Peter Carruthers

Argues for the need to recognise higher-order perceptual experiences and briefly argues for the superiority of the author’s own dispositional HOT version of higher-order perception theory. But its main focus is on purely recognitional concepts of experience. There is an emerging consensus amongst naturalistically minded philosophers that the existence of such concepts is the key to blocking the zombie-style arguments of both dualist mysterians like Chalmers and physicalist mysterians like McGinn and Levine. But, the author argues in this chapter that a successful account of the possibility of such concepts requires acceptance of one or another form of higher-order perception theory.

Argues that belief/desire psychology – and with it a form of first-order access-consciousness – are very widely distributed in the animal kingdom, being shared even by navigating insects. Although the main topic of this chapter is not mental-state consciousness, it serves both to underscore the argument of the previous chapter, and to emphasise how wide is the phylogenetic distance separating mentality per se from phenomenally conscious mentality. On some views, these things are intimately connected. But on the author’s view, they could not be further apart. We share the basic forms of our mental lives even with bees and ants. But we may be unique in the animal kingdom in possessing mental states that are phenomenally conscious.

Works its way through a variety of different accounts of phenomenal consciousness, looking at the strengths and weaknesses of each. At the heart of the chapter is an extended critical examination of first-order representational theories, of the sort espoused by Dretske and Tye, arguing that they are inferior to higher-order representational accounts. Acknowledges as a problem for HOR theories that they might withhold phenomenal consciousness from most other species of animal, but claims that this problem should not be regarded as a serious obstacle to the acceptance of some such theory. Different versions of HOR theory are discussed, and the author’s own account is briefly elaborated and defended.

Implicit and explicit attitudes manifest themselves as distinct and partly dissociable behavioral dispositions. It is natural to think that these differences reflect differing underlying representations. The present article argues that this may be a mistake. Although non-verbal and verbal measures of attitudes often dissociate, this may be because the two types of outcome-measure are differentially impacted by other factors, not because they are tapping into distinct kinds of representation or distinct storage systems. I arrive at this view through closer consideration than is usual of the mechanisms and processes that underlie overt behavior.

Presents and develops what the author takes to be the main argument, both against the most plausible version of first-order representationalist theory of phenomenal consciousness, and in support of his own higher-order perception/dual-content account. The primary goal of the chapter is to lay out the case for saying that dual-content theory provides us with a successful reductive explanation of the various puzzling features of phenomenal consciousness. Also takes up the question whether a first-order theorist can also accept the higher-order analogue contents postulated by dual-content theory, and can thereby obtain all of the advantages of the latter, while retaining their distinctively first-order account of phenomenal consciousness itself. It returns a negative answer.

Shifts focus from conscious experience to conscious thought. It develops a dilemma. Either the use of natural language sentences in ‘inner speech’ is constitutive of thinking, as opposed to being merely expressive of it. Or there may really be no such thing as conscious propositional thinking at all, and eliminativism about conscious thinking is true. While the author makes clear my preference for the first horn of this dilemma, and explains how such a claim could possibly be true, this is not really defended in any depth, and the final choice is left to the reader. Nor does the chapter commit itself to any particular theory of conscious thinking, beyond defending the claim that, in order to count as conscious, a thought must give rise to the knowledge that we are entertaining it in a way that is neither inferential nor interpretative.

This paper argues that a set of questioning attitudes are among the foundations of human and animal minds. While both verbal questioning and states of curiosity are generally explained in terms of metacognitive desires for knowledge or true belief, I argue that each is better explained by a prelinguistic sui generis type of mental attitude of questioning. I review a range of considerations in support of such a proposal and improve on previous characterizations of the nature of these attitudes. I then broaden their explanatory scope to include a number of forms of exploratory search. The paper has three main goals: to characterize the nature of the questioning attitudes, outlining their causal role and type of content; to argue that they are fundamental components of the mind, being widespread among animals and not constructed during ontogeny out of other attitudes; and to suggest that they explain a great deal more behavior than one might think.

In a pair of recent papers and his new book, Christopher Peacocke (2007, 2008a, 2008b) takes up and defends the claim that our awareness of our own actions is immediate and not perceptually based, and extends it into the domain of mental action.1 He aims to provide an account of action-awareness that will generalize to explain how we have immediate awareness of our own judgments, decisions, imaginings, and so forth. These claims form an important component in a much larger philosophical edifice, with many implications for the philosophy of mind and for epistemology. The present paper advances multiple criticisms of Peacocke's account. In particular, it shows that he has given insufficient grounds for thinking that we have non-perceptual awareness of our own actions; and it shows that the account of action-awareness that he provides does not, in any case, generalize to mental actions of the sort that he intends.

According to higher-order thought accounts of phenomenal consciousness it is unlikely that many non-human animals undergo phenomenally conscious experiences. Many people believe that this result would have deep and far-reaching consequences. More specifically, they believe that the absence of phenomenal consciousness from the rest of the animal kingdom must mark a radical and theoretically significant divide between ourselves and other animals, with important implications for comparative psychology. I shall argue that this belief is mistaken. Since phenomenal consciousness might be almost epiphenomenal in its functioning within human cognition, its absence in animals may signify only relatively trivial differences in cognitive architecture. Our temptation to think otherwise arises partly as a side-effect of imaginative identification with animal experiences, and partly from mistaken beliefs concerning the aspects of common-sense psychology that carry the main explanatory burden, whether applied to humans or to non-human animals.

This article replies to the main objections raised by the commentators on Carruthers. It discusses the question of what evidence is relevant to the assessment of dispositional higher-order thought theory; it explains how the actual properties of phenomenal consciousness can be dispositionally constituted; it discusses the case of pains and other bodily sensations in non-human animals and young children; it sketches the case for preferring higher-order to first-order theories of phenomenal consciousness; and it replies to some miscellaneous points and objections.

Various dichotomies have been proposed to characterize the nature and development of human mindreading capacities, especially in light of recent evidence of mindreading in infants aged 7 to 18 months. This article will examine these suggestions, arguing that none is currently supported by the evidence. Rather, the data support a modular account of the domain-specific component of basic mindreading capacities. This core component is present in infants from a very young age and does not alter fundamentally thereafter. What alters with development are the interactions between core mindreading and other systems, including executive systems, and forms of learning that do not require radical conceptual change.

This chapter argues that our language faculty can both be a peripheral module of the mind and be crucially implicated in a variety of central cognitive functions, including conscious propositional thinking and reasoning. I also sketch arguments for the view that natural language representations (e.g. of Chomsky's Logical Form, or LF) might serve as a lingua franca for interactions (both conscious and non-conscious) between a number of quasi-modular central systems. The ideas presented are compared and contrasted with the evolutionary proposals made by Derek Bickerton (1990, 1995), who has also argued for the involvement of language in thought. Finally, I propose that it was the evolution of a mechanism responsible for pretend play, circa 40,000 years ago, which led to the explosion of creative culture visible in the fossil record from that time onwards.