The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness (Bloomsbury Companions) [Annotated] 9781474229012, 9781474229036, 9781474229029, 1474229018

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The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness

Also available from Bloomsbury: The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy The Bloomsbury Companion to Epistemology The Bloomsbury Companion to Metaphysics The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophical Logic The Continuum Companion to Philosophy of Mind The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Science

The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness Edited by Dale Jacquette

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Dale Jacquette, 2018 Dale Jacquette has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editor. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-2901-2  ePDF: 978-1-4742-2903-6 eBook: 978-1-4742-2902-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jacquette, Dale, author. Title: The Bloomsbury companion to the philosophy of consciousness / Dale Jacquette. Description: New York : Bloomsbury, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017027229 (print) | LCCN 2017036282 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474229029 (ePub) | ISBN 9781474229036 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781474229012 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Consciousness. Classification: LCC B808.9 (ebook) | LCC B808.9 .J33 2017 (print) | DDC 128/.2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027229 Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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In memory of Dale Jacquette, 1953–2016

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Think of consciousness as a territory just opening its settlement and exploitation, something like an Oklahoma land rush. Put it in color, set it to music, frame it in images—but even this fails to do justice to the vision. Obviously consciousness is infinitely bigger than Oklahoma. —Saul Bellow, Collected Stories (2001), Afterword, 441.

Contents Contributorsix Prefacexi

1 Introduction: Philosophy of Consciousness  Dale Jacquette

1

Part 1  Historical Development 2 The Hard Problem of Understanding Descartes on Consciousness  Katherine Morris 11 3 Brentano’s Aristotelian Concept of Consciousness  Liliana Albertazzi 27 4 Wittgenstein and the Concept of Consciousness  Garry L. Hagberg 57 5 ‘Ordinary’ Consciousness  Julia Tanney 78 Part 2  Groundbreaking Concepts of Consciousness 6 Consciousness, Representation and the Hard Problem  Keith Lehrer 7 The Knowledge Argument and Two Interpretations of ‘Knowing What it’s Like’  Daniel Stoljar 8 Conscious and Unconscious Mental States  Richard Fumerton 9 Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness  Rocco J. Gennaro 10 Kripke on Mind–Body Identity  Scott Soames

93 108 126 142 170

Part 3  Metaphilosophy of Consciousness Studies 11 Understanding Consciousness by Building It  Michael Graziano and Taylor W. Webb 12 The Illusion of Conscious Thought  Peter Carruthers 13 Actualism About Consciousness Affirmed  Ted Honderich 14 Cracking the Hard Problem of Consciousness  Dale Jacquette

187 211 234 258

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Contents

Part 4  Mental Causation, Natural Law and Intentionality of Conscious States 15 Toward Axiomatizing Consciousness  Selmer Bringsjord, Paul Bello and Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu 16 Intentionality and Consciousness  Carlo Ierna 17 Cognitive Approaches to Phenomenal Consciousness  Pete Mandik 18 Free Will and Consciousness  Alfred Mele 19 Notes Towards a Metaphysics of Mind  Joseph Margolis

289 325 347 371 389

Part 5  Resources 20 Annotated Bibliography 21 Research Resources 22 A–Z Key Terms and Concepts

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Index

471

428 437

Contributors Liliana Albertazzi Principal Investigator Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMEC) Professor at the Department of Humanities University of Trento Trento, ITALY Selmer Bringsjord Chair, Department of Cognitive Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science Troy, NY, USA Peter Caruthers Professor, Department of Philosophy University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA Richard Fumerton Professor, Department of Philosophy The University of Iowa Iowa City, IA, USA Rocco J. Gennaro Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy University of Southern Indiana Evansville, IN, USA

Michael Graziano Professor, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Princeton University Princeton, NJ, USA Garry Hagberg James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics Department of Philosophy Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA Ted Honderich Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic University College London London, England, UK Carlo Ierna Postdoctoral Researcher Research Institute for Philosophy and Religious Studies (OFR) Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies—Philosophy Universiteit Utrecht Utrecht, THE NETHERLANDS Dale Jacquette Senior Professorial Chair Division for Logic and Theoretical Philosophy University of Bern BERN, SWITZERLAND

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Contributors

Keith Lehrer Regent’s Professor Emeritus of Philosophy University of Arizona Tucson, AZ, USA Pete Mandik Professor, Department of Philosophy William Paterson University Wayne, NJ, USA Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Washington University St. Louis, MO, USA Joseph Margolis Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy Temple University Philadelphia, PA, USA Alfred Mele William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy

Florida State University Tallahassee, FL, USA Katherine Morris Supernumerary Fellow in Philosophy Mansfield College Oxford University Oxford, England, UK Scott Soames Professor of Philosophy University of Southern California School of Philosophy Los Angeles, CA, USA Daniel Stoljar Professor of Philosophy Australian National University (ANU) Canberra, AUSTRALIA Julia Tanney Independent Scholar

Preface The chapters collected in this book investigate philosophical aspects, problems and challenges in the concept of consciousness. Consciousness studies are a subdivision in philosophy of mind with a recent history and unique character that sets them slightly apart from other developments in philosophy of mind or philosophical psychology otherwise conceived. I am grateful to Fiona Dillier for her able assistance in collating materials for the Part V Resources section, with detailed Annotated Bibliography, electronic Research Resources, and A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts. Thanks are due especially to contributing authors for their excellent chapters that present the recent history and contemporary thinking in philosophy of consciousness.

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Introduction: Philosophy of Consciousness Dale Jacquette

‘Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.’ Kingsley Amis The philosophy of consciousness is a relatively new concentration of interest within the more widely recognized general field of philosophical psychology and philosophy of mind. The concept of consciousness is not taken for granted, but subjected to close critical scrutiny. What exactly is meant by speaking of consciousness? What sort of thing, beginning categorically? If we are not to simply spoon up synonyms, then philosophy of consciousness assumes a specific burden in philosophical psychology and philosophy of mind, what kind of thing, ontologically, metaphysically speaking, is a moment of consciousness? What are the epistemically justified ways of discerning their qualities and relations? If moments of consciousness have as they are frequently said to have, undeniably if phenomenology is consulted, qualia and intentionality, then what kind of thing is a moment of consciousness to possess such apparently physically irreducible kinds of properties? These are not new questions. Nor need there be perceived any urgency in addressing these conceptual questions about and investigations of the properties of consciousness exactly now. To the extent that we question the concept of consciousness in approaching the traditional mind–body problem, the analysis of the concept and identity conditions for persons, inquiry in philosophy of mind becomes literally self-conscious. In the process, we are made conscious of the centrality of the concept of consciousness in every aspect of the philosophy of mind. Philosophy of consciousness focuses attention and places emphasis on the concept category of consciousness, which needless to say has been present all along. It is in one sense precisely what thinkers in the philosophy of mind have always been talking about. The challenge is to try explaining what that

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means, what philosophy of mind has, perhaps less self-consciously had, in its sights from ancient times. There is no competition between philosophy of mind and contemporary philosophy of consciousness. Philosophy of consciousness extensionally is subsumed by philosophy of mind. A discovery in philosophy of consciousness is automatically a contribution to philosophy of mind, even if not conversely. Philosophy of consciousness can venture subdivisions of its subject that might not have occurred in philosophy of mind lacking explicit engagement with the concept of consciousness. Consciousness is said to come in three varieties – in several terminologies the perceptual, affective and cognitive. Whether or not this is correct is not so much the point as that it offers something substantive about the nature of consciousness for philosophical consideration. What does it mean, and what are the arguments? What are the relevant identity conditions, if the perceptual, affective and cognitive are different kinds or applications of consciousness, if there is or cannot be anything common underlying all three, to which all three kinds or modes of consciousness can be reduced? Are there three consciousnesses, or three capabilities of a single unified consciousness? Can consciousness fail to be unified? What would that mean? What ontic and explanatory models could be invoked in the metaphysics of three kinds or modes of consciousness? In the science of psychology we can afford to be indifferent about these questions, but not here in the philosophy of consciousness. We must arrive at defensible identity conditions for consciousness. It should suffice to understand what it is for something to be a single moment of consciousness carried along metaphorically speaking in a progression streaming in sync with the conscious subject’s perception of the passing of time. This too has proved elusive. It is to attempt expressing in words the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thinking subject to think a single conscious thought. Anyone who has not tried but considers the task trivial need only continue reading as the authors assembled here raise philosophical difficulties for the concept and explore the perplexing nature of consciousness. There is nothing more familiar to each individual conscious being, and by reputation few things more resistant to exact articulation, let alone reductive conceptual analysis. There is by reputation again supposed to be a ‘hard’ problem of consciousness. What seems the hardest is saying exactly what the problem is meant. What is it supposed to be so hard to do? If it is to explain how living tissues can be related to the existence of moments of consciousness, then more must be said as to what sorts of explanations can satisfy and for what reasons they would finally

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answer the hard question. Otherwise it is not clear that a question is being asked at all, of any level of difficulty. Why should it not do then, to say that qualia and intentionality supervene on a conscious thinking subject’s functioning neurophysiology, to which it can be further added that qualia and intentionality are emergent properties that cannot be fully explained in terms exclusively of the purely physical properties of their supervenience base? Philosophy of consciousness taking inquiry in that direction opens many avenues of theory development with potential implications for analysis of the concept of perception, reasoning, mental action, passion and suffering, the concept of person, freedom of the will, action theory, phenomenological epistemology, and much else besides. Many philosophers of consciousness will not want to pursue all of these possibilities. There is thankfully no party line philosophically in consciousness studies. Instead there is commitment to improved understanding of the concept and properties of consciousness insofar as these can be rigorously investigated and conclusions defended by reasonable arguments. Engagement in philosophy of consciousness is a concentrated study in philosophy of mind, dedicated specifically to understanding the existence and nature of consciousness, beginning with a single moment of consciousness abstracted in isolation from the streaming progression of conscious moments. If consciousness is something like a streaming film, as Saul Bellow mentions in the book’s quotation, with a technicolor sound track and all the other sensory inputs of a richly experienced individual moment of consciousness, then we proceed analytically by asking what is a single frame in the movie and how it is linked up and connects together with all the other frames running through the chain of an individual subjective consciousness. These themes are examined from multiple perspectives in the present collection’s four main parts. The Historical Development of the philosophy of consciousness presented in Part I examines highlights selected from the history of the subject and explains their relation to the evolution of the subject among philosophers of many different orientations. Katherine Morris begins the book, appropriately, by examining, “The Hard Problem of Understanding Descartes on Consciousness.” Liliana Albertazzi in her comprehensive study, ‘Brentano’s Aristotelian Concept of Consciousness’, examines Franz Brentano’s descriptive and experimental psychology against the background of his thesis of the characteristic intentionality or ‘aboutness’ of thought. Albertazzi draws on her expertise in perceptual psychology to position herself authoritatively to conclude with Brentano and by implication with Aristotle in De Anima that even complete knowledge of the brain and its workings will never adequately

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explain the concept, possibility, structure or phenomenological contents of consciousness revealed only to Aristotle’s ‘inner sense’ of the active intellect or Brentano’s faculty of ‘inner perception’. Garry L. Hagberg in ‘Wittgenstein and the Concept of Consciousness’ historically-philosophically examines especially the later Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks relevant to understanding the nature of consciousness. Hagberg interprets Wittgenstein especially in the posthumous Philosophical Investigations, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology and Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, also Zettel and Blue and Brown Books, as opening his discussion to a double entendre based on explicating several meanings of the colloquial phrase, ‘it is not what you think’. Julia Tanney in ‘“Ordinary” Consciousness’ considers a common-sense approach to the problems of consciousness that require theory to become more self-conscious about the questions it asks, the kinds of answers it wants and expects, and that it could meaningfully accept. The chapter exemplifies ‘ordinary language’ considerations about the concepts and terminologies conventionally adopted in an effort to express conscious experience, notably the ‘what it is like’ vocabulary of qualia. She considers zombies’ arguments from this point of view and presses received philosophies of consciousness with a dilemma whereby the possibility of zombies is conceivable only if sufficient inner mental life of precisely the sort in question in the internalismexternalism debate is built into the concept of conscious non-zombies. The thought experiment consequently does not get off the ground without reasoning in a vicious circle. Part II, Groundbreaking Concepts of Consciousness, opens with an important new chapter by Keith Lehrer titled, ‘Consciousness, Representation and the Hard Problem’. Lehrer elaborates a representational theory of consciousness that makes reflexive exemplarization a key concept in understanding the facts and external world correspondences and truthconditions for states of consciousness. With one eye on semantics and another on epistemology against a realist metaphysical background, Lehrer makes a case for understanding consciousness and addressing David J. Chalmers’s mention of the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness as a self-presentation representation that ‘radiates’ beyond itself to represent the external world, however accurately and with whatever epistemic caveats and cautions. Daniel Stoljar in The Knowledge Argument and Two Interpretations of ‘Knowing What it’s Like’ considers a response to the knowledge argument based on Frank Jackson’s colour scientist thought experiment in his (1983) essay, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’. The suggestion that Mary, the colour scientist, comes

Introduction: Philosophy of Consciousness

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to ‘know what it is like’ to see red for the first time is judged ambiguous by Stoljar between an interrogative reading and a free relative reading. Stoljar argues that the ambiguity counterobjection is unsuccessful because the crucial concept supporting the knowledge argument can be reformulated to avoid the response. Stoljar distinguishes the what-it-is-like objection from two related proposals in the literature by David Lewis and Michael Tye. Richard Fumerton in his chapter, ‘Conscious and Unconscious Mental States’, considers whether there could be such a thing as an unconscious mental state. The idea is similar to that of the Freudian Unbewußt, where unconscious mental states must have intention, even qualia, and be capable of causing or contributing causally to a thinking subject’s external behaviour. Fumerton draws intriguing connections between the concept of conscious versus unconscious mental states, carefully defined and explicated, and such now-classic problems in philosophy of consciousness as the knowledge argument and correct interpretation of Jackson’s colour scientist thought experiment. Fumerton is motivated throughout his chapter by the consideration that the existence of mental states is disclosed to the individual phenomenologically, and that intuitively it appears at least logically possible for such states to exist even when the thinking subject is unaware of their occurrence. Rocco J. Gennaro in ‘Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness’ addresses the key question he thinks should be answered by any theory of consciousness: What makes a mental state a conscious mental state? He introduces an overall approach to consciousness called representationalism, and discusses Tye’s First-Order Representationalism, which Gennaro finds inadequate. Gennaro accordingly presents three major versions of a higher-order representationalism (HOR): higher-order thought (HOT) theory, dispositional HOT theory, and higherorder perception theory. He considers objections to HOR, to which he offers replies. He develops a connection between higher-order representational theories of consciousness conceptualism. He critically examines the claim that the representational content of a perceptual experience is entirely determined by the conceptual capacities the perceiver brings to bear in the experience. Scott Soames in ‘Kripke on Mind-Body Identity’ critically assesses Saul A. Kripke’s efforts to establish mind–body property non-identity in Naming and Necessity and precursor essay, ‘Identity and Necessity’. The argument is important because it intertwines considerations of modal semantics, identity theory, epistemology and philosophy of mind. Soames’s purpose is to explicate accurately an inference that has been muddled in the secondary philosophical literature to some extent, and to evaluate precisely the essential moves in

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Kripke’s reasoning against the background of their broader implications for the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Part III, Metaphilosophy of Consciousness Studies, begins with a constructive explanation of consciousness. Michael Graziano and Taylor W. Webb, in ‘Understanding Consciousness by Building It’, offer to explain basic concepts of consciousness by describing in plausible detail how a conscious entity might be systematically built, using technologies and programming protocols already available today. By establishing a hierarchy of nested internet-based information databases, and most importantly analysing beforehand in preparation the kinds of information concerning which thinking subjects can be expected to be conscious. The authors anticipate the demands on a conscious machine and carpenter-in data and metadata of several kinds structured and accessible to question-triggered information retrieval of whatever sort is generally available to and required of the reports of developing consciousness. Peter Caruthers in ‘The Illusion of Conscious Thought’ takes a refreshingly skeptical view of the existence of consciousness, supported by an independently interesting volley of arguments against the reality of consciousness, in support of the contrary thesis that consciousness as defined by Caruthers is an illusion. The reason is that on the strength of Caruthers’s main distinction between conscious and unconscious propositional attitude-events and the categorization of all ‘thoughts’ as propositional attitude-events all ‘thoughts’ so understood are unconscious. Significantly, Caruthers’s characterization of ‘thoughts’ explicitly excludes perception and affection, applying exclusively to enlanguaged cognition. Ted Honderich in ‘Actualism About Consciousness Reaffirmed’ offers an explication and philosophical defence of his unique analysis of actual consciousness. He divides consciousness into three distinct types or modes – perceptual, cognitive and affective. He identifies five ‘leading ideas’ about consciousness extracted from recent philosophical literature on the nature of our subject as a starting place for inquiry, primarily to dispel the assumption that consciousness is monolithic in meaning. Honderich outlines a metaphysics of physical reality that has two aspects – the unitary objective physical world and all the individual subjective worlds in which conscious participates, resides, perceives, acts in, and the like. Honderich explains main theoretical explanatory and problem-solving advantages of actual consciousness theory and recommends it on the grounds of avoiding difficulties to which other concepts of consciousness are liable. Dale Jacquette in his highly programmatic contribution, ‘Cracking the Hard Problem of Consciousness’, describes a new paradigm for understanding the concept of consciousness in fundamental metaphysical terms. The proposal

Introduction: Philosophy of Consciousness

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for an Attributive-Dynamic (AD) model of consciousness explains streaming consciousness as the brain’s dynamic activity in attributing information data packages of properties to passing moments of time as predication objects. Streaming consciousness is the brain’s successive attributions of information clusters to distinct moments of time as individual conscious states or moments in the stream. Implications and theoretical applications of the analysis are briefly suggestively explored. Foremost among the proposal’s touted advantages is its essentialist explanation of the manifest but otherwise inexplicably intimate connection between streaming consciousness and conscious awareness of the passage of time. The model embodies an analytic answer to Edmund Husserl’s quest for a phenomenology of internal time consciousness. Part IV, Mental Causation, Natural Law, and Intentionality of Conscious States’. Selmer Bringsjord and Paul Bellow’s chapter ‘Toward Axiomatizig Consciousness’ critically discusses the concept posed in the title of their essay. Carlo Ierna in ‘Intentionality and Consciousness’ chronicles important moments in the historical phenomenological tradition in philosophy of consciousness. He considers in detail the immanent intentionality thesis in Brentano’s Psychology, and Husserl’s canonical writings. Ierna contrasts the intentionality tradition in early phenomenology with the rootless intentionalism of John R. Searle. He makes instructive comparisons between the intentionality commitments of these first two related and third disparate contemporary thinkers dedicated to understanding the aboutness of consciousness. Pete Mandik continues the discussion with his chapter ‘Cognitive Approaches to Phenomenal Consciousness’. Alfred Mele in ‘Free Will and Consciousness’ studies the longstanding thorny problem of human free will versus determinism through the lens of Benjamin Libet’s and followers’ controversial experiments in reportings of and neuromuscular activation times. Mele argues that recent findings bear on the question whether there can be neuroscientific evidence for the nonexistence of free will. He provides empirical, conceptual and terminological background to the topic, and explores the status of generalizations from alleged findings about decisions or intentions in an experimental setting of a particular kind to all decisions and intentions. Casting doubt on the experimental findings and their implications, Mele disconnects recent Libet-inspired experimental findings from the ambitious conclusions offered on their foundation for the conclusion that the sense of free will at the ground of free and responsible action is delusional. Joseph Margolis completes the book with his thoughts on ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Mind’.

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Then follows Part V, Resources, with further annotated readings, electronic website materials, and an A–Z Key Terms and Concepts guide to the vocabulary and categories prevalent in contemporary philosophy of consciousness. A man’s thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Part One

Historical Development

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The Hard Problem of Understanding Descartes on Consciousness Katherine Morris

Descartes does not make extensive use of the terms ‘consciousness’ (conscientia, conscience) and ‘conscious’ (conscius, conscient) in his corpus.1 (A further complication which I ignore for present purposes: there is a range of terms apart from ‘conscientia’ which, as their context indicates, means the same thing to Descartes, for example, ‘apperception immediate’. These terms, as well as ‘conscientia’, are usually translated as ‘awareness’ or ‘immediate awareness’ in CSM.) Nonetheless, his conception of consciousness has been widely misunderstood, and these misunderstandings tend to carry further misconstructions in their wake. I will in what follows use the term ‘conscientia’ (and, occasionally, ‘conscius’) rather than ‘consciousness’ (and ‘conscious’) as a reminder of this danger.2 I will offer an interpretation of Descartes’s conception of conscientia that has some continuities with scholastic usage, although I won’t review that complex usage here.3 In particular, I will suggest (a) that conscientia retains (albeit in a complex and indirect way) its etymological links with scientia (knowledge), and (more controversially and more speculatively) (b) that conscientia also retains its etymological links with conscience. (In fact I will suggest that the relevant notion of conscience is itself a form of knowledge, viz. knowledge of one’s own actions.) The interpretation I offer also draws on some concepts taken from Sartre, and thus has some continuities with the usage of some twentieth-century French philosophers.4 Such continuities hardly constitute an argument in favour of this interpretation; nonetheless they perhaps provide some reassurance that the suggested interpretation might be on the right lines.

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Introduction: Conscientia and thought It is clear that Descartes draws some kind of connection between conscientia and thought. It has been argued that he draws two different kinds of connections, thereby indicating two different conceptions of conscientia. (Radner 1988: 445–52 calls these C1 and C2 respectively.)5 There are passages where Descartes apparently equates ‘thought’ and ‘conscientia’ (e.g. AT VII 176, CSM II 124: ‘the common conception of thought or perception or consciousness’), and in particular there are passages where he uses ‘conscientia’ to refer to one type of thought, namely ‘seeming’ (e.g. he refers to our conscientia of walking (AT VII 353, CSM II 244), and clearly means our seeming to walk).6 There are other passages where, rather than equating thought and conscientia, he sees conscientia as, in a sense yet to be explicated, some kind of awareness of thought; it is this sense (Radner’s C2) on which I will be concentrating here. (Hereafter, I will simply refer to ‘conscientia’ without the number, but this must be understood.) These two passages in particular will be our primary focus; the first comes from the Second Replies as a definition preceding his setting-out of his arguments in more geometrico, the second from the Principles: [1] I use this term [‘thought’] to include everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware of it. (AT 7:160, CSM II 113) [2] By the term ‘thought’, I understand everything which we are aware of as happening within us, in so far as we have awareness of it. (AT VIIIA 6, CSM I 195)

These are clearly meant as explanations of the term ‘thought’, not of the term ‘conscientia’; but we can use these passages to help us understand what he meant by ‘conscientia’. Passage [1] is followed by ‘Thus all the operations of the will, the intellect, the imagination and the senses are thoughts’, and passage [2] by a variant on this, both echoing the well-known passage in M2 which asserts that [3] A thing that thinks . . . [is a] thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions. (AT VII 28, CSM II 19)

In the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on those operations of the mind which have to do with the human being as union of mind and body. Thus the first substantial section focuses on conscientia in connection with the operations of the senses and imagination, the second in connection with the operations of the will

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(which are particularly relevant for the links between conscientia and conscience).7 I take it that we also have conscientia of purely intellectual thoughts, but the issues are more complex and interesting in respect of these other kinds of cases.

1 Conscientia and the operations of the senses and imagination Descartes seems to see no need to offer definitions or explications of ‘conscientia’. Evidently he assumed that his audience would understand this term without explanation (although, as we will see, this proved not to be entirely true).8 This carries a danger for us today: we are likely to begin with our own pre-theoretical understanding of ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’ and use these passages to work out what he means by ‘thought’ from that. Using this interpretive strategy, many commentators are led to the view that he is expanding the extension of ‘thought’ well beyond what we mean by ‘thought’ today, to include, for example, sense data, sensations, mental images, etc.9 The opposite interpretive strategy might have something to recommend it: perhaps we may arrive at an understanding of conscientia by beginning from the hypothesis that he meant by ‘thought’ more or less what we mean today. I suppose that, minimally, we think of thoughts as (i) intentional, that is, ‘about’ something, or having a ‘content’, and (ii) expressible in articulate propositions. Clearly enough, sense data, sensations, and mental images and so on are not thoughts, thus understood. We may be tempted to add to this characterization of ‘thought’ ‘(iii) items which have a truth-value’; this won’t do for Descartes’s conception, because operations of the will, being roughly equivalent to what we call intentions, have a different ‘direction of fit’ from what we ordinarily call thoughts. That Descartes classifies operations of the will as thoughts does indeed represent a difference from contemporary usage, but not one that is normally focused upon. We may note passages [1] and [2] and their sequelae don’t quite say that the operations of the senses and imagination are thoughts: they say that they are thoughts insofar as we have conscientia of them.10 This suggests the following interpretation: that to see something, to hear something, to fear something, to feel pain in such and such a place, to imagine something . . ., are, for Descartes, complex; to put it in an un-Cartesian idiom, the truth-conditions for the claim that x (for example,) sees light (where x is a human being)11 include, but are not exhausted by, the occurrence of a thought. Thus we could analyse ‘x sees

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light’ something like this: x sees light if and only if (a) there is light which (b) is stimulating x’s eyes, optic nerve, etc. such that (c) a certain thought (perhaps naturally expressed as ‘I seem to see light’ (AT VII 29, CSM II 19)) is given rise to in x.12 ( ‘I seem to see light’ might perhaps be analysed further, along the following lines: ‘I (x) am entertaining the proposition that (a) and (b) hold and am powerfully inclined to affirm that proposition’.13) I presume that similar analyses could be offered for other operations of the senses.14 To a first approximation, the suggestion would then be that when we see light, we have conscientia of (and only of) condition (c). This would make good sense of the claim that the operations of the senses are thoughts insofar as we have conscientia of them. But how does this help us make sense of conscientia itself? Much of the discussion in the literature centres on the question of whether conscientia is to be understood as a ‘higher-order thought’ or as a ‘same-order thought’. Bourdin, the author of the Seventh Objections, claimed to understand Descartes in the first way: as holding that ‘when you think, you know and consider that you are thinking (and this is really what it is to be conscious and to have conscious awareness of some activity)’ (AT VII 533-4, CSM II 364); this interpretation Descartes describes as ‘deluded’ (AT VII 559, CSM II 382). The position ascribed to Descartes by Bourdin is untenable, as Descartes clearly recognizes if conscientia is a HOT and if we have conscientia of every thought (including the higher-order ones), then we will end up in an infinite regress.15 This observation might lead us to the following view: that conscientia is to be understood simply as the power of the soul to reflect on its own operations.16 This has the obvious advantage that it does not construe conscientia as a higherorder thought; reflection – the exercise of conscientia construed as a power or disposition – is a HOT, but one can think without reflecting, so there is no regress. This proposal however cannot be quite right, for reasons that come out in Descartes’s exchange with Arnauld in the Fourth Objections and Replies: Arnauld asserts that ‘the mind of an infant in its mother’s womb has the power of thought, but is not aware of it’ (AT VII 214, CSM II 150), to which Descartes replies that ‘we cannot have any thought of which we are not aware at the very moment when it is in us’, going on to suggest that the infant too is ‘immediately aware of its thoughts’ but ‘does not remember them afterwards’ (AT VII 246, CSM II 171-2). This does not sit easily with the above proposal that conscientia is nothing but a power to reflect, although there is, I will suggest, still an essential link between conscientia and reflection.

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Another possibility is that Descartes sees conscientia as a same-order thought rather than a HOT.17 Direct support for this might come from Descartes himself: ‘The initial thought by means of which we become aware of something does not differ from the second thought by means of which we become aware that we were aware of it’ (AT VII 559, CSM II 382).18 This is sometimes understood as saying that every thought has two objects, one of which is whatever the thought is about, and the other of which is the thought itself. Sometimes the first object is called the ‘primary object’, the second the ‘secondary object’.19 I confess to finding this difficult to make sense of, and want to suggest another possibility (which may, for all I know, be what the two-objects view is attempting to get at).On this view, conscientia is neither a higher-order nor a same-order thought: it is not a thought at all. Rather, it is a kind of ‘background’ or ‘implicit’ awareness that we – necessarily – have of our thoughts, which is closely tied to the power of reflection, in the following sense: to make that background awareness explicit, to ‘foreground’ the thought itself (rather than what the thought is about), is to reflect. The resultant reflection is a thought and indeed a HOT (We might need to add that only as we become adults are we able to exercise the power of reflection, bearing in mind Descartes’s distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘reflective’ thoughts, the thoughts of infants being direct (AT VII 220-1, CSMK III 357).)20 What lies behind this suggestion is Sartre’s distinction between positional and non-positional conscientia (1986 (1943): xxviii–xxx). We can make some intuitive sense of this distinction with the following analogy. If, as the phenomenologists (following the Gestalt psychologists) claim, every perception is structured into figure and background,21 to be perceptually aware of the figure is (inter alia) to be aware of the background, but the awareness of the figure is explicit, whereas the awareness of the background is not; it can be made explicit by a shift of perceptual attention. (It would be strange to say that every perception has two objects: the figure and the background. The figure is the object of the perceptual act, but the background is an inextricable part of the whole perceptual experience and can become the object of another perceptual act via a shift of attention.) In like manner, for Descartes, to think one sees light (to seem to see light) is (inter alia) to be conscius of thinking that one sees light; one’s conscientia of thinking one sees light is not a thought, but reflection, which is simply the making-explicit of the conscientia, is one. We might, following Sartre (1986 (1943): xxx), prefer to write ‘conscientia of ’ as ‘conscientia (of)’, to remind ourselves of the point that conscientia ‘of ’ this or that thought does not have the thought as its object.22

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Thus conscientia can be understood as the ‘background awareness’ (of), in the case under discussion, what we earlier called condition (c), that is, the thought (e.g. that one sees light) which forms an essential part of the operations of the senses and imagination in human beings. Finally, I want to suggest that reflection, which is the making-explicit of conscientia, can yield knowledge of the operations of the senses and imagination. Thus the claim is not that conscientia is a kind of knowledge, but that it is internally related to (at least) this particular class of knowledge. Let me begin with an easy case of this, before introducing complications. We know that for Descartes ‘I seem to see light’ is immune to hyperbolic doubt. This is the burden of the paragraph which follows our passage [3]: ‘Are not all these things [‘I seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed’] just as true as the fact that I exist, even if I am asleep all the time, and even if he who created me is doing all he can to deceive me?’, (AT VII 28-9, CSM II 19, emphasis original). Thus ‘I seem to see light’ is ‘indubitable’, as long as we understand this term as expressing, not a psychological incapacity, but the idea that it cannot be called into doubt, that is, that no reasons can be given to doubt it.23 I take it that this amounts to knowledge.24 Thus if I make that (of) which I have conscientia (when I see light) explicit (through reflection), the resultant thought is indubitable and thus amounts to knowledge. Now for the complications: there are obstacles to the reflection just described. We know already that the operations of the senses and imagination have complex truth-conditions. On this basis, we might, following Descartes, see propositions such as ‘I see light’ as, in a sense, ambiguous: there is a wide sense, according to which ‘I see light’ expresses conditions (a)–(c), and a restricted sense (AT VII 29, CSM II 19), in which it expresses only condition (c), that is, ‘I seem to see light’. We normally (indeed naturally, i.e., because of our nature as union of mind and body) fail to distinguish (make a distinction between) the two meanings. (This is a way of understanding Descartes’s claim that the operations of the senses and imagination are ‘confused thoughts’ (e.g. AT VII 81, CSM II 56), bearing in mind that ‘distinct’ is the Cartesian opposite of ‘confused’.) 25 We might on this basis say that when our conscientia (of) this confused thought is made explicit (i.e. when we reflect), we (normally and naturally) engage in what we may call ‘impure reflection’.26 It is impure precisely because it does not distinguish between the wide and the restricted senses of ‘I see light’. Much of the Meditations is devoted to the sort of intellectual work – we may call this ‘purifying reflection’27 – required to unconfuse such confused thoughts. Only when we have done so are we in a position to engage in what we may

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call ‘pure reflection’:28 our reflection then makes explicit our conscientia of a thought (‘I see light’ in the restricted sense, i.e. ‘I seem to see light’) which is now carefully distinguished from the thought with which it was formerly confused (‘I see light’ in the wide sense). And it is this thought, not ‘I see light’ in the wide sense, which is immune to hyperbolic doubt. If we fail to distinguish these two senses of ‘I see light’, we are liable to fall into error: we, through habit or in our eagerness to find truth, may take it that ‘I see light’ in the wide sense is as indubitable as ‘I see light’ in the narrow sense: that it is as certain that there is light, and that my eyes are being stimulated by light, as it is that I seem to see light. Thus pure reflection yields (indubitable) knowledge of the operations of the senses and imagination, insofar as these operations are thoughts. Conscientia is not itself a form of knowledge;29 nonetheless, it is internally related to something (namely pure reflection) which does yield knowledge of this limited class.30

2 Conscientia and the operations of the will I will be suggesting that the picture of conscientia painted in the previous section can, when applied to the operations of the will (as opposed to those of the senses and imagination) and with a few modifications, be understood as closely related to conscience. I will suggest that conscience may itself be understood as a type of knowledge, in particular knowledge of one’s own actions; once again, the claim is not that conscientia is such knowledge, but that there is an internal relation between the two. The operations of the will, as they figure in the Meditations, seem at first sight to be limited to affirming and denying.31 Passage [3], however, says of a thinking thing not just that it affirms and denies but also that it ‘is willing’ and ‘is unwilling’ (AT VII 28, CSM II 19). Perhaps these terms might take us closer to what we ordinarily think of as actions. (Affirming and denying may, of course, be called actions; but actions as we ordinarily think of them involve body movements, and actions thus understood – as most parallel to operations of the senses and imagination, insofar as they can only occur in a union of mind and body – will be the focus here.) I take it that an action is, by definition, intentional,32 and that possibly these terms ‘willing’ and ‘unwilling’ are pointing us in the direction of intentionality in this sense. Descartes says very little about actions; one passage, however, might get us started. Consider something Descartes said in response to an objection by

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Gassendi: ‘I may not . . . make the inference “I am walking, therefore I exist”, except insofar as the awareness of walking is a thought’ (AT VII 353, CSM II 244). Note that ‘awareness [conscientia] of walking’ here means conscientia in the sense earlier called C1, not C2: it means something like ‘seeming to walk’. This might suggest that we could treat ‘x is walking’ in parallel fashion to our earlier treatment of ‘x sees light’: perhaps we could say that the truth-conditions for the claim that x is walking (where x is a human being)33 are complex, like those of ‘x sees light’. We might be tempted by something more or less like the following analysis: ‘x walks’ is true if and only if (a) there is a surface against which x’s feet push, (b) such pushing is caused by movements of various nerves, muscles and limbs, such that x’s body is propelled forward, and such that (c) a certain thought is given rise to (perhaps naturally expressed as ‘I seem to be walking’, cashed out in parallel fashion to ‘I seem to see light’). This, however, doesn’t capture the sense in which walking is an action, that is, intentional: It treats it as if it is some occurrence which is simply perceived. A better analysis might make the thought in condition (c), not ‘I seem to be walking’, but something like ‘I am trying to walk’, possibly roughly cashable-out as ‘I (x) intend that the other truth-conditions for “x is walking” hold’ (where this gives rise to those other conditions, rather than being given rise to by them, so as to capture the opposite direction of fit).34 This would begin to make sense of the idea that the operations of the will – including, strange as it may sound, actions such as walking – are thoughts insofar as we have conscientia of them. Let us take our previous discussion of conscientia and reflection for granted here. Conscientia (of) the operations of the will is neither a HOT nor a sameorder thought; rather, it names the kind of ‘background awareness’ we have of our own thoughts (in this case, our intentions). To try to walk is (inter alia) to be conscius (of) one’s trying to walk; one’s conscientia (of) so trying is not a thought, but can give rise to one through reflection. Finally, reflection, the making-explicit of conscientia, can – with an important caveat – yield indubitable knowledge of the operations of the will. The caveat is, once again, that the reflection in question be ‘pure’. It is through our exploration of this that connections between conscientia and conscience will begin to look more plausible. Although this is not a move which Descartes makes, we might argue that ‘I am walking’ is in a certain sense ambiguous, just as ‘I see light’ is. In the wide sense, ‘I am walking’ expresses the parallel conditions (a)–(c); in the restricted sense, it expresses only condition (c), that is, ‘I am trying to walk’. Again, Descartes never explicitly claims that operations of the will are confused

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thoughts, but we can suggest on his behalf that they are, in that we normally (and naturally) fail to distinguish the two meanings. Hence when we reflect on the operations of the will, we normally engage in impure reflection; the sort of purifying reflection sketched here enables us to unconfuse these thoughts so that we can engage in pure reflection. As with the operations of the senses and imagination, we can see an epistemological case for making the distinction between a wide and a narrow sense of ‘I am walking’. If the demon is deceiving me that there is an external world and that I have a body, then I am not walking in the wide sense, but it will still be the case that I am walking in the narrow sense, that is, trying to walk. What, though, has all this to do with conscience? The term ‘conscience’ has itself been understood in multiple ways.35 For the purposes of making sense of Descartes’s use of ‘conscientia’, we might link it to a tradition (visible, e.g. in Aquinas) which sees it as consisting in two kinds of knowledge: first, knowledge that one has performed or is performing this or that action, and secondly, knowledge of the moral character of this action.36 What we have so far is that pure reflection, the making-explicit of conscientia that we are acting ‘in the narrow sense’, that is, trying to act, yields (indubitable) knowledge of one’s actions, insofar as one can have such knowledge. Although what I have said so far is somewhat speculative, it is a fairly natural extension of the account given in the first section of conscientia (of) the operations of the senses and imagination. But can it be connected to knowledge of the moral character of one’s actions? Now, ‘x is walking’, all by itself, doesn’t look as though it has any particular moral character; on the other hand, we seldom ‘just walk’. That is, the intention is seldom just ‘to walk’, but, for example, to walk to the shop to get some Campari, or to walk with a friend to enjoy the companionship and countryside, or to walk away from the scene of an accident. If ‘walking away from the scene of an accident’ is, to use the jargon, the description under which my action is intentional, that is, what I am trying to do, I may fail to reflect properly on this trying, and this in one of several ways that go beyond the natural confusion described earlier. In the first place, I may fail to treat the action in question as an action at all: in effect, my reflection only gets me to ‘I (x) am entertaining the proposition that the other truth-conditions for “x is walking” hold and am powerfully inclined to affirm that proposition’. (One treats one’s action as if it were a mere happening.) In the second place, I may fail to specify fully what it is that I intended to do: in effect, my purifying reflection only gets me to ‘I (x) intend that the other truthconditions for “x is walking” hold and am powerfully inclined to affirm that they do hold’. (One treats one’s action as if it were a morally neutral action.) Or I focus

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on some description of the action other than that under which it was intentional (I am walking towards the shop), and so on. These kinds of reflective failures are commonplace, and one wants to say that they are not mere failures but motivated, and indeed motivated by the conscientia (of) what I am trying to do. This would be intelligible, although undoubtedly a great deal more would need to be said, if we can suppose that in being conscius (of) trying to walk away from the scene of an accident I am conscius (of) the moral reprehensibility of what I am trying to do, and it is this that motivates me to reflect so impurely. It remains the case that were I to reflect purely, I would achieve indubitable knowledge of my action, scilicet of what I am trying to do, and in so doing I would achieve knowledge of the action’s moral character. If this link could be made, then knowledge of our own actions and knowledge of the moral character of one’s actions are in fact not that far apart.37 These last remarks are both speculative and controversial; I hope at least to have made it plausible that there is an internal relation between conscientia of the operations of the will and knowledge of our own actions, even if someone wants to resist the further argument for an internal relation between conscientia of the operations of the will and knowledge of the moral character of our own actions.

3 Some concluding remarks I have tried to offer an interpretation of Descartes’s conception of conscientia, or to be precise an interpretation of one of his conceptions of conscientia, the one indicated in passages [1] and [2] quoted in the introduction. I have deliberately focused on conscientia of the operations of the mind which arise from the mind–body union. Hence I looked, first, at the operations of the senses and imagination (although with a focus on the senses), and, secondly, on those operations of the will which could be understood as intentions to perform a body-involving action. I argued, first, for a way to make sense of Descartes’s claim that the operations of the senses, imagination and the will are thoughts insofar as we have conscientia of them. I suggested that the truth-conditions of these operations (in human beings) were, for Descartes, complex, involving things going on in the world, things going on in the body and things going on in the mind. The latter, in the case of operations of the senses, could be understood as ‘seemings’ (which I attempted to cash out in a way that made it clear that to seem to see was to have

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a thought); in the case of operations of the will, it could be understood as ‘tryings’ (which I again attempted to cash out in a way that made it clear that to try was to have a thought, as long as we understand tryings as thoughts with the opposite direction of fit from seemings). It is this – the seeming or the trying – of which we have conscientia. I argued, secondly, that conscientia is not to be understood either as a higher-order or as a same-order thought (with, perhaps, a primary and a secondary object, the secondary object being the thought itself). Rather, it can be understood as a ‘background’ or ‘implicit’ awareness (of) the seeming or the trying just identified. Finally, the connection between conscientia and knowledge (including knowledge of one’s own actions insofar as these involve tryings) went, I argued, via reflection. Conscientia is not itself a form of knowledge. Rather, reflection is a making-explicit of conscientia; reflection yields knowledge when, and only when, it is ‘pure’, and it is pure (in relation to the operations of the senses, imagination and will) when, and only when, the thinker has gone through the sort of ‘purifying reflection’ that unconfuses the thoughts which are normally and naturally confused. I suggested, very speculatively, that in the case of the operations of the will, there were obstacles to pure reflection that went beyond natural confusion, in order to try to make somewhat plausible a more robust link between conscientia and conscience. This is a complicated picture; some of the details may be contestable. However, there are two conclusions which I think may be drawn. First, a full appreciation of what Descartes understands by conscientia requires some comprehe