Consciousness And Mind

CONSCIOUSNESS AND MIND CONSCIOUSNESS AND MIND D AV I D M . RO S E N T H A L CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © David M. Rosenthal, 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rosenthal, David M. Consciousness and mind / David M. Rosenthal. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Consciousness. 2. Thought and thinking. I. Title. B808.9.R675 2006 126–dc22 2005020562 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0-19-823697-2 ISBN 0-19-823696-4 (Pbk.) 978-0-19-823697-9 978-0-19-823696-2 (Pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 To the memory of my father and to my son, Joshua, who in different ways inspired and enriched this work Preface I first sketched the higher-order-thought theory of consciousness toward the end of an article about mind-body materialism, to help defuse the challenge consciousness seems to pose for materialism. That brief discussion left many questions unaddressed, and I set out to develop the theory in ‘‘Two Concepts of Consciousness,’’ reprinted here as chapter 1. My main goal there was to show how the theory can handle our pretheoretic intuitions, sometimes by predicting those intuitions and in other cases by showing why intuitions that seem compelling are nonetheless erroneous. I also came to see how the theory facilitates the fruitful investigation of the many connections consciousness has with other mental phenomena. One group of connections has to do with mental qualities. Discussions of consciousness often take off from unquestioned assumptions about the nature of mental qualities, assumptions that constrain subsequent theory and so make a mystery of consciousness. The appeal to higher-order thoughts suggests ways to work in the opposite direction, using the theory to point toward an account of mental qualities that conforms to both commonsense ideas and scientific findings about qualitative consciousness. In doing this, the theory helps undermine the assumptions about mental qualities that cause difficulty. These matters are the focus of chapters 5, 6, and 7. A second group of issues has to do with the ways consciousness interacts with thought, speech, and the self-interpretation that thoughts about ourselves sometimes involve. The appeal to higher-order thoughts makes poss