Abstract
It is often assumed that rationality and consciousness share some sort of essential connection. Thus some theorists build rationality into their accounts of consciousness. Ned Block, for example, famously claims that a mental state exhibits what he calls access consciousness if it “is poised for free use in reasoning and for direct “rational” control of action and speech” (2007, p. 168). In his (2011) paper “There It Is” and his (2014, this volume) précis “It’s Still There!” Benj Hellie develops a complex account of how perceptions justify beliefs—an account which effectively builds consciousness into rationality. As Hellie puts it, he “advances a picture of the nature of rationality and rational explanation in which consciousness plays a central role” (2011, p. 110).
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To be more precise, Hellie restricts good cases of perceptual states only to “what one is ‘attending to’” and he claims that anything else “has no direct presence within one’s stream of consciousness and therefore cannot be rationally significant” (2011, p. 131). But Hellie offers no reason to hold this position in his papers, and it is not clear why one would hold it. Even if Hellie were right that rationality requires consciousness (a view which I’ll challenge), whether consciousness requires attention is a vexed issue because of the considerable debate about how to understand attention. At first blush, however, it seems clear that there are many conscious perceptions that do not involve attention, such as those involved in the periphery of one’s consciousness. Such states may be less rich informationally than states that do involve attention, but it is not as though these peripheral perceptions need be illusory and hence bad cases. There thus seems to be no reason to deny that a conscious perception without attention can justify a belief. Additionally, there is mounting evidence that we can attend to stimuli in the absence of consciousness (see, e.g., Koch and Tsuchiya 2007; van Boxtel et al. 2010). For brevity’s sake, I will not review this evidence here and I acknowledge that some dispute it (e.g., de Brigard and Prinz 2010). But if attention can occur nonconsciously, even if Hellie were right that rationality requires attention (which is doubtful), it would not provide a reason to deny that rationality can occur outside of consciousness.
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Acknowledgement
I thank Myrto Mylopoulos, David Pereplyotchik, and Marjan Persuh for help with this commentary. I also thank David Rosenthal for his thoughtful comments on the online version of this commentary, which was presented at the Third Annual Consciousness Online Conference. I especially thank Benj Hellie for his detailed replies to that online commentary and Richard Brown for organizing the conference as well as this volume.
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Berger, J. (2014). Perceptual Justification Outside of Consciousness. In: Brown, R. (eds) Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6001-1_12
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