Consciousness collects
Carruthers’ essays on the topic from the last ten years. Some of the essays
haven been revised, so the book may set out Carruthers’ current position on
consciousness, presenting his dispositionalist higher order theory of
consciousness. Although there is some repetition given that the original essays
sometimes follow a similar line of argument the book presents a more or less
concise introduction to one of the main theories currently discussed.

The book can be divided into three
parts. The first part deals with phenomenal consciousness and the advantages of
a dispositionalist theory of (phenomenal) consciousness in distinction to first
order or second order actualist theories. The second part takes up Carruthers’
work on the relation of language and thought. The third part takes up
Carruthers’ work on animal consciousness and the ethics of animal treatment.

Carruthers’ work is known for some
highly controversial theses.

In his earlier book The Animal
Issue (Cambridge [University Press], 1992) he claimed "that human
beings are unique amongst members of the animal kingdom in possessing conscious
mental states" (p. 186). Given a common understanding of  "conscious"
this sounds like the outrageous remark that there is nothing — not even
blackness, so to say — going on in even highly developed animals like mammals.
Everything depends on the employed definition of (phenomenal) consciousness
here. Carruthers himself is partly to blame for such misunderstandings, but in Consciousness
he gives a more precise statement of this definition or understanding of the
terms. Interestingly his definition of consciousness, tying it to the human
case interwoven with self-awareness, resembles the understanding of
consciousness in the phenomenological tradition. Phenomenal consciousness,
according to Carruthers, consists of a dual analog content (the first order
perceptual content red plus the higher order analog presentation seeming
red of the occurrence of the first order state itself). Thus there are
phenomenal properties of the world "and phenomenal properties of one’s
experience of the world" (43). The subjective aspect of phenomenal states "is
their higher-order analog content" (180). Phenomenal consciousness thus
defined requires higher order thought (namely possessing the concept of
experience), and thus taken is restricted to beings capable of higher
order thought, presumably those having a language faculty. Animals experience
the world (there is something going on in them), but do not possess
consciousness in the strict sense of the term. "[T]he cat perceives
the smell of the cheese. We have no independent grounds for thinking that its
percepts will be phenomenally conscious ones." (52). We cannot imagine
what a cat perception is like, since we are prone to project our (i.e.
phenomenally conscious) perspective into a being which has a different mental
life. This does not preclude comparative psychology, since in many human and
all animal behaviors "the explanatory burden is carried by the purely
first-order, not necessarily phenomenally conscious, character of those states"
(203). Some human behavior involves consciousness (or reports thereof)
directly.

Carruthers still invites some
misunderstanding — as in the earlier book — by linking animal consciousness
to phenomena like blindsight (e.g. 72), in which from the conscious perspective
of the person involved really nothing is going on (with respect to
seeing, in this case). Carruthers, further on, now thinks that it is first
order disappointments that are morally relevant, not phenomenal states. This,
however, requires attribution of belief to animals: "What is sufficient
for subjective frustration is that a desire and a belief with directly
contradictory contents should both be active together in the creature’s
practical reasoning system."(169)

In another of this earlier books Language,
Thought, and Consciousness (Cambridge [University Press],  1996) Carruthers
claimed that "many thought-types are such that their conscious tokening in
us are necessarily language-involving" (p. 7), taking language to
be constitutive of thought. Given some common understanding of "thought"
this, again, may seem highly contra-intuitive, since some of our thoughts (e.g.
perceptions) are conscious although neither linguistic nor accompanied, it
seems, by inner speech. In Consciousness Carruthers now qualifies his
position in restricting the language dependency thesis to conscious
propositional thinking (116). He argues that one either has to be an eliminativist
with respect to conscious propositional thinking or accept its being
constituted by inner speech. The main argument apart from the role of language
in higher order thought is that one hasn’t to interpret one’s inner speech to
know what one is thinking right then, as might be the case if language only
expressed thoughts already there. And as with phenomenal states "conscious
thinkings are self-referential" (142), subject to higher order thought.

One of the main goals of the book
is to argue for a naturalistic explanation of consciousness and the dispositionalist
higher order theory of consciousness as the most appropriate approach. (First
order theories are dismissed by Carruthers, since they fail to account for the
dual analog character of phenomenal consciousness, actualist higher order
theories are dismissed, since they fail to account for some perception to not
become phenomenally conscious and, if such theories propose some inner
perceptive faculty, the absence of inner misrepresentation.) Now, one may
wonder how a disposition can explain anything. A disposition sometimes "fires",
that is some event occurs which causes further events. If the disposition does
not "fire" no such event occurs. Events are involved in causal
chains, neither states nor dispositions are. So how can the disposition to be
the object of an higher thought make a state conscious? In fact Carruthers has
a model in which it is not this disposition itself — so to say — which makes
the state conscious, but the state’s entering into a special processing stage (
"special-purpose functionally individuated memory store" [8],
Cartesian Theatre, or whatever your favorite description of the involved mental
module may be). This entering clearly is an event. As an event it is involved
in causal chains. The mere entering of a stage, however, may be doubted to be
explanatory. Compare: That something can be seen by you is explained by
bringing it from the outside into a lit chamber. So far so good, but what is
not explained here is why the chamber is lit or who are you. The same goes for
Carruthers’ theory: Entering a special processing stage explains the further
functional potential of a state, but is does not explain why that stage is lit
by consciousness (even leaving the problem of the perceiving agent to the
side). The problem seems to be what to expect from an explanation. Fichte
famously criticized any higher order theory of consciousness in noting that the
mere process of one act taking another act as its objects does not explain the
occurrence of consciousness/self-awareness. His riddle was that the reflecting
consciousness has already to have the structure of the reflected consciousness
to be conscious of itself. Some similar problem can be found, as just
explained, within Carruthers’ theory; his theory is in the same boat as the
operator theories, which account for consciousness by putting some
representation into the scope of operators like ‘The experience…’/’I feel…’, he
criticizes (90). Carruthers comes in some of his expositions of the working of
consciousness close to the phenomenological (or Neo-Kantian) tradition, but
these in contrast insisted on consciousness to be non-explainable, but to be
described with inherently complex egological structures (like distinguishing
implicit self-knowledge from the occurring subjective perspective from the "agent"
of consciousness — etc. [cf. my "Lessons from Sartre for the Analytic
Philosophy of Mind", Analecta Husserliana, 2005]).

Consciousness sets forth one
of the main contenders in the current theories of consciousness. Topics not
dealt with in this review include a functionalist account of merely
representational concepts in contrast to so called "qualia". The book
can be studied as an exposition of Carruthers’ theory, but may also be taken as
a clarifying supplement to Carruthers’ other work.

© 2006 Manuel Bremer

Manuel Bremer,
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology