The Introspective Availability of Intentional Content

Pitt, David (2007) The Introspective Availability of Intentional Content. In: 11th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, 22-25 June 2007, Las Vegas, USA.

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Abstract

Some analytic philosophers have recently been defending the thesis that there’s “something it’s like” to consciously think a particular thought, which is qualitatively different from what it’s like to be in any other kind of conscious mental state and from what it’s like to think any other thought, and which constitutes the thought’s intentional content. (I’ll call this the “intentional phenomenology thesis”). One objection to this thesis concerns the introspective availability of such content: If it is true that intentional phenomenology is constitutive of intentional content, and that conscious phenomenology is introspectively available, then it ought to be true that the content of any concept consciously entertained is introspectively available. But it is not. (For example, one can know introspectively that one is thinking that one knows that p without knowing introspectively what the content of the concept of knowledge is.) Hence, it cannot be that intentional content is constituted by cognitive phenomenology. I consider three responses to this objection. First, it is not clear that all of the contents of consciousness must be equally available to introspection. The capacities for conscious experience and introspective attention to it are distinct. It is not implausible that the latter’s resolving power might be insufficient to discern all of the fine-grained details of the former, or that its scope might be limited. Second, it is possible that in cases of incomplete accessibility one is entertaining only part of the concept the relevant term expresses in one’s language. In the knowledge case, for example, perhaps one is thinking only that one has justified true belief that p (one’s self-attribution of a thought about knowledge is in fact false). Finally, in such cases one might be consciously entertaining only part of the relevant concept, the rest remaining unconscious, and so unavailable to conscious introspection. I conclude that the objection is not decisive against the intentional phenomenology thesis.

Comments/Discussion

Mainstream analytic philosophy of mind has long operated under the assumption that intentionality and phenomenality are mutually exclusive aspects of mentality, with the former susceptible to naturalistic reduction even if the latter is not. If, however, the intentional content of conscious occurrent thought is constituted by a distinctive kind of phenomenology, the problem of intentionality and the problem of phenomenality cannot be solved separately. The existence of a "phenomenology of cognition" thus presents a significant roadblock to current naturalistic theories of intentionality, and of the mind in general.

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