Abstract
According to (what I will call) an inner awareness theory of consciousness, you are in a (phenomenally) conscious state only if you are aware, in some sense, of your being in the state. This theory is widely held, but what arguments are there for holding it? In this paper, I gather together in a systematic way the main arguments for holding the theory and suggest that none of them is persuasive. I end the paper by asking what our attitude to the theory should be if there is no existing argument for it.
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Notes
Terminology: I will exclusively use the phrase ‘inner awareness theory’ for the theory I have in mind, which I set out in Sect. 3 below. But the theory sometimes goes by other names, e.g. the reflexive theory, the pre-reflective theory, the self-representational theory, the self-awareness theory. I will not go into the reasons for these different labels here. A recent discussion whose terminology is consonant with mine is McClelland and Farrell 2017.
Three limitations on the present discussion are important to emphasize. First, my concern is exclusively with the persuasiveness of the arguments rather than their soundness—though of course sometimes arguments are unpersuasive because they are unsound. Second, my concern is exclusively with philosophical arguments rather than empirical arguments such as, e.g., those offered in Lau and Rosenthal 2011. Third, my concern is exclusively with the version of the inner awareness theory that I am about to set out, in §3.
The exceptions to this are Arguments 8–9 below which are best understood as invoking the phenomenal notion of awareness in particular, but I will leave this implicit.
Since the negative notion of phenomenal awareness I am working with does not tell us positively what it is it does not tell us that it is representational or not. I will assume the former in the text but what I will say also applies to the latter. Hence we accommodate a version of the inner awareness theory suggested by (e.g.) Zahavi (2006) according to which (what I am calling) phenomenal awareness is not a representational notion.
For an extensive discussion of Aristotle’s view about consciousness, see Caston (2002).
I take it that in using the phrase ‘subjective seeming’ Rosenthal intends to invoke some notion of awareness without saying exactly what it is. So in this passage he does not have cognitive awareness in mind.
This is a simplified version of what I take the correct analysis to be but the complications will not affect the present point; see Stoljar 2016.
I am indebted here to an anonymous reviewer.
Yet a different way to honor the idea behind the transitivity principle as stated in the text, but without advancing it, would be to advance it in a highly dispositional form, something like this: you are in a conscious state C if and only if, you would become conscious of being in C were various background conditions met, e.g., it matters to you whether you are in C, you are rational, and you are capable of being conscious of being in C. I will not explicitly discuss this version of the transitivity principle in this paper, but I think the material introduced when considering Arguments 7–8 below show that it too provides no reason to endorse an inner awareness theory of the sort we are interested in.
I am indebted here to an anonymous reviewer.
One might point out here that friends of the higher-order theory often use the contrapositive of (8), and relatedly, the contrapositive of the transparency principle mentioned in Argument 3, as an empirical test for consciousness; I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion. That is true, but it provides no support for the inner-awareness theory. For people who reject that theory may well agree that, as an empirical matter, subjects in phenomenally conscious states often believe that they are, and so that, as an empirical matter, subjects who do not believe that they are in such states, are often not in them.
I am indebted here to an anonymous reviewer.
By ‘preserves its basic structure’ I mean that it preserves the idea that if you remember seeing the blue sky yesterday, you must have been aware yesterday of seeing the blue sky. This feature of the argument is emphasized particularly in Ganeri’s 1999 discussion. As we will see in moment, however, the response to the argument I am about to consider precisely denies this.
The modal fallacy noted in the text is relevant also to another argument for the inner awareness theory suggested in various places by Rosenthal, viz., the argument from reportability (see e.g. Rosenthal 2005, esp. pp. 289–94). According to this argument, roughly, from the fact that it is possible for me to report being in the state it follows that I must be aware of it. I have not discussed this argument in the text since, as Rosenthal notes, its focus is on particular form of the inner awareness theory, viz., the one in which the background notion of awareness is cognitive awareness, whereas as I noted my focus is mainly on versions that are neutral on this matter. But in any case, I believe it fails in the same way that Argument 7 does. For, from the fact that it is possible for me to report being in a state it does not follow that I am aware of being in it; all that follows is that it is possible for me to be or become aware of being in it.
Nor does conceding this grant anything to the inner awareness theory, since as I noted in Sect. 4 according to it (8) is necessary and hence there is a necessary connection between being in the state and being aware of it.
I take an argument like this to be suggested by David Chalmers who writes “the clearest cases of direct phenomenal concepts arise when a subject attends to the quality of an experience and forms a concept wholly based on attention to that quality” (2010, 267).
As Chalmers notes, Geoffrey Lee has argued similarly in unpublished work.
Chalmers notes that A.D.Smith (see Smith 2008) uses the case of blur to argue against various forms of transparency or diaphanousness in philosophy of mind. But as I understand him the form of the thesis of transparency that Smith argues against is a very strong one; it is that one cannot attend at all in any way to one’s phenomenal experience. One does not need to hold the inner awareness theory to agree with Smith that that thesis is implausible.
In the text I assume that it is conscious states that admit of an indexical characterization. Could one assume instead that phenomenal awareness admits of such a characterization? After all, as I indicated in Sect. 4, it is very plausible that it does. However, the problem with this interpretation of the argument is that it brings us no closer to the truth of the inner awareness theory, since that reflexive awareness has a certain sort of content does not entail that if you in a conscious state you are in state of reflexive awareness with that content.
The use of depictive representation in the text is inspired by Bernard Williams’ use of it in a related context (see Williams 1973). For a somewhat similar use also in the context of inner awareness theories, see Grünbaum & Zahavi 2013, esp. pp. 230–233.
I am indebted here to an anonymous reviewer.
I am indebted here to an anonymous reviewer.
It is worth remembering at this point also that I am concerned only with philosophical arguments for the inner awareness theory in this paper.
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Previous versions of this material were presented to the Australian National University and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I thank all members of the audiences on those occasions for their helpful comments. I am particularly grateful for encouragement from David Papineau. I should also thank several anonymous referees for their hard work on the paper.
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Stoljar, D. Is There a Persuasive Argument for an Inner Awareness Theory of Consciousness?. Erkenn 88, 1555–1575 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00415-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00415-8