The present article distinguishes three kinds of accounts of direct awareness : mental-eye theory, self-intimational theory and appendage theory. These aim to explain the same phenomenon, though each proposes that direct awareness occurs in a fundamentally different way. Also, I address a crucial problem that appendage theory must solve: how does a direct awareness succeed in being awareness specifically of the particular mental-occurrence instance that is its object? Appendage theory is singled out for this attention because psychologists, as they embark (...) on their renewed study of consciousness, are most likely to be attracted by appendage theory for their explanation of direct awareness. (shrink)

The present article is the second one in a series and begins to spell out the case for the intrinsic kind of theory of consciousness4. According to such theory, a mental-occurrence instance is conscious4 on its own, that is, as a part of its own internal structure. Considered here are a prominent phenomenologist’s argument in favor of an intrinsic theory of consciousness4, and his conception of how such inner awareness occurs in the case of objectivating mental acts, which are all (...) conscious4 in his view. Every objectivating act is a mental-occurrence instance that includes outer awareness, that is, awareness of something lying externally to the act. Every objectivating act presents an object distinct from itself, conveys awareness of that object, and — allegedly as a mere by-product or concomitant — conveys awareness of itself. This article emphasizes the question of what property of outer awareness it is that necessarily, as has been claimed, brings along with it inner awareness of the respective objectivating act. Also, this article begins to argue that, in the very occurrence of any conscious4 objectivating act, inner awareness is "interwoven" with outer awareness. Inner awareness is a part of the "thematizing" activity of any conscious4 mental act, rather than being "marginal," that is, a merely implicit concomitant of the act. (shrink)

This article contains an initial statement of the pluralistic approach together with some justification for its adoption by psychologists. Two alternative coneptions of the nature of feelings, William James's and Edmund Husserl's, are discussed with the pluralistic approach in mind. Psychologists who would practice the pluralistic approach with respect to the nature of feelings must develop a plural conception of the nature of feelings. A plural conception differs from a singular conception by simultaneously including more than a single account of (...) the relevant phenomena. Rather than wreaking destruction on alternative conceptions, the pluralistic approach is such as welcomes, encourages, and even commissions the formulation of alternative accounts of the phenomena of concern. Rightly or wrongly, the pluralistic psychologist feels closest to an ideal explanatory framework at those points in his or her plural conception where the alternative accounts are mutually contradictory. (shrink)

Discusses reflective seeing in the context of the works of J. J. Gibson (published 1963–79) and E. Husserl (published 1960–83). Topics discussed include (1) naive-realistic seeing, (2) the nature of visual experiences, (3) the relation of reflective seeing to naive-realistic seeing, and (4) levels of consciousness with reference to reflective seeing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

This is the introductory installment in a projected series of articles in which I shall be advancing the positive case for the "intrinsic" kind of explanatory account of "consciousness4." "Consciousness4" has reference to a property of individual mental-occurrence instances wherein there takes place an immediate awareness of them either upon their occurrence or as part of their very occurrence. The immediacy or directness of such inner awareness amounts to the absence of mental mediation by any other occurrent awareness. An account (...) of consciousness4 that properly comes under the heading of "intrinsic theory" is distinguished by the thesis that a mental-occurrence instance’s being conscious4 is an intrinsic property, rather than an external-relational property of that mental-occurrence instance. My hope for the present series of articles is that, by the end, the case for intrinsic theory will he so evidently strong, or at least so vivid, that all psychologists of consciousness will have to address intrinsic theory and its explanandum of consciousness4. In this article, I set the stage by rendering some of the relevant meanings explicit, spelling out my purpose and approach to making the case for intrinsic theory, providing some context for the discussions to follow, and mentioning important objections to intrinsic theory that have been voiced in the literature. (shrink)

In response to the objection that his “access-consciousness” is not really consciousness but a matter of the availability of certain information for certain kinds of processing, Block will probably have to argue that consciousness in a more basic, familiar, traditional sense is an essential component of any instance of access-consciousness and thus justifies the name.

When we see Wilfrid Sellars's favorite object, an ice cube pink through and through, we see the very pinkness of it. Inner awareness of our visual experience finds the ice cube to be experientially present, not merely representationally present to our consciousness. Its pinkness and other properties are present not merely metaphorically, not merely in the sense that the experience represents or is an occurrent belief in the ice cube's being there before us. Despite his behavioristic inclinations, Sellars acknowledges experiential (...) presence and gives an account of it in terms of a perceptual experience's having two intrinsic components, a sensation and a conceptual response to the sensation that ultimately refers to the sensation although it normally takes the sensation for the environmental item that produced it. Problems with Sellars's account include the inadequacy of the causal and referential relations postulated between the two components of a perceptual experience, and the experimentally demonstrated fact (A. Michotte et al, 1964/1991) that, although sensations may be necessary for perceptual experience, experiential presence of a particular environmental property does not always require corresponding sensations. ((c) 1999 APA/PsycINFO, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Addressed here are certain relations among intentionality, consciousness, and subjectivity which Searle has lately been calling our attention, while arguing that certain brain-occurrences possess irreducibly subjective features - in the sense that no amount of strictly objective, third-person information about the animal and his or her brain and behavior could result in a description of any such features, except by inference based on the first-person perspective. In his relevant discussions, Searle has focused on the aspectual shapes of conscious mental brain-occurrences, (...) that is, the particular intrinsic feature of any mental occurrence responsible for the mental occurrence's being of or as of something beyond itself. However, Searle's view would seem, undesirably, to conceive of aspectual shape as purely appearential, in the same sense as a hallucinated fire-breathing dragon is purely appearential. Has not Searle thus abandoned ontological subjectivity - though he has available other ways to conceive of the undoubtedly, as he says, plain fact about biological evolution which is ontological subjectivity? Throughout the present article, Freud's conception of consciousness serves as an aid to understanding Searle's views of subjectivity, consciousness, and intentionality. (shrink)

This article seeks to render Sigmund Freud's unfamiliar conception of consciousness more evident and accessible; because Freud was the greatest theorist psychology has so far known, and because present-day psychologists stand in special need of a variety of conceptual frameworks in whose terms they can give coherent and cogent expression to their different hypotheses pertaining to consciousness. The three main sections respectively address Freud's complex property of intrinsic consciousness, which characterizes each instance of every conscious psychical process and includes qualitative (...) content, direct awareness, and tertiary consciousness; the cognitive contents of purportedly pure, or contentless, emotions and feelings; and certain limits and variations of Freud's intrinsic consciousness. A special effort is made to be faithful to Freud's own conception of consciousness; though the discussion includes clarification, explication, and extension of parts of his conception that are undeveloped, summarily stated, or implicit. In fact, Freud's conception of consciousness is treated here as something very much alive today. Implications are drawn and developed that Freud probably never thought of. However, note that the conception presented does not belong to the author of this article. Rather, I present here Sigmund Freud's own conception of consciousness as he might have developed it judging from the part of it that he did express. (shrink)

Consciousness is familiar to us first hand, yet difficult to understand. This book concerns six basic concepts of consciousness exercised in ordinary English. The first is the interpersonal meaning and requires at least two people involved in relation to one another. The second is a personal meaning, having to do with one's own perspective on the kind of person one is and the life one is leading. The third meaning has reference simply to one being occurrently aware of something or (...) as though of something. The fourth narrows the preceding sense to one having direct occurrent awareness of happenings in one's own experiential stream. The fifth is the unitive meaning of consciousness and has reference to those portions of one's stream that one self-appropriates to make up one's conscious being. The last is the general-state meaning and picks out the general operating mode in which we most often function. (shrink)

As part of his rediscovery of consciousness, Searle has recently provided an interpretation of Freud's account of consciousness, including the relation of consciousness to nonconscious mental occurrences [i.e., preconscious mental occurrences and unconscious (repressed) mental occurrences]. Regrettably, Searle's interpretation is based on a single paragraph from The Unconscious and serves to eliminate Freud's general view on these matters as being "incoherent." In the present article, I rediscover Freud's account and show that Searle has deeply misunderstood him, thus converting Freud into (...) a "mental-eye" theorist of consciousness when Freud is actually an "intrinsic" theorist. I point out that Freud's and Searle's views on consciousness are actually similar, though Searle denies the existence of nonconscious mental occurrences. My discussion of Freud's account of consciousness addresses as well (a) Freud's understanding of emotions and feelings, including what he calls "misconstrued" emotions, and repression that works to suppress the development of affect, and (b) why Freud held that emotions and feelings never occur except consciously. I hope that my present contribution will be part of an intensive discussion that will proceed among psychologists of consciousness in a conscious and deliberate joint effort to develop the theory of consciousness. (shrink)

Direct awareness, or the immediate, on-the-spot, noninferential access that we have to some of our mental-occurrence instances, is a kind of "secondary consciousness." It often happens, in addition, that direct awareness itself is conscious, meaning that one is also directly aware of being so aware. This is "tertiary consciousness." Indeed, absent tertiary consciousness, one could not base actions on what is mentally occurring to one now. Although Armstrong held that "subliminal introspection" suffices for purposive mental activity, tertiary consciousness would seem (...) to be necessary for carrying out such activity because purposive mental activity essentially involves choosing what mentally to do next on the basis of "introspective" feedback. One must be aware of whatever it may be that one is basing one’s actions on. Adopting, in place of "subliminal introspection," either one of two Jamesian hypotheses could save Armstrong from having to posit nonconscious purposive mental activities. (shrink)

The Sciousness Hypothesis holds that how we know our mental-occurrence instances does not include our having immediate awareness of them. Rather, we take notice of our behaviors or bodily reactions and infer mental-occurrence instances that would explain them. In The Principles, James left it an open question whether the Sciousness Hypothesis is true, and proceeded in accordance with the conviction that one’s stream of consciousness consists only of basic durational components of which one has immediate awareness. Nevertheless, James seems to (...) have been tempted by the Sciousness Hypothesis. And he adopted an account of inner awareness that is popular among present-day psychologists of consciousness, to the effect that awareness of a mental-occurrence instance never takes place from within its phenomenological structure, always from a certain distance, by means of a distinct mental-occurrence instance. This means that the immediacy of inner awareness can only be a temporal and causal immediacy, not the kind we seem to have, whereby we consciously participate in the occurrence of a mental state. The present article, which is published in two separate though continuous parts, clarifies and elaborates the Sciousness Hypothesis, and critically discusses it and the kind of account of inner awareness that seems closest to it. (shrink)

Gibson distinguishes among activities of the visual system, including viewing a room as opposed to seeing it, and, in effect, between a visual-system activity and the stream of experience that is a product and part of it. During viewing, one perceives the surfaces projecting light to one's point of observation, and one’s location in relation to them. Thus, one does not view some of the surfaces that one sees when, instead, one engages in straightforward seeing at the same observation point. (...) The latter activity produces direct awareness of both occluded and here-and-now surfaces, although the latter surfaces are not distinguished as such . Inter alia, it is argued that, given Gibson’s account of visually controlled locomotion, viewing should be considered the visual perceptual activity involved therein since, in his view, one cannot see light and determine one's behavior on that basis. (shrink)

More consistently than Aron Gurwitsch, whose intrinsic account of consciousness4 was the topic of the previous two articles of the present series, David Woodruff Smith maintains that, within any objectivating act that is its object, inner awareness is inextricably interwoven with the outer awareness that is involved in the act. I begin here an examination of arguments Woodruff Smith proffers pro an understanding of inner awareness as intrinsic. However, in the present article, I give attention only to one of his (...) arguments, and my discussion focuses largely on how David M. Rosenthal, who holds instead that inner awareness is accomplished by a separate mental-occurrence instance, has interpreted the empirical evidence that Woodruff Smith cites. Woodruff Smith considers how a conscious4 mental-occurrence instance seems to its owner to be empirical evidence that lends support to intrinsic theory of inner awareness. When one introspects a mental-occurrence instance, one finds a single unified experience, not two of them as Rosenthal proposes. Rosenthal accepts this firsthand evidence as tending to support intrinsic theory, but tries to explain the appearances away, mentioning G.E. Moore's description of consciousness as "transparent.". (shrink)

The Sciousness Hypothesis holds that how we know our mental-occurrence instances does not include our having immediate awareness of them. Rather, we take notice of our behaviors or bodily reactions and infer mental-occurrence instances that would explain them. In The Principles, James left it an open question whether the Sciousness Hypothesis is true, although he proceeded on the conviction that one’s mental life consists exclusively of mental-occurrence instances of which one has immediate awareness. Nevertheless, James was tempted by the Sciousness (...) Hypothesis; and he adopted the kind of account of inner awareness favored among present-day psychologists of consciousness: to the effect that awareness of a mental-occurrence instance does not take place from within its phenomenological structure, always from a certain distance, by means of a distinct mental-occurrence instance. This means that the immediacy of inner awareness can only be a temporal and causal immediacy, not the kind we seem actually to have, whereby we consciously participate in the occurrence of a mental state. The present article, which is published in two separate though continuous parts, clarifies and elaborates the Sciousness Hypothesis, and critically discusses it and the kind of account of inner awareness that seems to be closest to it. (shrink)

This book describes and proposes an unusual integrative approach to human perception that qualifies as both an ecological and a phenomenological approach at the same time. Thomas Natsoulas shows us how our consciousness - in three of six senses of the word that the book identifies - is involved in our activity of perceiving the one and only world that exists, which includes oneself as a proper part of it, and that all of us share together with the rest of (...) life on earth. He makes the case that our stream of consciousness - in the original Jamesian sense minus his mental/physical dualism - provides us with firsthand contact with the world, as opposed to our having such contact instead with theorist-posited items such as inner mental representations, internal pictures, or sense-image models, pure figments and virtual objects, none of which can have effects on our sensory receptors. (shrink)