Colloquium Lecture: Tim Crane (Cambridge)

Tim Crane (Cambridge): "The Conscious and the Unconscious"

Abstract: Mental states with intentional content can be conscious or unconscious. But what does it really mean to say these states have content, and does it mean the same thing for the conscious states as it does for the unconscious? In other words, do conscious and unconscious intentional states have the same kind of content? The consensus among analytic philosophers is that the answer to this question is yes; a dominant idea, for example, is that all intentional states have propositional content, and states with propositional content can be conscious or unconscious. In this talk I challenge this consensus. First I argue that the propositions which are the relata of propositional attitudes should be thought of as theoretical tools which aim to model some aspect of a subject’s unconscious belief and other attitudes (which I call the subject’s 'world view'). Second, I argue that the content of an unconscious world view can be incomplete, indeterminate, unspecific, contradictory and confused; and the function of conscious thought is to make aspects of the subject’s world view explicit and determinate. Conscious mental states do not just have propositional content in the semantic (or ‘modelling’) sense, but they also have what I call content in the phenomenal sense.