(Even Higher-Order) Intentionality Without Consciousness

Abstract

One would have it had become a commonplace in contemporary psychology since Freud, and certainly since recent theories of vision, language and cognition, that there can be unconscious intentional states, such as thoughts, judgments and desires, that nevertheless play causal explanatory roles. There are, however, a surprising number of philosophers who seem still prepared to deny it. The possibility of any intentionality without consciousness has recently been denied, for example, by John Searle ( 1992) and Galen Strawson (1994) — theirs I call the Denial. Problems with this view are well-known, but I'll briefly review a few of them here as a background to discussing how some of these same problems beset some recently popular theories of consciousness, so-called higher-order thought (HOT) theories advanced most notably by David Rosenthal (2000a&b, 2005) and Peter Carruthers (2000 and ms.). According to HOT theories, a conscious state is constituted by some intentional state having an intentional state as its real or intentional object (or target), for example, a about a or sensory state. If such a view is true, then it entails that many intentional states, viz. those that are the targets of HOTs, are not possible without consciousness. I want to argue that some of the same considerations that tell against the Sweeping Denial tell against HOT theories as well.2