetic psychology seeks the causes of various types of mental phenomena, descriptive psychology defines and classifies the various types of mental phenomena, including perception, judgment, emotion, etc. According to Brentano, every mental phenomenon, or act of consciousness, is directed toward some object, and only mental phenomena are so directed. This thesis of intentional directedness was the hallmark of Brentano's descriptive psychology. In 1889 Brentano used the term "phenomenology" for descriptive psychology, and the way was paved for Husserl's new science of phenomenology.
Phenomenology as we know it was launched by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations (1900-01). Two importantly different lines of theory came together in that monumental work: Psychological theory, on the heels of Franz Brentano (and William James, whose Principles of Psychology appeared in 1891 and greatly impressed Husserl); And logical or semantic theory, on the heels of Bernard Bolzano and Hussserl's contemporaries who founded modern logic, including Gottlob Frege. (Interestingly, both lines of research trace back to Aristotle, and both reached importantly new results in Hussserl's day.)
Hussserl's Logical Investigations was inspired by Bolzano's ideal of logic, while taking up Brentano's conception of descriptive psychology. In his Theory of Science (1835) Bolzano distinguished between subjective and objective ideas or representations (Vorstellungen). In effect Bolzano criticized Kant and before him the classical empiricists and rationalists for failing to make this sort of distinction, thereby rendering phenomena merely subjective. Logic studies objective ideas, including propositions, which in turn make up objective theories as in the sciences. Psychology would, by contrast, study subjective ideas, the concrete contents (occurrences) of mental activities in particular minds at a given time. Husserl was after both, within a single discipline. So phenomena must be reconceived as objective intentional contents (sometimes called intentional objects) of subjective acts of consciousness. Phenomenology would then study this complex of consciousness and correlated phenomena. In Ideas I (Book One, 1913) Husserl introduced two Greek words to capture his version of the Bolzanoan distinction: noesis and noema (from the Greek verb noéaw, meaning to perceive, think, intend, from what place the noun nous or mind). The intentional process of consciousness is called noesis, while its ideal content is called noema. The noema of an act of consciousness Husserl characterized both as an ideal meaning and as "the object as intended.” Thus the phenomenon, or object-as-it-appears, becomes the noema, or object-as-it-is-intended. The interpretations of Husserl's theory of noema have been several and amount to different developments of Husserl's basic theory of intentionality. (Is the noema an aspect of the object intended, or rather a medium of intention?)
For Husserl, then, phenomenology integrates a kind of psychology with a kind of logic. It develops a descriptive or analytic psychology in that it describes and analytical divisions of subjective mental activity or experience, in short, acts of consciousness. Yet it develops a kind of logic - a theory of meaning (today we say logical semantics) -by that, it describes and approves to analytical justification that an objective content of consciousness, brings forthwith the ideas, concepts, images, propositions, in short, ideal meanings of various types that serve as intentional contents, or noematic meanings, of various types of experience. These contents are shareable by different acts of consciousness, and in that sense they are objective, ideal meanings. Following Bolzano (and to some extent the platonistic logician Hermann Lotze), Husserl opposed any reduction of logic or mathematics or science to mere psychology, to how human beings happen to think, and in the same spirit he distinguished phenomenology from mere psychology. For Husserl, phenomenology would study consciousness without reducing the objective and shareable meanings that inhabit experience to merely subjective happenstances. Ideal meaning would be the engine of intentionality in acts of consciousness.
A clear conception of phenomenology awaited Husserl's development of a clear model of intentionality. Indeed, phenomenology and the modern concept of intentionality emerged hand-in-hand in Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900-01). With theoretical foundations laid in the Investigations, Husserl would then promote the radical new science of phenomenology in Ideas. And alternative visions of phenomenology would soon follow.
Phenomenology came into its own with Husserl, much as epistemology came into its own with Descartes, and ontology or metaphysics came into its own with Aristotle on the heels of Plato. Yet phenomenology has been practised, with or without the name, for many centuries. When Hindu and Buddhist philosophers reflected on states of consciousness achieved in a variety of meditative states, they were practising phenomenology. When Descartes, Hume, and Kant characterized states of perception, thought, and imagination, they were practising phenomenology. When Brentano classified varieties of mental phenomena (defined by the directedness of consciousness), he was practising phenomenology. When William James appraised kinds of mental activity in the stream of consciousness (including their embodiment and their dependence on habit), he too was practising phenomenology. And when recent analytic philosophers of mind have addressed issues of consciousness and intentionality, they have often been practising phenomenology. Still, the discipline of phenomenology, its roots tracing back through the centuries, came full to flower in Husserl.
Husserl's work was followed by a flurry of Phenomenological writing in the first half of the 20th century. The diversity of traditional phenomenology is apparent in the Encyclopaedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, Dordrecht and Boston), which features separate articles on some seven types of phenomenology. (1) Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in pure or transcendental consciousness, setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world around us. (2) Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology studies how consciousness constitutes or takes things in the world of nature, assuming with the natural attitude that consciousness is part of nature. (3) Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence, including our experience of free choice or action in concrete situations. (4) Generative historicist phenomenology studies how meaning, as found in our experience, is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time. (5) Genetic phenomenology studies the genesis of meanings of things within one's own stream of experience. (6) Hermeneutical phenomenology studies interpretive structures of experience, how we understand and engage things around us in our human world, including ourselves and others. (7) Realistic phenomenology studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality, assuming it occurs in a real world that is largely external to consciousness and not somehow brought into being by consciousness.
The most famous of the classical phenomenologists were Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. In these four thinkers we find different conceptions of phenomenology, different methods, and different results. A brief sketch of their differences will capture both a crucial period in the history of phenomenology and a sense of the diversity of the field of phenomenology.
In his Logical Investigations (1900-01) Husserl outlined a complex system of philosophy, moving from logic to philosophy of language, to ontology (theory of universals and parts of wholes), to a Phenomenological theory of intentionality, and finally to a Phenomenological theory of knowledge. Then in Ideas I (1913) he focussed squarely on phenomenology itself. Husserl defined phenomenology as "the science of the essence of consciousness,” entered on the defining trait of intentionality, approached explicitly "in the first person." In this spirit, we may say phenomenology is the study of consciousness - that is, conscious experience of various types - as experienced from the first-person point of view. In this discipline we study different forms of experience just as we experience them, from the perspective of its topic for living through or performing them. Thus, we characterize experiences of seeing, hearing, imagining, thinking, feeling (i.e., emotion), wishing, desiring, willing, and acting, that is, embodied volitional activities of walking, talking, cooking, carpentering, etc. However, not just any characterization of an experience will do. Phenomenological analysis of a given type of experience will feature the ways in which we ourselves would experience that form of conscious activity. And the leading property of our familiar types of experience is their intentionality, their being a consciousness of or about something, something experienced or presented or engaged in a certain way. How I see or conceptualize or understand the object I am dealing with defines the meaning of that object in my current experience. Thus, phenomenology features a study of meaning, in a wide sense that includes more than what is expressed in language.
In Ideas, Husserl presented phenomenology with a transcendental turn. In part this means that Husserl took on the Kantian idiom of "transcendental idealism,” looking for conditions of the possibility of knowledge, or of consciousness generally, and arguably turning away from any reality beyond phenomena. But Hussserl's transcendental, and turns to involve his discovery of the method of epoché (from the Greek skeptics' notion of abstaining from belief). We are to practice phenomenology, Husserl proposed, by "bracketing" the question of the existence of the natural world around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to the structure of our own conscious experience. Our first key result is the observation that each act of consciousness is a consciousness of something, that is, intentional, or directed toward something. Consider my visual experience wherein I see a tree across the square. In Phenomenological reflection, we need not concern ourselves with whether the tree exists: my experience is of a tree whether or not such a tree exists. However, we do need to concern ourselves with how the object is meant or intended. I see a Eucalyptus tree, not a Yucca tree; I see the object as a Eucalyptus tree, with a certain shape, with bark stripping off, etc. Thus, bracketing the tree itself, we turn our attention to my experience of the tree, and specifically to the content or meaning in my experience. This tree-as-perceived Husserl calls the noema or noematic sense of the experience.
Philosophers succeeding Husserl debated the proper characterization of phenomenology, arguing over its results and its methods. Adolf Reinach, an early student of Husserl's (who died in World War I), argued that phenomenology should remain cooperatively affiliated within there be of the view that finds to some associative values among the finer qualities that have to them the realist’s ontology, as in Husserl's Logical Investigations. Roman Ingarden, a Polish phenomenologist of the next generation, continued the resistance to Hussserl's turn to transcendental idealism. For such philosophers, phenomenology should not bracket questions of being or ontology, as the method of epoché would suggest. And they were not alone. Martin Heidegger studied Hussserl's early writings, worked as Assistant to Husserl in 1916, and in 1928 Husserl was to succeed in the prestigious chair at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger had his own ideas about phenomenology.
In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger unfurled his rendition of phenomenology. For Heidegger, we and our activities are always "in the world,” our being is being-in-the-world, so we do not study our activities by bracketing the world, rather we interpret our activities and the meaning things have for us by looking to our contextual relations to things in the world. Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenology resolves into what he called "fundamental ontology.” We must distinguish beings from their being, and we begin our investigation of the meaning of being in our own case, examining our own existence in the activity of "Dasein" (that being whose being is in each case my own). Heidegger resisted Husserl's neo-Cartesian emphasis on consciousness and subjectivity, including how perception presents things around us. By contrast, Heidegger held that our more basic ways of relating to things are in practical activities like hammering, where the phenomenology reveals our situation in a context of equipment and in being-with-others
In Being and Time Heidegger approached phenomenology, in a quasi-poetic idiom, through the root meanings of "logos" and "phenomena,” so that phenomenology is defined as the art or practice of "letting things show themselves.” In Heidegger's inimitable linguistic play on the Greek roots, “phenomenology” means, . . . to let that which shows itself be seen from themselves in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. Here Heidegger explicitly parodies Hussserl's call, "To the things themselves!", or "To the phenomena themselves!" Heidegger went on to emphasize practical forms of comportment or better relating (Verhalten) as in hammering a nail, as opposed to representational forms of intentionality as in seeing or thinking about a hammer. Being and Time developed an existential interpretation of our modes of being including, famously, our being-toward-death.
In a very different style, in clear analytical prose, in the text of a lecture course called The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), Heidegger traced the question of the meaning of being from Aristotle through many other thinkers into the issues of phenomenology. Our understanding of beings and their being comes ultimately through phenomenology. Here the connection with classical issues of ontology is more apparent, and consonant with Hussserl's vision in the Logical Investigations (an early source of inspiration for Heidegger). One of Heidegger's most innovative ideas was his conception of the "ground" of being, looking to modes of being more fundamental than the things around us (from trees to hammers). Heidegger questioned the contemporary concern with technology, and his writing might suggest that our scientific theories are historical artifacts that we use in technological practice, rather than systems of ideal truth (as Husserl had held). Our deep understanding of being, in our own case, comes rather from phenomenology, Heidegger held.
In the 1930s phenomenology migrated from Austrian and then German philosophy into French philosophy. The way had been paved in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator recounts in close detail his vivid recollections of experiences, including his famous associations with the smell of freshly baked madeleines. This sensibility to experience traces to Descartes' work, and French phenomenology has been an effort to preserve the central thrust of Descartes' insights while rejecting mind-body dualism. The experience of one's own body, or one's lived or living body, has been an important motif in many French philosophers of the 20th century.
In the novel Nausea (1936) Jean-Paul Sartre described a bizarre course of experience in which the protagonist, writing in the first person, describes how ordinary objects lose their meaning until he encounters pure being at the foot of a chestnut tree, and in that moment recovers his sense of his own freedom. In Being and Nothingness (1943, written partly while a prisoner of war), Sartre developed his conception of Phenomenological ontology. Consciousness is a consciousness of objects, as Husserl had stressed. In Sartre's model of intentionality, the central player in consciousness is a phenomenon, and the occurrence of a phenomenon is just a consciousness-of-an-object. The chestnut tree I see is, for Sartre, such a phenomenon in my consciousness. Indeed, all things in the world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath or behind which lies their "being-in-itself.” Consciousness, by contrast, has "being-for-itself,” since everything conscious is not only a consciousness-of-its-object but also a pre-reflective consciousness-of-itself (conscience). Yet for Sartre, unlike Husserl, the formal "I" or self is nothing but a sequence of acts of consciousness, notably including radically free choices (like a Humean bundle of perceptions).
For Sartre, the practice of phenomenology proceeds by a deliberate reflection on the structure of consciousness. Sartre's method is in effect a literary style of interpretive description of different types of experience in relevant situations - a practice that does not really fit the methodological proposals of either Husserl or Heidegger, but makes benefit from Sartre's great literary skill. (Sartre wrote many plays and novels and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.)
Sartre's phenomenology in Being and Nothingness became the philosophical foundation for his popular philosophy of existentialism, sketched in his famous lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1945). In Being and Nothingness Sartre emphasized the experience of freedom of choice, especially the project of choosing oneself, the defining pattern of one's past actions. Through vivid description of the "look" of the Other, Sartre laid groundwork for the contemporary political significance of the concept of the Other (as in other groups or ethnicities). Indeed, in The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's life-long companion, launched contemporary feminism with her nuance account of the perceived role of women as Other.
In 1940s Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined with Sartre and Beauvoir in developing phenomenology. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty developed a rich variety of phenomenology emphasizing the role of the body in human experience. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty looked to experimental psychology, analysing the reported experience of amputees who felt sensations in a phantom limb. Merleau-Ponty rejected both associationist psychology, focussed on correlations between sensation and stimulus, and intellectualist psychology, focussed on rational construction of the world in the mind. (Think of the behaviorist and computationalist models of mind in more recent decades of empirical psychology.) Instead, Merleau-Ponty focussed on the "body image,” our experience of our own body and its significance in our activities. Extending Hussserl's account of the lived body (as opposed to the physical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesian separation of mind and body. For the body image is neither in the mental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm. Rather, my body is, as it were, me in my engaged action with things I perceive including other people.
The scope of Phenomenology of Perception is characteristic of the breadth of classical phenomenology, not least because Merleau-Ponty drew (with generosity) on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre while fashioning his own innovative vision of phenomenology. His phenomenology addressed the role of attention in the phenomenal field, the experience of the body, the spatiality of the body, the motility of the body, the body in sexual being and in speech, other selves, temporality, and the character of freedom so important in French existentialism. Near the end of a chapter on the cogito (Descartes' "I think, therefore I am"), Merleau-Ponty succinctly captures his embodied, existential form of phenomenology, writing: Insofar as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity [= consciousness] is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when appropriated concrete, it is inseparable from this body and this world.
In short, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and equally body is infused with consciousness (with cognition of the world).
In the years since Hussserl, Heidegger, et al, wrote that its topic or ways of conventional study are to phenomenologists of having in accord dug into all these classical disseminations that include, intentionality, temporal awareness, intersubjectivity, practical intentionality, and the social and linguistic contexts of human activity. Interpretation of historical texts by Husserl et al. has played a prominent role in this work, both because the texts are rich and difficult and because the historical dimension is itself part of the practice of continental European philosophy. Since the 1960s, philosophers trained in the methods of analytic philosophy have also dug into the foundations of phenomenology, with an eye to 20th century work in philosophy of logic, language, and mind.
Phenomenology was already linked with logical and semantic theory in Husserl's Logical Investigations. Analytic phenomenology picks up on that connection. In particular, Dagfinn F¿llesdal and J. N. Mohanty have explored historical and conceptual relations between Husserl's phenomenology and Frége's logical semantics (in Frége's "On Sense and Reference,” 1892). For Frége, an expression refers to an object by way of a sense: Thus, two expressions (say, "the morning star" and "the evening star") may refer to the same object (Venus) but express different senses with different manners of presentation. For Husserl, similarly, an experience (or act of consciousness) intends or refers to an object by way of a noema or noematic sense: Consequently, two experiences may refer to the same object but have different noematic senses involving different ways of presenting the object (for example, in seeing the same object from different sides). Indeed, for Husserl, the theory of intentionality is a generalization of the theory of linguistic reference: as linguistic reference is mediated by sense, so intentional reference is mediated by noematic sense.
More recently, analytic philosophers of mind have rediscovered Phenomenological issues of mental representation, intentionality, consciousness, sensory experience, intentional content, and context-of-thought. Some of these analytic philosophers of mind hark back to William James and Franz Brentano at the origins of modern psychology, and some look to empirical research in today's cognitive neuroscience. Some researchers have begun to combine Phenomenological issues with issues of neuroscience and behavioural studies and mathematical modelling. Such studies will extend the methods of traditional phenomenology as the Zeitgeist moves on.
The discipline of phenomenology forms one basic field in philosophy among others. How is phenomenology distinguished from, and related to, other fields in philosophy?
Traditionally, philosophy includes at least four core fields or disciplines: Ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic presupposes phenomenology as it joins that list. Consider then these elementary definitions of field: (1) Ontology is the study of beings or their being - what is. (2) Epistemology is the study of knowledge - how we know. (3) Logic is the study of valid reasoning - how to reason. (4) Ethics is the study of right and wrong - how we should act. (5) Phenomenology is the study of our experience - how we experience.
The domains of study in these five fields are clearly different, and they seem to call for different methods of study.
Philosophers have sometimes argued that one of these fields is "first philosophy,” the most fundamental discipline, on which all philosophy or all knowledge or wisdom rests. Historically (it may be argued), Socrates and Plato put ethics first, then Aristotle put metaphysics or ontology first, then Descartes put epistemology first, then Russell put logic first, and then Husserl (in his later transcendental phase) put phenomenology first.
Consider epistemology. As we saw, phenomenology helps to define the phenomena on which knowledge claims rest, according to modern epistemology. On the other hand, phenomenology itself claims to achieve knowledge about the nature of consciousness, a distinctive description of first-person knowledge, through a form of intuition.
Consider logic saw being a logical theory of meaning, in that this had persuaded Husserl into the theory of intentionality, the heart of phenomenology. On one account, phenomenology explicates the intentional or semantic force of ideal meanings, and propositional meanings are central to logical theory. But logical structure is expressed in language, either ordinary language or symbolic languages like those of predicate logic or mathematics or computer systems. It remains an important issue of debate where and whether language shapes specific forms of experience (thought, perception, emotion) and their content or meaning. So there is an important (if disputed) relation between phenomenology and logico-linguistic theory, especially philosophical logic and philosophy of language (as opposed to mathematical logic per se).
Consider ontology. Phenomenology studies (among other things) the nature of consciousness, which is a central issue in metaphysics or ontology, and one that lead into the traditional mind-body problem. Husserlian methodology would bracket the question of the existence of the surrounding world, thereby separating phenomenology from the ontology of the world. Yet Husserl's phenomenology presupposes theory about species and individuals (universals and particulars), relations of part and whole, and ideal meanings - all parts of ontology.
Now consider ethics. Phenomenology might play a role in ethics by offering analyses of the structure of will, valuing, happiness, and care for others (in empathy and sympathy). Historically, though, ethics has been on the horizon of phenomenology. Husserl largely avoided ethics in his major works, though he featured the role of practical concerns in the structure of the life-world or of Geist (spirit, or culture, as in Zeitgeist). He once delivered a course of lectures giving ethics (like logic) a basic place in philosophy, indicating the importance of the phenomenology of sympathy in grounding ethics. In Being and Time Heidegger claimed not to pursue ethics while discussing phenomena ranging from care, conscience, and guilt to "fallenness" and "authenticity" (all phenomena with theological echoes). In Being and Nothingness Sartre analysed with subtlety the logical problem of "bad faith,” yet he developed an ontology of value as produced by willing in good faith (which sounds like a revised Kantian foundation for morality). Beauvoir sketched an existentialist ethics, and Sartre left unpublished notebooks on ethics. However, an explicit Phenomenological approach to ethics emerged in the works of Emannuel Levinas, a Lithuanian phenomenologist who heard Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg before moving to Paris. In Totality and Infinity (1961), modifying themes drawn from Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas focussed on the significance of the "face" of the other, explicitly developing grounds for ethics in this range of phenomenology, writing an impressionistic style of prose with allusions to religious experience.
Allied with ethics that on the same line, signify political and social philosophy. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were politically captivated in 1940s Paris, and their existential philosophies (phenomenologically based) suggest a political theory based in individual freedom. Sartre later sought an explicit blend of existentialism with Marxism. Still, political theory has remained on the borders of phenomenology. Social theory, however, has been closer to phenomenology as such. Husserl analysed the Phenomenological structure of the life-world and Geist generally, including our role in social activity. Heidegger stressed social practice, which he found more primordial than individual consciousness. Alfred Schutz developed a phenomenology of the social world. Sartre continued the Phenomenological appraisal of the meaning of the other, the fundamental social formation. Moving outward from Phenomenological issues, Michel Foucault studied the genesis and meaning of social institutions, from prisons to insane asylums. And Jacques Derrida has long practised a kind of phenomenology of language, seeking socially meaning in the "deconstruction" of wide-ranging texts. Aspects of French "poststructuralist" theory are sometimes interpreted as broadly Phenomenological, but such issues are beyond the present purview.
Classical phenomenology, then, ties into certain areas of epistemology, logic, and ontology, and leads into parts of ethical, social, and political theory.
It ought to be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in the area called philosophy of mind. Yet the traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind have not been closely joined, despite overlapping areas of interest. So it is appropriate to close this survey of phenomenology by addressing philosophy of mind, one of the most vigorously debated areas in recent philosophy.
The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20th century, with analyses of language, notably in the works of Gottlob Frége, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of language about different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will. Though Ryle is commonly deemed a philosopher of ordinary language, Ryle himself said The Concept of Mind could be called phenomenology. In effect, Ryle analysed our Phenomenological understanding of mental states as reflected in ordinary language about the mind. From this linguistic phenomenology Ryle argued that Cartesian mind-body dualism involves a category mistake (the logic or grammar of mental verbs - "believe,” "see,” etc. -does not mean that we ascribe belief, sensation, etc., to "the ghost in the machine"). With Ryle's rejection of mind-body dualism, the mind-body problem was re-awakened: What is the ontology of mind/body, and how are mind and body related?
René Descartes, in his epoch-making Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), had argued that minds and bodies are two distinct kinds of being or substance with two distinct kinds of attributes or modes: bodies are characterized by spatiotemporal physical properties, while minds are characterized by properties of thinking (including seeing, feeling, etc.). Centuries later, phenomenology would find, with Brentano and Husserl, that mental acts are characterized by consciousness and intentionality, while natural science would find that physical systems are characterized by mass and force, ultimately by gravitational, electromagnetic, and quantum fields. Where do we find consciousness and intentionality in the quantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that, by hypothesis, orders everything in the natural world in which we humans and our minds exist? That is the mind-body problem today. In short, phenomenology by any other name lies at the heart of the contemporary, mind-body problem.
After Ryle, philosophers sought a more explicit and generally naturalistic ontology of mind. In the 1950s materialism was argued anew, urging that mental states are identical with states of the central nervous system. The classical identity theory holds that each token mental state (in a particular person's mind at a particular time) is identical with a token brain state (in that person's brain at that time). A weaker materialism holds, instead, that each type of mental state is identical with a type of brain state. But materialism does not fit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how conscious mental states as we experience them - sensations, thoughts, emotions - can simply be the complex neural states that somehow subserve or implement them. If mental states and neural states are simply identical, in token or in type, where in our scientific theory of mind does the phenomenology occur - is it not simply replaced by neuroscience? And yet experience is part of what is to be explained by neuroscience.
In the late 1960s and 1970s the computer model of mind set it, and functionalism became the dominant model of mind. On this model, mind is not what the brain consists in (electrochemical transactions in neurons in vast complexes). Instead, mind is what brains do: They are function of mediating between information coming into the organism and behaviour proceeding from the organism. Thus, a mental state is a functional state of the brain or of the human or an animal organism. More specifically, on a favourite variation of functionalism, the mind is a computing system: Mind is to brain as software is to hardware; Thoughts are just programs running on the brain's "NetWare.” Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences - from experimental studies of cognition to neuroscience - have tended toward a mix of materialism and functionalism. Gradually, however, philosophers found that Phenomenological aspects of the mind pose problems for the functionalist paradigm too.
In the early 1970s Thomas Nagel argued in "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) that consciousness itself - especially the subjective character of what it is like to have a certain type of experience - escapes physical theory. Many philosophers pressed the case that sensory qualia - what it is like to feel pain, to see red, etc. - are not addressed or explained by a physical account of either brain structure or brain function. Consciousness has properties of its own. And yet, we know, it is closely tied to the brain. And, at some level of description, neural activities implement computation.
In the 1980s John Searle argued in Intentionality (1983) (and further in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1991)) that intentionality and consciousness are essential properties of mental states. For Searle, our brains produce mental states with properties of consciousness and intentionality, and this is all part of our biology, yet consciousness and intentionality require the "first-person" ontology. Searle also argued that computers simulate but do not have mental states characterized by intentionality. As Searle argued, a computer system has of the syntax (processing symbols of certain shapes) but has no semantics (the symbols lack meaning: We interpret the symbols). In this way Searle rejected both materialism and functionalism, while insisting that mind is a biological property of organisms like us: Our brains "secrete" consciousness.
The analysis of consciousness and intentionality is central to phenomenology as appraised above, and Searle's theory of intentionality reads like a modernized version of Husserl's. (Contemporary logical theory takes the form of stating truth conditions for propositions, and Searle characterizes a mental state's intentionality by specifying its "satisfaction conditions"). However, there is an important difference in background theory. For Searle explicitly assumes the basic worldview of natural science, holding that consciousness is part of nature. But Husserl explicitly brackets that assumption, and later phenomenologists - including Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty - seem to seek a certain sanctuary for phenomenology beyond the natural sciences. And yet phenomenology itself should be largely neutral about further theories of how experience arises, notably from brain activity.
The philosophy or theory of mind overall may be factored into the following disciplines or ranges of theory relevant to mind: Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced, analysing the structure - the types, intentional forms and meanings, dynamics, and (certain) enabling conditions - of perception, thought, imagination, emotion, and volition and action.
Neuroscience studies the neural activities that serve as biological substrate to the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience. Neuroscience will be framed by evolutionary biology (explaining how neural phenomena evolved) and ultimately by basic physics (explaining how biological phenomena are grounded in physical phenomena). Here lie the intricacies of the natural sciences. Part of what the sciences are accountable for is the structure of experience, analysed by phenomenology.
Cultural analysis studies the social practices that help to shape or serve as cultural substrate of the various types of mental activity, including conscious experience. Here we study the import of language and other social practices. Ontology of mind studies the ontological type of mental activity in general, ranging from perception (which involves causal input from environment to experience) to volitional action (which involves causal output from volition to bodily movement).
This division of labour in the theory of mind can be seen as an extension of Brentano's original distinction between descriptive and genetic psychology. Phenomenology offers descriptive analyses of mental phenomena, while neuroscience (and wider biology and ultimately physics) offers models of explanation of what causes or gives rise to mental phenomena. Cultural theory offers analyses of social activities and their impact on experience, including ways language shapes our thought, emotion, and motivation. And ontology frames all these results within a basic scheme of the structure of the world, including our own minds.
Meanwhile, from an epistemological standpoint, all these ranges of theory about mind begin with how we observe and reason about and seek to explain phenomena we encounter in the world. And that is where phenomenology begins. Moreover, how we understand each piece of theory, including theory about mind, is central to the theory of intentionality, as it were, the semantics of thought and experience in general. And that is the heart of phenomenology.
There is potentially a rich and productive interface between neuroscience/cognitive science. The two traditions, however, have evolved largely independent, based on differing sets of observations and objectives, and tend to use different conceptual frameworks and vocabulary representations. The distributive contributions to each their dynamic functions of finding a useful common reference to further exploration of the relations between neuroscience/cognitive science and psychoanalysis/psychotherapy.
Forthwith, is the existence of a historical gap between neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy is being productively closed by, among other things, the suggestion that recent understandings of the nervous system as a modeler and predictor bear a close and useful similarity to the concepts of projection and transference. The gap could perhaps be valuably narrowed still further by a comparison in the two traditions of the concepts of the "unconscious" and the "conscious" and the relations between the two. It is suggested that these be understood as two independent "story generators" - each with different styles of function and both operating optimally as reciprocal contributors to each others' ongoing story evolution. A parallel and comparably optimal relation might be imagined for neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy.
For the sake of argument, imagine that human behaviour and all that it entails (including the experience of being a human and interacting with a world that includes other humans) is a function of the nervous system. If this were so, then there would be lots of different people who are making observations of (perhaps different) aspects of the same thing, and telling (perhaps different) stories to make sense of their observations. The list would include neuroscientists and cognitive scientists and psychologists. It would include as well psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and social workers. If we were not too fussy about credentials, it should probably include as well educators, and parents and . . . babies? Arguably, all humans, from the time they are born, spend significant measures of their time making observations of how people (others and themselves) behave and why, and telling stories to make sense of those observations.
The stories, of course, all differ from one another to greater or lesser degrees. In fact, the notion that "human behaviour and all that it entails . . . is a function of the nervous system" is itself a story used to make sense of observations by some people and not by others. It is not my intent here to try to defend this particular story, or any other story for that matter. Very much to the contrary, is to explore the implications and significance of the fact that there ARE different stories and that they might be about the same (some)thing
In so doing, I want to try to create a new story that helps to facilitate an enhanced dialogue between neuroscience/cognitive science, on the one hand, and psychotherapy, on the other. That new story is itself is a story of conflicting stories within . . . what is called the "nervous system" but others are free to call the "self," "mind," "soul," or whatever best fits their own stories. What is important is the idea that multiple things, evident by their conflicts, may not in fact be disconnected and adversarial entities but could rather be fundamentally, understandably, and valuably interconnected parts of the same thing.
Many practising psychoanalysts (and psychotherapists too, I suspect) feel that the observations/stories of neuroscience/cognitive science are for their own activities, least of mention, are at primes of irrelevance, and at worst destructive, and the same probable holds for many neuroscientists/cognitive scientists. Pally clearly feels otherwise, and it is worth exploring a bit why this is so in her case. A general key, I think, is in her line "In current paradigms, the brain has intrinsic activity, is highly integrated, is interactive with the environment, and is goal-oriented, with predictions operating at every level, from lower systems to . . . the highest functions of abstract thought." Contemporary neuroscience/cognitive science has indeed uncovered an enormous complexity and richness in the nervous system, "making it not so different from how psychoanalysts (or most other people) would characterize the self, at least not in terms of complexity, potential, and vagary." Given this complexity and richness, there is substantially less reason than there once was to believe psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are dealing with two fundamentally different thing’s ally suspects, more aware of this than many psychotherapists because she has been working closely with contemporary neuroscientists who are excited about the complexity to be found in the nervous system. And that has an important lesson, but there is an additional one at least as important in the immediate context. In 1950, two neuroscientists wrote: "The sooner we realize that not to expect of expectation itself, which we would recognize the fact that the complex and higher functional Gestalts that leave the reflex physiologist dumfounded in fact send roots down to the simplest basal functions of the CNS, the sooner we will see that the previously terminologically insurmountable barrier between the lower levels of neurophysiology and higher behavioural theory simply dissolves away."
And in 1951 another said, "I am becoming subsequently forwarded by the conviction that the rudiments of every behavioural mechanism will be found far down in the evolutionary scale and represented in primitive activities of the nervous system."
Neuroscience (and what came to be cognitive science) was engaged from very early on in an enterprise committed to the same kind of understanding sought by psychotherapists, but passed through a phase (roughly from the 1950's to the 1980's) when its own observations and stories were less rich in those terms. It was a period that gave rise to the notion that the nervous system was "simple" and "mechanistic," which in turn made neuroscience/cognitive science seem less relevant to those with broader concerns, perhaps even threatening and apparently adversarial if one equated the nervous system with "mind," or "self," or "soul," since mechanics seemed degrading to those ideas. Arguably, though, the period was an essential part of the evolution of the contemporary neuroscience/cognitive science story, one that laid needed groundwork for rediscovery and productive exploration of the richness of the nervous system. Psychoanalysis/psychotherapy of course went through its own story evolution over this time. That the two stories seemed remote from one another during this period was never adequate evidence that they were not about the same thing but only an expression of their needed independent evolutions.
An additional reason that Pally is comfortable with the likelihood that psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are talking about the same thing is her recognition of isomorphisms (or congruities, Pulver 2003) between the two sets of stories, places where different vocabularies in fact seem to be representing the same (or quite similar) things. I am not sure I am comfortable calling these "shared assumptions" (as Pally does) since they are actually more interesting and probably more significant if they are instead instances of coming to the same ideas from different directions (as I think they are). In this case, the isomorphisms tend to imply that, rephrasing Gertrude Stein, "that there exists an actual there.” Regardless, Pally has entirely appropriately and, I think, usefully called attention to an important similarity between the psychotherapeutic concept of "transference" and an emerging recognition within neuroscience/cognitive science that the nervous system does not so much collect information about the world as generate a model of it, act in relation to that model, and then check incoming information against the predictions of that model. Pally's suggestion that this model reflects in part early interpersonal experiences, can be largely "unconscious," and so may cause inappropriate and troubling behaviour in current time seems entirely reasonable. So too is she to think of thoughts that there is an interaction with the analyst, and this can be of some help by bringing the model to "consciousness" through the intermediary of recognizing the transference onto the analyst.
The increasing recognition of substantial complexity in the nervous system together with the presence of identifiable isomorphisms provides a solid foundation for suspecting that psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are indeed talking about the same thing. But the significance of different stories for better understanding a single thing lies as much in the differences between the stories as it does in their similarities/isomorphisms, in the potential for differing and not obviously isomorphic stories productively to modify each other, yielding a new story in the process. With this thought in mind, I want to call attention to some places where the psychotherapeutic and the neuroscientific/cognitive scientific stories have edges that rub against one another rather than smoothly fitting together. And perhaps to ways each could be usefully further evolved in response to those non-isomorphisms.
Unconscious stories and "reality.” Though her primary concern is with interpersonal relations, Pally clearly recognizes that transference and related psychotherapeutic phenomena are one (actually relatively small) facet of a much more general phenomenon, the creation, largely unconsciously, of stories that are understood to be that of what are not necessarily reflective of the "real world.” Ambiguous figures illustrate the same general phenomenon in a much simpler case, that of visual perception. Such figures may be seen in either of two ways; They represent two "stories" with the choice between them being, at any given time, largely unconscious. More generally, a serious consideration of a wide array of neurobiological/cognitive phenomena clearly implies that, as Pally said, that if we could ever see "reality," but only have stories to describe it that result from processes of which we are not consciously aware.
All of this raises some quite serious philosophical questions about the meaning and usefulness of the concept of "reality." In the present context, what is important is that it is a set of questions that sometimes seem to provide an insurmountable barrier between the stories of neuroscientists/cognitive scientists, who by and large think they are dealing with reality, and psychotherapists, who feel more comfortable in more idiosyncratic and fluid spaces. In fact, neuroscience and cognitive science can proceed perfectly well in the absence of a well-defined concept of "reality" and, without being fully conscious of it, does in fact do so. And psychotherapists actually make more use of the idea of "reality" than is entirely appropriate. There is, for example, a tendency within the psychotherapeutic community to presume that unconscious stories reflect "traumas" and other historically verifiable events, while the neurobiological/cognitive science story says quite clearly that they may equally reflect predispositions whose origins reflect genetic information and hence bear little or no relation to "reality" in the sense usually meant. They may, in addition, reflect random "play" (Grobstein, 1994), putting them even further out of reach of easy historical interpretation. In short, with regard to the relation between "story" and "reality," each set of stories could usefully be modified by greater attention to the other. Differing concepts of "reality" (perhaps the very concept itself) gets in the way of usefully sharing stories. The neurobiologists and/or/cognitive scientists' preoccupation with "reality" as an essential touchstone could valuably be lessened, and the therapist's sense of the validation of story in terms of personal and historical idiosyncracies could be helpfully adjusted to include a sense of actual material underpinnings.
The Unconscious and the Conscious. Pally appropriately makes a distinction between the unconscious and the conscious, one that has always been fundamental to psychotherapy. Neuroscience/cognitive science has been slower to make a comparable distinction but is now rapidly beginning to catch up. Clearly some neural processes generate behaviour in the absence of awareness and intent and others yield awareness and intent with or without accompanying behaviour. An interesting question however, raised at a recent open discussion of the relations between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, is whether the "neurobiological unconscious" is the same thing as the "psychotherapeutic unconscious," and whether the perceived relations between the "unconscious" and the"conscious" are the same in the two sets of stories. Is this a case of an isomorphism or, perhaps more usefully, a masked difference?
An oddity of Pally's article is that she herself acknowledges that the unconscious has mechanisms for monitoring prediction errors and yet implies, both in the title of the paper, and in much of its argument, that there is something special or distinctive about consciousness (or conscious processing) in its ability to correct prediction errors. And here, I think, there is evidence of a potentially useful "rubbing of edges" between the neuroscientific/cognitive scientific tradition and the psychotherapeutic one. The issue is whether one regards consciousness (or conscious processing) as somehow "superior" to the unconscious (or unconscious processing). There is a sense in Pally of an old psychotherapeutic perspective of the conscious as a mechanism for overcoming the deficiencies of the unconscious, of the conscious as the wise father/mother and the unconscious as the willful child. Actually, Pally does not quite go this far, but there is enough of a trend to illustrate the point and, without more elaboration, I do not think many neuroscientists/cognitive scientists will catch Pally's more insightful lesson. I think Pally is almost certainly correct that the interplay of the conscious and the unconscious can achieve results unachievable by the unconscious alone, but think also that neither psychotherapy nor neuroscience/cognitive science are yet in a position to say exactly why this is so. So let me take a crack here at a new, perhaps bi-dimensional story that could help with that common problem and perhaps both traditions as well.
A major and surprising lesson of comparative neuroscience, supported more recently by neuropsychology (Weiskrantz, 1986) and, more recently still, by artificial intelligence is that an extraordinarily rich repertoire of adaptive behaviour can occur unconsciously, in the absence of awareness of intent (be supported by unconscious neural processes). It is not only modelling of the world and prediction and error correction that can occur this way but virtually (and perhaps literally) the entire spectrum of behaviour externally observed, including fleeing from threat, approaching good things, generating novel outputs, learning from doing so, and so on.
This extraordinary terrain, discovered by neuroanatomists, electrophysiologists, neurologists, behavioural biologists, and recently extended by others using more modern techniques, is the unconscious of which the neuroscientist/cognitive scientist speaks. It is a terrain so surprisingly rich that it creates, for some people, the inpuzzlement about whether there is anything else at all. Moreover, it seems, at first glance, to be a totally different terrain from that of the psychotherapist, whose clinical experience reveals a territory occupied by drives, unfulfilled needs, and the detritus with which the conscious would prefer not to deal.
As indicated earlier, it is one of the great strengths of Pally's article to suggest that the two terrains may in fact turns out to be the same in many ways, but if they are of the same line, it then becomes the question of whether or not it feels in what way nature resembles the "unconscious" and the "conscious" different? Where now are the "two stories?” Pally touches briefly on this point, suggesting that the two systems differ not so much (or at all?) in what they do, but rather in how they do it. This notion of two systems with different styles seems to me worth emphasizing and expanding. Unconscious processing is faster and handles many more variables simultaneously. Conscious processing is slower and handles several variables at one time. It is likely that there appear to a host of other differences in style as well, in the handling of number for example, and of time.
In the present context, however, perhaps the most important difference in style is one that Lacan called attention to from a clinical/philosophical perspective - the conscious (conscious processing) that has in resemblance to some objective "coherence," that is, it attempts to create a story that makes sense simultaneously of all its parts. The unconscious, on the other hand, is much more comfortable with bits and pieces lying around with no global order. To a neurobiologist/cognitive scientist, this makes perfectly good sense. The circuitry includes the unconscious (sub-cortical circuitry?) assembly of different parts organized for a large number of different specific purposes, and only secondarily linked together to try to assure some coordination? The circuitry preserves the conscious precessings (neo-cortical circuitry?), that, on the other hand, seems to both be more uniform and integrated and to have an objective for which coherence is central.
That central coherence is well-illustrated by the phenomena of "positive illusions,” exemplified by patients who receive a hypnotic suggestion that there is an object in a room and subsequently walk in ways that avoid the object while providing a variety of unrelated explanations for their behaviour. Similar "rationalization" is, of course, seen in schizophrenic patients and in a variety of fewer dramatic forms in psychotherapeutic settings. The "coherent" objective is to make a globally organized story out of the disorganized jumble, a story of (and constituting) the "self."
What this thoroughly suggests is that the mind/brain be actually organized to be constantly generating at least two different stories in two different styles. One, written by conscious processes in simpler terms, is a story of/about the "self" and experienced as such, for developing insights into how such a story can be constructed using neural circuitry. The other is an unconscious "story" about interactions with the world, perhaps better thought of as a series of different "models" about how various actions relate to various consequences. In many ways, the latter is the grist for the former.
In this sense, we are safely back to the two story ideas that has been central to psychotherapy, but perhaps with some added sophistication deriving from neuroscience/cognitive science. In particular, there is no reason to believe that one story is "better" than the other in any definitive sense. They are different stories based on different styles of story telling, with one having advantages in certain sorts of situations (quick responses, large numbers of variables, more direct relation to immediate experiences of pain and pleasure) and the other in other sorts of situations (time for more deliberate responses, challenges amenable to handling using smaller numbers of variables, more coherent, more able to defer immediate gratification/judgment.
In the clinical/psychotherapeutic context, an important implication of the more neutral view of two story-tellers outlined above is that one ought not to over-value the conscious, nor to expect miracles of the process of making conscious what is unconscious. In the immediate context, the issue is if the unconscious is capable of "correcting prediction errors,” then why appeal to the conscious to achieve this function? More generally, what is the function of that persistent aspect of psychotherapy that aspires to make the unconscious conscious? And why is it therapeutically effective when it is? Here, it is worth calling special attention to an aspect of Pally's argument that might otherwise get a bit lost in the details of her article: . . . the therapist encourages the wife to stop consciously and consider her assumption that her husband does not properly care about her, and to effort fully consider an alternative view and inhibit her impulse to reject him back. This, in turn, creates a new type of experience, one in which he is indeed more loving, such that she can develop new predictions."
It is not, as Pally describes it, the simple act of making something conscious that is therapeutically effective. What is necessary is too consciously recompose the story (something that is made possible by its being a story with a small number of variables) and, even more important, to see if the story generates a new "type of experience" that in turn causes the development of "new predictions." The latter, I suggest, is an effect of the conscious on the unconscious, an alteration of the unconscious brought about by hearing, entertaining, and hence acting on a new story developed by the conscious. It is not "making things conscious" that is therapeutically effective; it is the exchange of stories that encourages the creation of a new story in the unconscious.
For quite different reasons, Grey (1995) earlier made a suggestion not dissimilar to Pally's, proposing that consciousness was activated when an internal model detected a prediction failure, but acknowledged he could see no reason "why the brain should generate conscious experience of any kind at all." It seems to me that, despite her title, it is not the detection of prediction errors that is important in Pally's story. Instead, it is the detection of mismatches between two stories, one unconscious and the other conscious, and the resulting opportunity for both to shape a less trouble-making new story. That, in brief, is it to why the brain "should generate conscious experience,” and reap the benefits of having a second story teller with which a different style of paraphrasing Descartes, one might know of another in what one might say "I am, and I can think, therefore I can change who I am.” It is not only the neurobiological "conscious" that can undergo change; it is the neurobiological "unconscious" as well.
More generally, the most effective psychotherapy requires the recognitions that assume their responsibility is rapidly emerging from neuroscience/cognitive science, that the brain/mind has evolved with two (or more) independent story tellers and has done so precisely because there are advantages to having independent story tellers that generate and exchange different stories. The advantage is that each can learn from the other, and the mechanisms to convey the stories and forth and for each story teller to learn from the stories of the other are a part of our evolutionary endowment as well. The problems that bring patients into a therapist's office are problems in the breakdown of story exchange, for any of a variety of reasons, and the challenge for the therapist is to reinstate the confidence of each story teller in the value of the stories created by the other. Neither the conscious nor the unconscious is primary; they function best as an interdependent loop with each developing its own story facilitated by the semi-independent story of the other. In such an organization, there is not only no "real,” and no primacy for consciousness, there is only the ongoing development and, ideally, effective sharing of different stories.
There are, in the story I am outlining, implications for neuroscience/cognitive science as well. The obvious key questions are what does one mean (in terms of neurons and neuronal assemblies) by "stories," and in what ways are their construction and representation different in unconscious and conscious neural processing. But even more important, if the story I have outlined makes sense, what are the neural mechanisms by which unconscious and conscious stories are exchanged and by which each kind of story impacts on the other? And why (again in neural terms) does the exchange sometimes break down and fail in a way that requires a psychotherapist - an additional story teller - to be repaired?
Just as the unconscious and the conscious are engaged in a process of evolving stories for separate reasons and using separate styles, so too have been and will continue to be neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy. And it is valuable that both communities continue to do so. But there is every reason to believe that the different stories are indeed about the same thing, not only because of isomorphisms between the differing stories but equally because the stories of each can, if listened to, be demonstrably of value to the stories of the other. When breakdowns in story sharing occur, they require people in each community who are daring enough to listen and be affected by the stories of the other community. Pally has done us all a service as such a person. I hope my reactions to her article will help further to construct the bridge she has helped to lay, and that others will feel inclined to join in an act of collective story telling that has enormous intellectual potential and relates as well very directly to a serious social need in the mental health arena. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that an enhanced skill at hearing, respecting, and learning from differing stories about similar things would be useful in a wide array of contexts.
There is now a more satisfactory range of ideas available [in the field of consciousness studies] . . . They involve mostly quantum objects called Bose-Einstein condensates that may be capable of forming ephemeral but extended structures in the brain (Pessa). Marshall's original idea (based on the work of Frölich) was that the condensates that comprise the physical basis of mind, form from activity of vibrating molecules (dipoles) in nerve cell membranes. One of us (Clarke) has found theoretical evidence that the distribution of energy levels for such arrays of molecules prevents this happening in the way that Marshall first thought. However, the occurrence of similar condensates centring around the microtubules that are an important part of the structure of every cell, including nerve cells, remains a theoretical possibility (del Giudice et al.). Hameroff has pointed out that single-cell organisms such as 'paramecium' can perform quite complicated actions normally thought to need a brain. He suggests that their 'brain' be in their microtubules. Shape changes in the constituent proteins (tubulin) could subserve computational functions and would involve quantum phenomena of the sort envisaged by del Giudice. This raises the intriguing possibility that the most basic cognitive unit is provided, not by the nerve cell synapse as is usually supposed, but by the microtubular structure within cells. The underlying intuition is that the structures formed by Bose-Einstein condensates are the building Forms of mental life; in relation to perception they are models of the world, transforming a pleasant view, say, into a mental structure that represents some of the inherent qualities of that view.
We thought that, if there is anything to ideas of this sort, the quantum nature of awareness should be detectable experimentally. Holism and non-locality are features of the quantum world with no precise classical equivalents. The former presupposes that the interacting systems have to be considered as wholes - you cannot deal with one part in isolation from the rest. Non-locality means, among other things, that spatial separation between its parts does not alter the requirement to deal with an interacting system holistically. If we could detect these in relation to awareness, we would show that consciousness cannot be understood solely in terms of classical concepts.
Generative thought and words are the attempts to discover the relation between thought and speech at the earliest stages of phylogenetic and ontogenetic development. We found no specific interdependence between the genetic roots of thought and of word. It became plain that the inner relationship we were looking for was not a prerequisite for, but rather a product of, the historical development of human consciousness.
In animals, even in anthropoids whose speech is phonetically like human speech and whose intellect is akin to man’s, speech and thinking are not interrelated. A prelinguistic epoché through which times interval in thought and a preintellectual period in speech undoubtedly exist also in the development of the child. Thought and word are not connected by a primary bond. A connection originates, changes, and grows in the course of the evolution of thinking and speech.
It would be wrong, however, to regard thought and speech as two unrelated processes either parallel or crossing at certain points and mechanically influencing each other. The absence of a primary bond does not mean that a connection between them can be formed only in a mechanical way. The futility of most of the earlier investigations was largely due to the assumption that thought and word were isolated, independent elements, and verbal thought the fruit of their external union.
The method of analysis based on this conception was bound to fail. It sought to explain the properties of verbal thought by breaking it up into its component elements, thought and word, neither of which, taken separately, possessed the properties of the whole. This method is not true analysis helpful in solving concrete problems. It leads, rather, to generalisation. We compared it with the analysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen - which can result only in findings applicable to all water existing in nature, from the Pacific Ocean to a raindrop. Similarly, the statement that verbal thought is composed of intellectual processes and speech is functionally proper applications to all verbal thought and all its manifestations and explains none of the specific problems facing the student of verbal thought.
We tried a new approach to the subject and replaced analysis into elements by analysis into units, each of which retains in simple form all the properties of the whole. We found this unit of verbal thought in word meaning.
The meaning of a word represents such a close amalgam of thought and language that it is hard to tell whether it is a phenomenon of speech or a phenomenon of thought. A word without meaning is an empty sound; meaning, therefore, is a criterion of “word,” its indispensable component. It would seem, then, that it may be regarded as a phenomenon of speech. But from the point of view of psychology, the meaning of every word is a generalisation or a concept. And since generalisations and concepts are undeniably acts of thought, but we may regard meaning as a phenomenon of thinking. It does not follow, however, that meaning formally belongs in two different spheres of psychic life. Word meaning is a phenomenon of thought only insofar as thought is embodied in speech, and of speech only insofar as speech is connected with thought and illumined by it. It is a phenomenon of verbal thought, or meaningful speech - a union of word and thought.
Our experimental investigations fully confirm this basic thesis. They not only proved that concrete study of the development of verbal thought is made possible by the use of word meaning as the analytical unit but they also led to a further thesis, which we consider the major result of our study and which issues directly from the further thesis that word meanings develop. This insight must replace the postulate of the immutability of word meanings.
From the point of view of the old schools of psychology, the bond between word and meaning is an associative bond, established through the repeated simultaneous perception of a certain sound and a certain object. A word calls to mind its content as the overcoat of a friend reminds us of that friend, or a house of its inhabitants. The association between word and meaning may grow stronger or weaker, be enriched by linkage with other objects of a similar kind, spread over a wider field, or become more limited, i.e., it may undergo quantitative and external changes, but it cannot change its psychological nature. To do that, it would have to cease being an association. From that point of view, any development in word meanings is inexplicable and impossible - an implication that impeded linguistics as well as psychology. Once having committed itself to the association theory, semantics persisted in treating word meaning as an association between a word’s sound and its content. All words, from the most concrete to the most abstract, appeared to be formed in the same manner in regard to meaning, and to contain nothing peculiar to speech as such; a word made us think of its meaning just as any object might remind us of another. It is hardly surprising that semantics did not even pose the larger question of the development of word meanings. Development was reduced to changes in the associative connections between single words and single objects: A word brawn to denote at first one object and then become associated with another, just as an overcoat, having changed owners, might remind us first of one person and later of another. Linguistics did not realize that in the historical evolution of language the very structure of meaning and its psychological nature also change. From primitive generalisations, verbal thought rises to the most abstract concepts. It is not merely the content of a word that changes, but the way in which reality is generalised and reflected in a word.
Equally inadequate is the association theory in explaining the development of word meanings in childhood. Here, too, it can account only for the pure external, quantitative changes in the bonds uniting word and meaning, for their enrichment and strengthening, but not for the fundamental structural and psychological changes that can and do occur in the development of language in children.
Oddly enough, the fact that associationism in general had been abandoned for some time did not seem to affect the interpretation of word and meaning. The Wuerzburg school, whose main object was to prove the impossibility of reducing thinking to a mere play of associations and to demonstrate the existence of specific laws governing the flow of thought, did not revise the association theory of word and meaning, or even recognise the need for such a revision. It freed thought from the fetters of sensation and imagery and from the laws of association, and turned it into a purely spiritual act. By so doing, it went back to the prescientific concepts of St. Augustine and Descartes and finally reached extreme subjective idealism. The psychology of thought was moving toward the ideas of Plato. Speech, at the same time, was left at the mercy of association. Even after the work of the Wuerzburg school, the connection between a word and its meaning was still considered a simple associative bond. The word was seen as the external concomitant of thought, its attire only, having no influence on its inner life. Thought and speech had never been as widely separated as during the Wuerzburg period. The overthrow of the association theory in the field of thought actually increased its sway in the field of speech.
The work of other psychologists further reinforced this trend. Selz continued to investigate thought without considering its relation to speech and came to the conclusion that man’s productive thinking and the mental operations of chimpanzees were identical in nature – so completely did he ignore the influence of words on thought.
Even Ach, who made a special studies in phraseology, by the meaning of who tried to overcome the correlation in his theory of concepts, did not go beyond assuming the presence of “determining tendencies” operative, along with associations, in the process of concept formation. Hence, the conclusions he reached did not change the old understanding of word meaning. By identifying concept with meaning, he did not allow for development and changes in concepts. Once established, the meaning of a word was set forever; Its development was completed. The same principles were taught by the very psychologists Ach attacked. To both sides, the starting point was also the end of the development of a concept; the disagreement concerned only the way in which the formation of word meanings began.
In Gestalt psychology, the situation was not very different. This school was more consistent than others in trying to surmount the general principle of a collective associationism. Not satisfied with a partial solution of the problem, it tried to liberate thinking and speech from the rule of association and to put both under the laws of structure formation. Surprisingly, even this most progressive of modern psychological schools made no progress in the theory of thought and speech.
For one thing, it retained the complete separation of these two functions. In the light of Gestalt psychology, the relationship between thought and word appears as a simple analogy, a reduction of both to a common structural denominator. The formation of the first meaningful words of a child is seen as similar to the intellectual operations of chimpanzees in Koehler’s experiments. Words that filter through the structure of things and acquire a certain functional meaning, in much the same way as the stick, to the chimpanzee, becomes part of the structure of obtaining the fruit and acquires the functional meaning of tool, that the connection between word and meaning is no longer regarded as a matter of simple association but as a matter of structure. That seems like a step forward. But if we look more closely at the new approach, it is easy to see that the step forward is an illusion and that we are still standing in the same place. The principle of structure is applied to all relations between things in the same sweeping, undifferentiated way as the principle of association was before it. It remains impossible to deal with the specific relations between word and meaning.
They are from the outset accepted as identical in principle with any and all other relations between things. All cats are as grey in the dusk of Gestalt psychology as in the earlier plexuities that assemble in universal associationism.
While Ach sought to overcome the associationism with “determining tendencies,” Gestalt psychology combatted it with the principle of structure - retaining, however, the two fundamental errors of the older theory: the assumption of the identical nature of all connections and the assumption that word meanings do not change. The old and the new psychology both assume that the development of a word’s meaning is finished as soon as it emerges. The new trends in psychology brought progress in all branches except in the study of thought and speech. Here the new principles resemble the old ones like twins.
If Gestalt psychology is at a standstill in the field of speech, it has made a big step backward in the field of thought. The Wuerzburg school at least recognised that thought had laws of its own. Gestalt psychology denies their existence. By reducing to a common structural denominator the perceptions of domestic fowl, the mental operations of chimpanzees, the first meaningful words of the child, and the conceptual thinking of the adult, it obliterates every distinction between the most elementary perception and the highest forms of thought.
This may be summed up as follows: All the psychological schools and trends overlook the cardinal point that every thought is a generalisation. They all study word and meaning without any reference to development. As long as these two conditions persist in the successive trends, there cannot be much difference in the treatment of the problem.
The discovery that word meanings evolve leads the study of thought and speech out of a blind alley. Word meanings are dynamic rather than static formations. They change as the child develops; they change also with the various ways in which thought functions.
If word meanings change in their inner nature, then the relation of thought to word also changes. To understand the dynamics of that relationship, we must supplement the genetic approach of our main study by functional analysis and examine the role of word meaning in the process of thought.
Let us consider the process of verbal thinking from the first dim stirring of a thought to its formulation. What we want to show now is not how meanings develop over long periods of time but the way they function in the live process of verbal thought. On the basis of such a functional analysis, we will be able to show also that each stage in the development of word meaning has its own particular relationship between thought and speech. Since functional problems are most readily solved by examining the highest form of a given activity, we will, for a while, put aside the problem of development and consider the relations between thought and word in the mature mind.
The leading idea in the following discussion can be reduced to this formula: The relation of thought to word is not a thing but a process, a continual movement back and forth from thought to word and from word to thought. In that process the relation of thought to word undergoes changes that they may be regarded as development in the functional sense. Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them. Every thought tends to connect something with something else, to establish a relationship between things. Every thought moves, grows and develops, fulfils a function, solves a problem. This flow of thought occurs as an inner movement through a series of planes. An analysis of the interaction of thought and word must begin with an investigation of the different phases and planes a thought traverses before it is embodied in words.
The first thing such a study reveals is the need to distinguish between two planes of speech. Both the inner, meaningful, semantic aspect of speech and the external, phonetic aspects, though forming a true unity, have their own laws of movement. The unity of speech is a complex, not a homogeneous, unity. A number of facts in the linguistic development of the child indicate independent movement in the phonetic and the semantic spheres. We will point out two of the most important of these facts.
In mastering external speech, the child starts from one word, then connects two or three words; a little later, he advances from simple sentences to more complicated ones, and finally to coherent speech made up of series of such sentences; in other words, he proceeds from a part to the whole. In regard to meaning on the other hand, the first word of the child is a whole sentence. Semantically, the child starts from the whole, from a meaningful complex, and only later begins to master the separate semantic units, the meanings of words, and to divide his formerly undifferentiated thought into those units. The external and the semantic aspects of speech develop in opposite directions – one from the particular to the whole, from word to sentence, and the other from the whole to the particular, from sentence to word.
This in itself suffices to show how important it is to distinguish between the vocal and the semantic aspects of speech. Since they move in reverse directions, their development does not coincide, but that does not mean that they are independent of each other. On the contrary, their difference is the first stage of a close union. In fact, our example reveals their inner relatedness as clearly as it does their distinction. A child’s thought, precisely because it is born as a dim, amorphous whole, must find expression in a single word. As his thought becomes more differentiated, the child is less apt to express it in single words but constructs a composite whole. Conversely, progress in speech to the differentiated whole of a sentence helps the child’s thoughts to progress from a homogeneous whole to well-defined parts. Thought and word are not cut from one pattern. In a sense, there are more differences than likenesses between them. The structure of speech does not simply mirror the structure of thought that is why words cannot be put on by thought like a ready-made garment. Thought undergoes many changes as it turns into speech. It does not merely find expression in speech; It finds its reality and form. The semantic and the phonetic developmental processes are essentially one, precisely because of their reverse directions.
The second, equally important fact emerges at a later period of development. Piaget demonstrated that the child uses subordinate clauses with because, although, etc., long before he grasps the structures of meaning corresponding to these syntactic forms. Grammar precedes logic. Here, too, as in our previous example, the discrepancy does not exclude union but is, in fact, necessary for union.
In adults the divergence between the semantic and the phonetic aspects of speech is even more striking. Modern, psychologically oriented linguistics is familiar with this phenomenon, especially in regard too grammatical and psychological subject and predicate. For example, in the sentence “The clock fell,” emphasis and meaning may change in different situations. Suppose I notice that the clock has stopped and ask how this happened. The answer is, “The clock fell.” Grammatical and psychological subject coincide: “The clock” is the first idea in my consciousness; “fell” is what is said about the clock. But if I hear a crash in the next room and inquire what happened, and get the same answer, subject and predicate are psychologically reversed. I knew something had fallen – that is what we are talking about. “The clock” completes the idea. The sentence could be changed to: “What has fallen is the clock”; Then the grammatical and the psychological subject would coincide. In the prologue to his play Duke Ernst von Schwaben, Uhland says: “Grim scenes will pass before you.” Psychologically, “will pass” is the subject. The spectator knows he will see events unfold the additional idea, the predicate, remains in “grim scenes.” Uhland meant, “What will pass before your eyes are a tragedy.” Any part of a sentence may become the psychological predicate, the carrier of topical emphasis: on the other hand, entirely different meanings may lie hidden behind one grammatical structure. Accord between syntactical and psychological organisation is not as prevalent as we tend to assume – rather, it is a requirement that is seldom met. Not only subject and predicate, but grammatical gender, number, case, tense, degree, etc. has their psychological doubles. A spontaneous utterance wrong from the point of view of grammar, may have charm and aesthetic value. Absolute correctness is achieved only beyond natural language, in mathematics. Our daily speech continually fluctuates between the ideals of mathematical and of imaginative harmony.
We will illustrate the interdependence of the semantic and the grammatical aspects of language by citing two examples that show that changes in formal structure can entail far-reaching changes in meaning.
In translating the fable “La Cigale et la Fourmi,” Krylov substituted a dragonfly for La Fontaine’s grasshopper. In French Grasshopper is feminine and therefore well suited to symbolise a light-hearted, carefree attitude. The nuance would be lost in a literal translation, since in Russian Grasshopper is masculine. When he settled for dragonflies, which is feminine in Russian, Krylov disregarded the literal meaning in favour of the grammatical form required to render La Fontaine’s thought.
Tjutchev did the same in his translation of Heine’s poem about a fir and a palm. In German fir is masculine and palm feminine, and the poem suggests the love of a man for a woman. In Russian, both trees are feminine. To retain the implication, Tjutchev replaced the fir by a masculine cedar. Lermontov, in his more literal translation of the same poem, deprived it of these poetic overtones and gave it an essentially different meaning, more abstract and generalised. One grammatical detail may, on occasion, change the whole of which is to purport of what is said.
Behind words, there is the independent grammar of thought, the syntax of word meanings. The simplest utterance, far from reflecting a constant, rigid correspondence between sound and meaning, is really a process. Verbal expressions cannot emerge fully formed but must develop gradually. This complex process of transition from meaning to sound must itself be developed and perfected. The child must learn to distinguish between semantics and phonetics and understand the nature of the difference. At first he uses verbal forms and meanings without being conscious of them as separate. The word, to the child, is an integral part of the object it denotes. Such a conception seems to be characteristic of primitive linguistic consciousness. We all know the old story about the rustic who said he wasn’t surprised that savants with all their instruments could figure out the size of stars and their course – what baffled him was how they found out their names. Simple experiments show that preschool children “explain” the names of objects by their attributes. According to them, an animal is called “cow” because it has horns, “calves” because its horns are still small, “dog” because it is small and has no horns; an object is called “car” because it is not an animal. When asked whether one could interchange the names of objects, for instance call a cow “ink,” and ink “cow,” children will answer no, “because ink is used for writing, and the cow gives milk.” An exchange of names would mean an exchange of characteristic features, so inseparable is the connection between them in the child’s mind. In one experiment, the children were told that in a game a dog would be called “cow.” Here is a typical sample of questions and answers: Does a cow have horns? “Yes.” “But do you not remember that the cow is really a dog? Come now, does a dog have horns? “Sure, if it is a cow, if it is called cow, it has horns. That kind of dog has to have little horns.
We can see how difficult it is for children to separate the name of an object from its attributes, which cling to the name when it is transferred like possessions following their owner.
The fusion of the two planes of speech, semantic and vocal begins to break down as the child grows older, and the distance between them gradually increases. Each stage in the development of word meanings has its own specific interrelation of the two planes. A child’s ability to communicate through language is directly related to the differentiation of word meanings in his speech and consciousness.
To understand this, we must remember a basic characteristic of the structure of word meanings. In the semantic structure of a word, we distinguish between referent and meaning correspondingly, we distinguish a word’s nominative from its significative function. When we compare these structural and functional relations at the earliest, middle, and advanced stages of development, we find the following genetic regularity: In the beginning, only the nominative functions exist, and semantically, only the unbiased objective becomes the reference, and independent of naming, and meaning independent of reference, appear later and develop along the paths we have attempted to trace and describe.
Only when this development is completed does the child become fully able to formulate his own thought and to understand the speech of others. Until then, his usage of words coincides with that of adults in its objective reference but not in its meaning.
We must probe still deeper and explore the plane of inner speech lying beyond the semantic plane. We will discuss here some of the data of the special investigation we have made of it. The relationship of thought and word cannot be understood in all its complexity without a clear understanding of the psychological nature of inner speech. Yet, of all the problems connected with thought and language, this is perhaps the most complicated, beset as it is with terminological and other misunderstandings.
The term inner speech, or endophasy, has been applied to various phenomena, and authors argue about different things that they call by the same name. Originally, inner speech seems to have been understood as verbal memory. An example would be the silent recital of a poem known by heart. In that case, inner speech differs from vocal speech only as the idea or image of an object differs from the real object. It was in this sense that inner speech was understood by the French authors who tried to find out how words were reproduced in memory – whether as auditory, visual, motor, or synthetic images. We will see that word memory is indeed one of the constituent elements of inner speech but not all of it.
In a second interpretation, inner speech is seen as truncated external speech - as “speech minus sound” (Mueller) or “sub-vocal speech” (Watson). Bekhterev defined it as a speech reflex inhibited in its motor part. Such an explanation is by no measure of sufficiency. Silent “pronouncing” of words is not equivalent to the total process of inner speech.
The third definition is, on the contrary, too broad. To Goldstein, the term covers everything that precedes the motor act of speaking, including Wundt’s “motives of speech” and the indefinable, non-sensory and non-motor specific speech experience -, i.e., the whole interior aspect of any speech activity. It is hard to accept the equation of inner speech with an inarticulate inner experience in which the separate identifiable structural planes are dissolved without trace. This central experience is common to all linguistic activity, and for this reason alone Goldstein’s interpretation does not fit that specific, unique function that alone deserves the name of inner speech. Logically developed, Goldstein’s view must lead to the thesis that inner speech is not speech at all but rather an intellectual and affective-volitional activity, since it includes the motives of speech and the thought that is expressed in words.
To get a true picture of inner speech, one must embark upon that which is a specific formation, with its own laws and complex relations to the other forms of speech activity. Before we can study its relation to thought, on the one hand, and to speech, on the other, we must determine its special characteristics and function.
Inner speech allows one to speak for one’s external oration, for which of the others would be surprising, if such a difference in function did not affect the structure of the two kinds of speech. Absence of vocalisation per se is only a consequence of the specific nature of inner speech, which is neither an antecedent of external speech nor its reproduction in memory but is, in a sense, the opposite of external speech. The latter is the turning of thought into words, its materialisation and objectification. With inner speech, the process is reversed: Speech turns into inward thought. Consequently, their structures must differ.
The area of inner speech is one of the most difficult to investigate. It remained almost inaccessible to experiments until ways were found to apply the genetic method of experimentation. Piaget was the first to pay attention to the child’s egocentric speech and to see its theoretical significance, but he remained blind to the most important trait of egocentric speech - its genetic connection with inner speech – and this warped his interpretation of its function and structure. We made that relationship the central problem of our study and thus were able to investigate the nature of inner speech with unusual completeness. A number of considerations and observations led us to conclude that egocentric speech is a stage of development preceding inner speech: Both fulfil intellectual functions; Their structures are similar; egocentric speech disappears at school age, when inner speech begins to develop. From all this we infer that one change into the other.
If this transformation does take place, then egocentric speech provides the key to the study of inner speech. One advantage of approaching inner speech through egocentric speech is its accessibility to experimentation and observation. It is still vocalised, audible speech, i.e., external in its mode of expression, but at the same time inner speech in function and structure. To study an internal process, in that it is necessary to externalise it experimentally, by connecting it with some outer activity; barely then is objective functional analysis possible. Egocentric speech is, in fact, a natural experiment of this type.
This method has another great advantage: Since egocentric speech can be studied at the time when some of its characteristics are waning and new ones forming, we are able to judge which traits are essential to inner speech and which are only temporary, and thus to determine the goal of this movement from egocentric to inner speech -, i.e., the nature of inner speech.
Before we go on to the results obtained by this method, we will briefly discuss the nature of egocentric speech, stressing the differences between our theory and Piaget’s. Piaget contends that the child’s egocentric speech is a direct expression of the egocentrism of his thought, which in turn is a compromise between the primary autism of his thinking and its gradual socialisation. As the child grows older, and as autism overturns the associative remembers affiliated to socialisation progresses, leading to the waning of egocentrism in his thinking and speech.
In Piaget’s conception, the child in his egocentric speech does not adapt himself to the thinking of adults. His thought remains entirely egocentric; This makes his talk incomprehensibly to others. Egocentric speech has no function in the child’s realistic thinking or activity, but it merely accompanies them. And since it is an expression of egocentric thought, it disappears together with the child’s egocentrism. From its climax at the beginning of the child’s development, egocentric speech drops to zero on the threshold of school age. Its history is one of involution rather than evolution. It has no future.
In our conception, egocentric speech is a phenomenon of the transition from interpsychic to intrapsychic functioning, i.e., from the social, collective activity of the child to his more individualised activity - a pattern of development common to all the higher psychological functions. Speech for oneself originates through differentiation from speech for others. Since the main course of the child’s development is one of gradual individualisation, this tendency is reflected in the function and structure of his speech.
The function of egocentric speech is similar to that of inner speech: It does not merely accompany the child’s activity; it serves mental orientation, conscious understanding; it helps in overcoming difficulties; it is speech for oneself, intimately and usefully connected with the child’s thinking. Its fate is very different from that described by Piaget. Egocentric speech develops along a rising not a declining, curve; it goes through an evolution, not an involution. In the end, it becomes inner speech.
Our hypothesis has several advantages over Piaget’s: It explains the function and development of egocentric speech and, in particular, its sudden increase when the child’s face’s difficulties that demand consciousness and reflection – a fact uncovered by our experiments and which Piaget’s theory cannot explain. But the greatest advantage of our theory is that it supplies a satisfying answer to a paradoxical situation described by Piaget himself. To Piaget, the quantitative drop in egocentric speech as the child grows older means the withering of that form of speech. If that were so, its structural peculiarities might also be expected to decline; it is hard to believe that the process would affect only its quantity, and not its inner structure. The child’s thought becomes infinitely less egocentric between the ages of three and seven. If the characteristics of egocentric speech that make it incomprehensible to others are indeed rooted in egocentrism, they should become less apparent as that form of speech becomes less frequent; Egocentric speech should approach social speech and become ever more intelligible. Yet what are the facts? Is the talk of a three-year-old harder to follow than that of a seven-year-old? Our investigation established that the traits of egocentric speech that makes for inscrutability are at their lowest point at three and at their peak at seven. They develop in a reverse direction to the frequency of egocentric speech. While the latter keeps declining and reaches the point of zero at school age, the structural characteristics become more pronounced.
This throws a new light on the quantitative decrease in egocentric speech, which is the cornerstone of Piaget’s thesis.
What does this decrease mean? The structural peculiarities of speech for oneself and its differentiation from external speech increase with age. What is it that diminishes? Only one of its aspects verbalizes. Does this mean that egocentric speech as a whole is dying out? We believe that it does not, for how then could we explain the growth of the functional and structural traits of egocentric speech? On the other hand, their growth is perfectly compatible with the decrease of vocalisation - indeed, clarifies its meaning. Its rapid dwindling and the equally rapid growth of the other characteristics are contradictory in appearance only.
To explain this, let us start from an undeniable, experimentally established fact. The structural and functional qualities of egocentric speech become more marked as the child develops. At three, the difference between egocentric and social speech matches that to zero; At seven, we have speech that in structure and function is totally unlike social speech. A differentiation of the two speech functions has taken place. This is a fact - and facts are notoriously hard to refute.
Once we accept this, everything else falls into place. If the developing structural and functional peculiarities of egocentric speech progressively isolate it from external speech, then its vocal aspect must fade away. This is exactly what happens between three and seven years. With the progressive isolation of speech for oneself, its vocalisation becomes unnecessary and meaningless and, because of its growing structural peculiarities, also impossible. Speech for oneself cannot find expression in external speech. The more independent and autonomous egocentric speech becomes, the poorer it grows in its external manifestations. In the end it separates itself entirely from speech for others, ceases to be vocalised, and thus appears to die out.
But this is only an illusion. To interpret the sinking coefficient of egocentric speech as a sign that this kind of speech is dying out is like saying that the child stops counting when he ceases to use his fingers and starts adding in his head. In reality, behind the symptoms of dissolution lies a progressive development, the birth of a new speech form.
The decreasing vocalisation of egocentric speech denotes a developing abstraction from sound, the child’s new faculty to “think words” instead of pronouncing them. This is the positive meaning of the sinking coefficient of egocentric speech. The downward curve indicates development toward inner speech.
We can see that all the known facts about the functional, structural, and genetic characteristics of self-indulgent or egocentric speech points to one thing: It develops in the direction of inner speech. Its developmental history can be understood only as a gradual unfolding of the traits of inner speech.
We believe that this corroborates our hypothesis about the origin and nature of egocentric speech. To turn our hypothesis into a certainty, we must devise an experiment capable of showing which of the two interpretations is correct. What are the data for this critical experiment?
Let us restate the theories between which we must decide as for Piaget believes, that egocentric speech stems from the insufficient socialisation of speech and that its only development is decrease and eventual death. Its culmination lies in the past. Inner speech is something new brought in from the outside along with socialisation. We demonstrated that in egocentric speech stems from the insufficient individualisation of primary social speech. Its culmination lies in the future. It develops into inner speech.
To obtain evidence for one or the other view, we must place the child alternately in experimental situations encouraging social speech and in situations discouraging it, and see how these changes affect egocentric speech. We consider this an experimentum crucis for the following reasons.
If the child’s egocentric talk results from the egocentrism of his thinking and its insufficient socialisation, then any weakening of the social elements in the experimental setup, any factor contributing to the child’s isolation from the group, must lead to a sudden increase in egocentric speech. But if the latter results from an insufficient differentiation of speech for oneself from speech for others, then the same changes must cause it to decrease.
We took as the starting point of our experiment three of Piaget’s own observations: (1) Egocentric speech occurs only in the presence of other children engaged in the same activity, and not when the child is alone; i.e., it is a collective monologue. (2) The child is under the illusion that his egocentric talk, directed to nobody, is understood by those who surround him. (3) Egocentric speech has the character of external speech: It is audible or whispered. These are certainly not chance peculiarities. From the child’s own point of view, egocentric speech is not yet separated from social speech. It occurs under the subjective and objective conditions of social speech and may be considered a correlate of the insufficient isolation of the child’s individual consciousness from the social whole.
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