Event Detail

In his paper, ‘Thinking’, published in 1993, George Myro claimed that he found plausible ‘the view that thinking is … standing in a certain special consciousness-relation to something like a state of affairs or a proposition’. He added: ‘I do not for a moment regard this as perfectly clear’. Many philosophers today share this view of what thinking and other ‘propositional attitudes’ are; but I share Myro’s view that it is not perfectly clear. In this talk I will attempt to shed some light on this idea by contrasting conscious episodes like thinking, with unconscious states like believing. I will make three claims. First, that the propositions which are the relata of propositional attitudes should be thought of as theoretical tools which aim to model a subject’s unconscious beliefs 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 one function of conscious thought is to make aspects of the subject’s world view explicit and determinate. Finally, I claim that conscious mental states do not just have propositional content in this semantic (or ‘modelling’) sense, but they also have what I call content in the phenomenal or phenomenological sense.