David Rosenthal

Edited in hypertext by Andrew Chrucky. Reprinted with the permission of Professor David Rosenthal. Editor's Note: Due to the limitation of current hypertext, the following conventions have been used. In general, if an expression has some mark over it, that mark is placed as a prefix to the expression. All Greek characters are rendered by their names. Subscripts are placed in parentheses as concatenated suffixes: thus, e.g., HO is the chemical formula for water. Sellars' dot quotes are expressed by bold periods

Theories of what it is for a mental state to be conscious must answer two questions. We must say how we're conscious of our conscious mental states. And we must explain why we seem to be conscious of them in a way that's immediate. Thomas Natsoulas distinguishes three strategies for explaining what it is for mental states to be conscious. I show that the differences among those strategies are due to the divergent answers they give to the foregoing questions. Natsoulas finds most promising the strategy that amounts to the higher-order-thought hypothesis that I've defended elsewhere. But he raises a difficulty for it, which he thinks probably can be met only by modifying that strategy. I argue that this is unnecessary. The difficulty is a special case of a general question, the answer to which is independent of any issues about consciousness. So it's no part of a theory of consciousness to address the problem, much less solve it. Moreover, the difficulty seems to have intuitive force only given the picture that underlies the other two explanatory strategies, which both Natsoulas and I reject

Is mental imagery pictorial? In Pylyshyn's view no empirical data provides convincing support to the “pictorial” hypothesis of mental imagery. Phenomenology, Pylyshyn says, is deeply deceiving and offers no explanation of why and how mental imagery occurs. We suggest that Pylyshyn mistakes phenomenology for what it never pretended to be. Phenomenological evidence, if properly considered, shows that mental imagery may indeed be pictorial, though not in the way that mimics visual perception. Moreover, Pylyshyn claims that the “pictorial hypothesis” is flawed because the interpretation of “picture-like” objects in mental imagery takes a homunculus. However, the same point can be objected to Pylyshyn's own conclusion: if imagistic reasoning involves the same mechanisms and the same forms of representation as those that are involved in general reasoning, if they operate on symbol-based representations of the kind recommended by Pylyshyn (1984) and Fodor (1975), don't we need a phenomenological homunculus to tell an imagined bear from the real one?

red and round. According to common sense, the red, round thing we see is the tomato itself. When we have a hallucinatory vision of a tomato, however, there may be present to us no red and round phys- ical object. Still, we use the words 'red' and 'round' to describe that situation as well, this time applying them to the visual experience itself. We say that we have a red, round visual image, or a visual experience of a red disk, or some such. Because we see physical objects far more often than we hallucinate, we apply terms for color and shape to physical objects far more often than to visual experiences. Moreover, different theories of perception explain in different ways the applications such terms have to physical objects and to visual experiences. But whatever their frequency and explanation, it seems clear that both sorts of application occur

According to Dennett, the facts about consciousness are wholly fixed by the effects consciousness has on other things. But if a mental state's being conscious consists in one's having a higher-order thought about that state, we will in principle have an independent way to fix those facts. Dennett also holds that our speech acts sometimes determine what our thoughts are, since speech acts often outrun in content the thoughts they express.I argue that what thoughts we have is independent of how we express them in speech, and that this is consonant with speech acts’ often seeming to have more fine grained content than the thoughts they express. This model has the advantage, compared with Dennett’s, of accommodating our folk-psychological taxonomy of intentional states and preserving the traditional idea that speech acts express antecedent intentional states. Speech acts doubtless do sometimes have richer content than the thoughts they express, though sometimes verbally expressing a thought simply makes us conscious in a more fine-grained way of what that content is.On the higher-order-thought model, as on Dennett’s, a mental state’s being conscious is, in effect, our spontaneously interpreting ourselves as being in that state. But such spontaneous self-interpretation need not be the last word on what content our thoughts have. Even though the content of speech acts sometimes outrun that of the thoughts they express, we can explain why the two seem always to be exactly the same. Even when a speech act is richer in content than the thought it expresses, the well-entrenched pragmatic equivalence between saying something and saying that one thinks that thing ensures that one will be conscious of one’s thought as having the richer content of the speech act that expresses it. We are conscious of our thoughts as having the content that our speech acts would capture.

There is strong reason to doubt that the intuitions Chalmers' meta-problem focuses on are widespread or independent of proto-theoretical prompting. So it's unlikely that they result from factors connected to the nature of consciousness. In any case, it's only the accuracy of the problem intuitions that matters for evaluating theories of consciousness or revealing the nature of consciousness, not an explanation of how they arise. Unless we determine that they're accurate about consciousness, we mustn't assume that realism about consciousness incorporates them, or that denying them means denying that consciousness exists. And we must assess whether they're accurate independently of how they arise.