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Dennett on Consciousness: Realism Without the Hysterics

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Abstract

Dennett’s theory of consciousness is often misread as broadly anti-realist. His aversion to ontology encourages readers to form their own interpretations, and the rhetoric he employs often seems to support the anti-realist reading. Dennett does offer defenses against the anti-realist charge, but these are piecemeal and diffuse. This paper examines Dennett’s most current expression (From Bacteria to Bach and Back: the Evolution of Minds, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2017), which proves insufficient on its own as a resolution to the ontological dispute. Drawing on related discussions in an attempt to find a resolution leads to a further challenge from Schwitzgebel. Crucial distinctions between inner and outer, cause and effect, and reporting and expressing, unite in a general characterization of how a realist explanation of consciousness should bottom out. Dennett’s form of realism depends upon distinguishing the explananda of consciousness from their doomed explanans; anti-realism about the latter makes room for genuine explanation of how things (really) seem to us.

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Notes

  1. The (anti-)realism in question concerns existence. The term’anti-realism’ here covers eliminative materialism, instrumentalism, blanket fictionalism, and varieties of ‘greedy reductionism’. For a discussion of Dennett and (anti-) realism about consciousness concerning not existence claims, but rather (belief-) independence claims, see (Mandik 2015).

  2. Aside from those cited below, see the following: Shoemaker (1993) and Tye (1993) with Dennett (1993b) responding; Rey (1994), with Dennett (1994) responding; Viger (2000) and Ross (2000), with Dennett (2000) responding; and Carman(2007); Dokic and Pacherie (2007); Marbach (2007); Noe (2007); Siewart (2007), with Dennett (2007) responding. Space considerations limit what can be covered here; this paper’s exposition follows Dennett’s most current expression (2017), which leads (by his own lights) to a discussion of (Dennett 2007), in particular the exchange with Schwitzgebel (2007), which Schwitzgebel (2006) regards as insufficient. Particularly pertinent citations of other works are built around this exposition and the associated arguments.

  3. See Dennett (2005) for an overview of many theories that share an anti-realist reading of him.

  4. Later, the initial statement will be labelled Windows Ai, and the justification, Windows Aii, for reasons that will become clear.

  5. To gloss the reality/fiction distinction in causal terms: There is no real person, Sherlock Holmes, whose existence causes our beliefs about him; likewise, there is no real object, the red stripe, which causes us to have beliefs about it. Talk referencing either as (real objects that are) causal, or implying as much, therefore consists in fictional narrative (Sect. 6 argues that Dennett can be a fictionalist about these while being a realist about consciousness in a different way).

  6. Dennett (2007) is, in part, a response to these objections. Several passages of the (2017) treatment of consciousness discussed in Sect. 2 and 3 above draw their material from the part of (Dennett 2007) that is a response to Schwitzgebel’s objections. Dennett (2017, p. 421) guides the reader to this section of (Dennett 2007) for a “fuller discussion”.

  7. Presumably Schwitzgebel and Dennett drafted and shared their 2007 pieces, and corresponded about them, in 2006.

  8. At the outset of (2007), Dennett writes “I am running my reactions together, taking advantage of the contexts they provide for each other” (247). The following connection is an important instance of this.

  9. Dennett (2002) links this example to fallibility.

  10. Broad characterizations of consciousness as user-illusion, or as real as dollars, equivocate on this distinction.

  11. This compares with Dennett’s distinction between representing something and representing that something is the case, which appears in the more specific context of the debate about ‘filling-in’ (1991, p. 355).

  12. Unsurprisingly, the Goldilocks story has been used to characterize realism before; see (Trout 1998).

  13. Dennett (2000, especially p. 374–375) explicitly maintains realism about representations in this sense, against Lloyd’s (2000) call to eliminate ‘representation talk’ altogether.

  14. In a passage explicitly describing bottoming-out (2015, p. 376), Dennett notes that seeming ineffability is the “inevitable byproduct” of the “user-friendliness” of the manifest image at the personal level; we should treat ineffability as “simply the current level of analysis”.

  15. Both Brook (2000) and, in response, Dennett (2000), give detailed support for this claim.

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  1. St. John’s University, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Jamaica, Queens, 11439, USA

    Francis Fallon

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Fallon, F. Dennett on Consciousness: Realism Without the Hysterics. Topoi 39, 35–44 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9502-8

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