Abstract
How does mental content feature in conscious thought? I first argue that for a thought to be conscious the content of that thought must conscious, and that one has to appeal to cognitive phenomenology to give an adequate account of what it is for the content of a thought to be conscious. Sensory phenomenology cannot do the job. If one claims that the content of a conscious thought is unconscious, one is really claiming that there is no such thing as conscious thought. So one must either accept that there is such a thing as cognitive phenomenology, or deny the existence of conscious thought. Once it is clear that conscious thought requires cognitive phenomenology, there is a pressing question about the exact relationship between a thought’s cognitive phenomenological properties and its content. I conclude with a discussion of the nature of this relationship.
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Notes
This definition of ‘cognitive phenomenology’ differs from the one offered by Smithies 2013, who defines it as whatever phenomenology happens to be tied up with conscious thought. Defining it in this latter way seems to obscure the central question of the cognitive phenomenology debate, which is whether there is such a thing as cognitive phenomenology at all.
There may be other kinds of phenomenology irreducible to either sensory phenomenology or cognitive phenomenology. For example, I argue (2009, 2014) that emotions have their own sui generis kind of phenomenology, and others have argued that there is sui generis agentive phenomenology. For the purposes of this paper, I will only be concerned to argue for sui generis cognitive phenomenology.
Philosophers have explicated the distinction between internal and external representational content in various ways. See e.g. Chalmers 2002; Horgan and Tienson 2002; McGinn 1997. Rather than going into detail about these different theories, and how they compare to my explication, I am only interested in giving a very rough and intuitive characterization of what I have in mind.
There are at least two ways of explicating the sense in which phenomenology is an intrinsic feature of conscious thought: one could hold a same-order self-intimating view, according to which a conscious thought is conscious in virtue of its self-intimating character, or simply hold that phenomenology is an intrinsic feature of conscious thought.
I argue for this in detail in Montague (forthcoming a).
See my Montague (forthcoming b) for a detailed argument against higher-order views. See also Neander 1998 and Zahavi 2006.
Prinz 2011: 189-90.
At this point, one might argue that there is a difference between the kinds of properties sensed and the kinds of properties thought about, and this difference between properties accounts for why the former are associated with phenomenology while the latter are not. (I thank an anonymous referee for raising this issue.) In order for this kind of objection to have force, and not just amount to the denial of cognitive phenomenology, more needs to be said about what this difference between kinds of properties is and how it is related to phenomenology.
The expression ‘taking herself to be thinking p’ in the phrase ‘a subject’s taking herself to be thinking p’ shouldn’t be understood as strictly involving propositional structure. There is a sense in which any deployment of a concept, even in the case of a dog if dogs deploy concepts, involves a ‘taking’. Moreover, this expression should not be understood as a subject’s having some higher-order thought towards her thinking that p. I just mean for this expression to indicate how things ‘phenomenologically seem’ to the subject from her first-person perspective.
To see how a similar issue arises for the case of perception see Montague 2013.
I find Dretske’s 1995 argument for phenomenal externalism based on the twin-earth water case unconvincing. His argument relies on rejecting the awareness of awareness thesis, which I accept, and argue for in Montague (forthcoming b).
At this point I’m putting aside the possibility of sui generis emotional phenomenology and sui generis agentive phenomenology.
The issue becomes more difficult if basic concepts can be complex. We then need to give some sense to the idea of how a concept can be basic and complex, and then ask how we grasp such complex concepts (do we grasp the whole without grasping the parts, or grasp the whole in virtue of grasping the parts?). These questions are for another time.
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Montague, M. Cognitive phenomenology and conscious thought. Phenom Cogn Sci 15, 167–181 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9403-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9403-x