Reply to the commentators

To begin with, I would like to thank the commentators for taking their time commenting on my target paper. I find it fascinating how diverging reflections it has inspired, and how often commentators express theoretical viewpoints that are compatible or that differ, regardless of the authors’ disciplinary backgrounds. I thank Andreas Roepstorff for welcoming the article, and I do feel welcome writing it although Roepstorff is right in pointing out that the paper is in a position to ‘please two audiences’ (or at least address both of them). In a sense, this captures the primary motivation for writing the paper in the first hand: To introduce and discuss considerations that are more or less typical for so-called ‘consciousness studies’ to ‘Danish brand general psychology. Baars and Willert both say that psychology has means of dealing with the problems I have lined up that go around the kind of sceptic rhetoric, typical for consciousness studies (though they, so to say, come from ‘consciousness studies’ and ‘Danish psychology’ respectively). Although they argue so quite differently, the basic point is the same: That ‘the problems of consciousness’ are not problems of general psychology. Others, such as Roepstorff, refer to ‘psychology’ and ‘consciousness studies’ as were they somehow fundamentally different, and not as were the latter a specific subdiscipline of the first. What is interesting here is that even though Roepstorff’s understanding of psychology does not stand without opposition, it is not trivially incorrect. For some unknown reason, the specific ‘Danish brand’ of general psychology to which Roepstorff also refers does not have a specific theory to account for the fact that some mental states some of the time are conscious. Hereby, I do not mean to suggest that no activity theorist in the past has ever made use of the word ‘consciousness’ – only that contemporary Danish general psychology as well as activity theory, ecological psychology and other such main sources of inspiration seems to have no real interest in finding out how to target consciousness for empirical research. Even the issue of how to understand consciousness theoretically seems totally disregarded. Temporary empirical ‘consciousness studies’ is however on a completely different track. It presents arguments into the scientific arenas of cognitive science and neuroscience, and, generally, it has no interest in the perspectives laid out by ‘Danish general psychology’. As I shall return to it at the end of my response, this is not a situation to be conceived of as necessary or desirable.