Abstract
According to the Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, conscious states are just those states that are the object of a suitable higher-order thought to the effect that one is in that state. These higher-order thoughts perform this role by providing subjects with a particular type of awareness. However, HOT theorists have tended to offer two alternative formulations of this awareness when stating the basic claims of HOT theory. According to what I call the state formulation of HOT theory, HOTs provide subjects with an awareness of mental states, and a mental state is conscious only if the subject is aware of that state. According to what I call the oneself formulation of HOT theory, HOTs provide subjects with an awareness of themselves as being in a mental state, and a mental state is conscious only if the subject is aware of themselves as being in that state. In this paper I explore the dialectical significance and legitimacy of HOT theorists’ current practice of employing both formulations. I argue that there is some reason for HOT theorists to adopt the oneself formulation, rather than the state formulation. However, this appears to weaken HOT theory considerably, by abandoning the idea that when our mental states are conscious, we are aware of those states themselves. Against this objection I argue that adopting the oneself formulation does not require abandoning the basic idea lying behind the state formulation and that this is consistent with the reasons for favouring the oneself formulation.
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Notes
See Rosenthal (2002) for a statement of the standard version of the view.
Or, more precisely, of state consciousness. See ibid., p. 46 for this distinction.
E.g. Huemer (1998, pp. 12–13).
Rosenthal (2018, p. 59).
For a more in-depth discussion and defence of this claim, see Huemer (1998, pp. 13–16).
See Rosenthal (2018, p. 60) for this point.
C.f. Rosenthal (2005, p. 13); Rosenthal (2018, p. 50); Brown (2015, p. 1788); Lau and Brown (2019, p. 171); Weisberg (2011b, p. 413) for examples of formulations in these terms. There is a third formulation that is occasionally employed—that what it is that HOTs make subjects aware of is neither states themselves, nor the subjects as being in those states, but rather simply ‘being in the state’. (C.f. Rosenthal, 2018, p. 61; Lau and Brown, 2019, p. 172) This could be construed as awareness of neither a mental state nor of an individual, but rather of a fact—but the fact of which they are aware is presumably just the fact that they, themselves, are in the state, so this third formulation is most likely best understood as an abbreviation of the OF.
As Rosenthal puts the point, HOTs are assertoric thoughts—c.f. Rosenthal 2002, p. 410.
This may give rise to the worry that the distinction between the SF and the OF is therefore much less significant than it might first appear. Indeed, we might worry that either the two formulations are both always true of HOTs (since the content of those HOTs always make reference to both oneself and a particular first-order state) or that the SF is simply a shorthand for or abbreviation of the OF. However, as I argue in the rest of this section and in §IV, the two formulations appear to fare differently in the face of different objections to HOT theory—with empty HOT objections affecting the SF and intimacy objections affecting the OF. If this is right, then the distinction between the two formulations takes on a more dialectically significant character—and HOT theorists are required to supply a more in-depth account of which formulations are appropriate in what contexts and why. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to be clearer on this.
Rosenthal (2018, p.59).
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me for clarity on this point.
The phrase is due to Kriegel (2009, p. 108).
See, for example, Rosenthal (2018) (especially pp. 64–71).
Coleman (2015) comes close to making this argument explicit; see p. 2709, particularly: ‘Here’s the problem. It’s clear that, once it has disappeared, the visual percept makes no contribution to the stream of consciousness: the subject cannot be conscious of the red bus-ish percept, since it no longer exists. If you’re really conscious of x, as opposed to being conscious merely as of x, then x surely exists. And Rosenthal’s theory—on the natural way of explicating its appeal—was supposed to account for our consciousness of mental states’. (My italics.) The italicized sentence states the object-factivity of ‘consciousness of’ (which we can treat as synonymous with ‘awareness of’ in this context).
Some might think that the OF captures all of the intuitive pull of the SF. Even if this is granted however, admitting that the SF of the TP is always strictly speaking false is still a significant concession for the HOT theorist. Irrespective of whether or not the OF can be used to garner as much intuitive support as the SF, the claim that the SF of the TP is always false might be a counter-intuitive enough result on its own to generate serious philosophical worries with regard to HOT theory.
Which is not to say that one may not thereby become conscious of some mental state—see the discussion of slight misrepresentation cases below.
What then is causally responsible for the empty HOT in these cases? The answer to that will depend on the details of each case. For example, in an imagined case of future neuroscientists deliberately manipulating prefrontal cortex to create the impression of conscious mental states it will be the manipulation of prefrontal cortex (and ultimately the scientists themselves) that are causally responsible for the HOT in question. In cases such as the rare Charles Bonnet syndrome discussed by Lau and Brown (2019, p. 174) it will be the typical neurological patterns associated with the syndrome, and ultimately the underlying damage to primary visual cortex. And so on. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me on this point.
A small point worth noting here: the phrase ‘empty HOT’ is somewhat misleading. After all, the HOTs that this phrase refers to do not lack content (they are thoughts, with content of the form ‘I am in a mental state of type X’). And neither do they entirely lack real world correlates of those thoughts—the existence of the referent of the ‘I’ is guaranteed in all cases. The phrase ‘empty HOT’ rather describes a case of a HOT where there is no referent of the term used to (try to) pick out a mental state.
Rosenthal 2005, p.211.
In cases of radical misrepresentation, the HOT theorist could abandon the claim that there is any awareness of the states in question without much difficulty. Say that by some means a first-order visual state of a table causes a HOT to the effect that I am in a first-order visual state of a rampaging pink zebra. In that case it may well be inaccurate to describe that HOT as yielding awareness of the first-order state itself. But this concession does no harm to HOT theory—whereas a concession to the effect that even slight misrepresentation leads to a situation in which there is no awareness of states themselves would be a more significant problem, given the potentially frequent and mundane nature of such misrepresentation (as Rosenthal claims, c.f. Rosenthal, (2005, p. 211), Rosenthal, (2011, p. 433) and Rosenthal, (2018, p. 55); see also Lau and Brown, 2019 for more evidence of the actuality of slight misrepresentation cases). It’s also worth pointing out that there are reasons to think that radical misrepresentation will be extremely unlikely—see Rosenthal (2005, p. 212).
‘Dental fear’, in this context, refers to the phenomenon of dental patients feeling pain even when the relevant nerves are absent or anaesthetized. The standard explanation of these cases is that the patient has the sensation of vibration, and fear, but is conscious of those states as pain. This would be a case of a first-order state of vibration and a first-order state of fear causing a HOT to the effect that one is in a first-order state of pain that one is not in fact in. My suggestion is that the causal link is what makes this a case of misrepresentation rather than an empty HOT. (See Rosenthal, 2005, pp. 209–210 for further discussion.).
And note that the precise formulation of the TP usually given by HOT theorists strongly implies that such transposition would not be warranted: the SF formulation of the TP holds that a mental state (i.e., an existent mental state) is conscious only if the subject is conscious of that state. This strongly implies that the issue at hand is one of what conditions must be fulfilled for an existent mental state to become conscious. This is all consistent with holding that there can be empty HOTs which provide awareness not of any mental state, but rather only of subject’s themselves as being in particular mental states.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to offer sincere thanks to two anonymous reviewers, Rebecca Keller, Antonina Maj, Jacob Martin, Tomasz Zyglewicz, and especially to David Rosenthal for extremely useful comments and discussion on these issues.
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MacRae, C.Z. Higher-Order Awareness of What?. Erkenn 88, 2083–2095 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00443-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00443-4