Jakub Mihálik
Affiliation: Institute Of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: phenomenal consciousness, inner awareness, acquaintance, higher-order thought theory
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 18:00
Location: Room 161 (161)
View the full session: Subjective Experience
According to a widely held view with roots in Aristotle and Brentano, when a subject is in a phenomenally conscious state, a state that there is something it’s like for one to undergo, the subject is ipso facto aware of this state. When I’m in a conscious state of a caffeine-withdrawal headache, for example, I’m thereby aware of this unpleasant state – if I were unaware of it, the state couldn’t be phenomenally conscious, according to this conception. Until recently, the prevalent understanding of this ‘inner awareness’ (Brentano’s term), a subject’s special, ubiquitous awareness of their own phenomenally conscious states, which renders these states conscious, was representationalist. According to Rosenthal (2005), for example, one’s mental state is conscious due to one’s having a ‘higher-order thought’ (HOT) that represents it; according to Kriegel (2009), one’s mental state needs to represent itself in order to be conscious.
If, however, inner awareness of one’s phenomenally conscious states is a matter of representing these states, it would seem that one is kept ‘cognitively apart’ from these states, or – more precisely – from their qualitative properties, which seems highly implausible. (Here ‘qualitative properties’, or simply ‘qualities’ are understood as phenomenal properties considered without one’s inner awareness of these.) To see this, note that the representations that constitute inner awareness could misrepresent the qualitative properties they target, especially if representations are understood naturalistically, as grounded in natural, broadly causal processes (Armstrong [1968]). One could, for example, be aware as of perceiving a green bus, if that is what the inner awareness representation presents them with, even though one instantiates a ‘red-bus-ish’ qualitative property, or no quality at all (see Neander 1998, Block 2011, Coleman 2015). I find this result alarming – one’s awareness of own's own qualitative states seems direct, or intimate (Kriegel 2009, Levine 2007) in a sense that rules out such a ‘qualitative mismatch’.
In the light of this objection from intimacy, Williford (2015), Levine (2019), Giustina (2022), and others have suggested that inner awareness is better understood non-representationally, as Russellian acquaintance. For Russell (1910–11), acquaintance is a direct, cognitive, although non-conceptual relation between a subject and their intentional object, where the object is immediately presented to the subject and the subject ipso facto gains rich knowledge of the object. An acquaintance-based model of inner awareness would arguably cancel any cognitive distance between a subject and the qualitative properties she instantiates, as these would be directly presented to her, instead of represented, so misrepresentation would be ruled out. Such an approach, however, faces a naturalizability challenge since acquaintance – unlike representation – is often viewed as naturalistically suspect, or even mysterious (Frankish 2021).
While some proponents of acquaintance have bitten the bullet and endorsed a non-naturalistic conception thereof (Levine 2019), others have argued that acquaintance is consistent with naturalism. Arguably the best developed naturalistic model of acquaintance has been proposed by Sam Coleman (2019) who construes acquaintance in terms of a special, non-representationalist version of the HOT theory. For Coleman, one’s inner awareness of qualitative properties is a matter of having HOTs about these states, where these HOTs do not represent our mental states, but rather ‘quote’ them, due to the target mental states’ being embedded within the HOTs (see Coleman 2015, 2018). If Coleman’s quotational-HOT (or simply QHOT) model is viable, it would avoid the misrepresentation problem and might accommodate our sense that in being conscious, we are in the kind of direct, substantial and near infallible cognitive contact with qualitative properties that the notion of acquaintance aims to capture. Moreover, Coleman’s conception looks naturalistically respectable.
I’ll argue that the QHOT theory – despite its merits – faces two significant challenges. Recall that, according to Coleman, one is acquainted with a qualitative property in virtue of instantiating a QHOT that is intentionally about the quality because the quality is quoted in this thought. As I’ll argue, however, it’s unclear that the QHOT could be intentionally about the quality in any sense that would enable us to make sense of one’s acquaintance with the quality. According to Coleman, the physical relation that grounds the intentional relation between the QHOT and the quality is a part-whole relation. But why think that a physical whole must be intentionally about a specific part it contains? Here proponents of the QHOT theory could suggest that which of its parts the QHOT is about is determined by the functional properties of the QHOT but I’ll explain that this suggestion faces a serious difficulty: While functional properties are dispositional properties, one’s acquaintance, if it is to constitute inner awareness, i.e. a crucial constituent of phenomenal consciousness, must be occurrent (see Kriegel 2009). If this ‘occurent intentionality challenge’ is plausible, the QHOT theory falls short of making sense of acquaintance.
The other challenge I have in mind stems from the idea, expressed by Russell, that in being acquainted with a quality, one is ipso facto afforded a rich proto-cognitive grasp of the quality. Adapting Levine’s (2007) term ‘cognitive presence’, I like to express this point by saying that acquaintance essentially involves ‘proto-cognitive presence’ of the quality for the subject. I take it that this must mean that the quality significantly proto-cognitively affects the subject acquainted with it – how else could the subject get to know the quality, after all? Insofar as the QHOT theory is naturalistic, however, one would expect that the quality should significantly physically affect the organism instantiating the quality. I’ll argue that any such physical impact of the quality on the organism would need to be causal, which would bring back a form of Armstrong’s misrepresentation worry that acquaintance was supposed to dispel. As I see it, then, this ‘proto-cognitive presence challenge’ further undermines the QHOT account of acquaintance. While, then, the acquaintance-based conception of inner awareness may well be on the right track, I’ll conclude – in the light of these two challenges – that we currently lack a plausible naturalistic account of acquaintance.