Privileged Access and Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

The Cartesian notion that a conscious subject has “privileged access” to her inner mental states — that she is an authority on their nature because they are hers — has been out of favor for some time in Western philosophy of the mind. In part because Phenomenology claims something like privileged access, it was considered by some computationalist philosophers to be irrelevant to the real business of constructing a scientifically respectable theory of consciousness and cognition. This paper argues that while it is true that we, qua conscious subjects, lack full experiential understanding of all the causal mechanisms, seams and faultlines of our conscious states, we do have a certain privileged access. The basis for this argument was supplied by Merleau-Ponty as early as The Structure of Behavior and is made very clear in The Phenomenology of Perception. His work establishes two vital facts: that we necessarily understand the basic structure of our consciousness, and that this structure is entailed and elucidated by the physical structures of the brain and body, not by mysterious powers of a Cartesian cogito. Merleau-Ponty brings together the phenomenological and the scientific in a way that cognitive scientists are only now beginning to appreciate.