Return to Consciousness

David Woodruff Smith

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139165327.007

3 - Return to Consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

David Woodruff Smith

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David Woodruff Smith: Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine

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Abstract. What makes a mental state conscious, according to the classical view (in Locke et al.), is a certain self-consciousness, or (as I prefer to put it) an inner awareness of the state. What is the form of that inner awareness? This is a difficult question, as we see by studying neoclassical models in Brentano, Husserl, and others. In recent philosophy of mind it has been proposed that this awareness of our experience consists in a higher-order monitoring. Yet there are problems with all higher-order theories of consciousness, as Brentano well observed. Here I pursue and partly revise my own earlier analysis of inner awareness as a “modal” character of mental acts. On that analysis, inner awareness is an integral part of an act of consciousness; it is not a higher-order act of any type (such as observing one's current thought or perception). On a particular account, this inner awareness may itself be grounded in the temporal flow of consciousness (extending Husserl's analysis of time consciousness). Yet, in the end, we should allow that lower forms of consciousness do not include the form of inner awareness typical of everyday human experience. Consciousness does not, then, reduce to inner awareness; instead we need a systematic classification of types and levels of consciousness, and we sketch the beginning of such a classification.

Segue. In “The Cogito circa a.d. 2000” we appraised the core elements of the Cartesian account of how consciousness is eo ipso a consciousness of its object and an awareness of itself. […]

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Type: Chapter
Information: Mind World
Essays in Phenomenology and Ontology
, pp. 76 - 121

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139165327.007 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2004

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References

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