Abstract
Higher-order thought (HOT) theories of consciousness attempt to explain what it takes for a mental state to be conscious, rather than unconscious, by means of a HOT that represents oneself as being in the state in question. Rosenthal (in: Liu, Perry (eds) Consciousness and the self: new essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) stresses that the way we are aware of our own conscious states requires essentially indexical self-reference. The challenge for defenders of HOT theories is to show that there is a way to explain the required reference-fixing mechanisms that is compatible with the theory. According to Rosenthal, the reference to oneself as such is grounded in the disposition to identify the individual the HOT refers to as the individual who has that HOT. I argue that this leads to a vicious infinite regress on the more than plausible assumption that our cognitive capacities are limited. This leaves such theories without a foundation, since self-reference is thought essential to consciousness.
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Notes
This might lead to the further problem of being unable to provide a justification for the transitivity principle (Kriegel 2009a). An alternative solution is offered by self-representational theorists (Caston 2002; Kriegel 2009b; Sebastián 2012), who might accept something along the lines of the transitivity principle while denying that consciousness is something that could be rendered by a different state.
Recall from the introduction that HOTs are typically not conscious. This is required if we want to avoid the regress to which the transitivity principle would otherwise apparently lead us.
Even if one concedes that non-human animals and human babies have the conceptual abilities required by HOT, it is unreasonable to assume that they are able to establish the identification in question. In reply, Rosenthal claims that they:
[H]ave no irrelevant, inessential ways of referring to themselves in thought. They do distinguish themselves from everything else, and can thereby refer to themselves in thought. But their HOTs do not require the essential indexical, since distinguishing themselves from everything else provides the only way they have to refer to themselves (ibid. p. 34).
This seems to be a gratuitous claim and we have good reasons to think that it is false. The capacity to attribute mental states to others has been demonstrated in, for example, corvids and canids (Bugnyar and Heinrich 2006; Hare and Tomasello 2005; Stulp et al. 2009; Udell et al. 2008). One would expect that by seeing their own image reflected in, say, a river, they might attribute a certain mental state to the animal they are seeing. Therefore, it seems false that they lack inessential ways to refer to themselves and hence the problem of fixing the reference of the concept in their HOTs persists.
What is more, as an anonymous referee has remarked to me, in order to report that the individual the HOT refers to is the same as the one who has the HOT seems to require thinking about the HOT. This in turn would make the HOT conscious according to the theory.
Needless to say, an hypothetical HOT theory that manages to resist the claim that the first-person concept is deployed in the required HOT would not be targeted by my argument—see Coleman (2015).
It is worth introducing a caveat at this point. This reasoning does not assume that the accessibility relation between worlds is transitive. For the first-person concept deployed in the HOT in w1 to refer, it is necessary for there to be an accessible world, w2, in which the HOT is conscious. This means that a third-order thought—that also deploys the first-person concept—is entertained in w2. So, again, this requires that there is a possible world, w3, which is accessible from w2, where the third-order thought is conscious; and so on, ad infinitum. Now, my argument does not assume that w3, nor any posterior world in the chain, has to be accessible from the actual world, w1. That would be a mistake, because there is no need for the required accessibility relation to be transitive. It only assumes that the cognitive capacities of beings like us are what is relevant for assessing the theory, and that our cognitive capacities are limited. This means that there is a world, wn, in which a thought of the maximal length beings like us can entertain is entertained and therefore, that wn+1 is not accessible from wn. I am grateful to Alessandro Torza for pressing me on this point.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Paloma Atencia-Linares, Axel Barceló, Denis Buehler, Elvira Di Bona, Manolo Martínez, Ricardo Mena, Angélica Pena-Martínez, James Stazicker, Nils-Hennes Stear (who suggested to me the title for the paper), and Alessandro Torza for discussion and comments on a previous draft. I owe a special debt to David Rosenthal for helpful discussion of the argument presented in this paper and also to an anonymous referee of this journal. A version of this paper was presented at the Congress of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy. I am grateful to the participants, especially to Krisztina Orban, Michelle Palmira, Carlota Serranilla and Hong Yu Wong. Financial support for this research was provided by the Spanish Government (FFI2014-51811-P), the British Academy and the PAPIIT (IN400218).
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Sebastián, M.Á. Drop it like it’s HOT: a vicious regress for higher-order thought theories. Philos Stud 176, 1563–1572 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1078-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1078-7