Consciousness and the Varieties of Aboutness

Thinking is special. There is nothing quite like it. Thinking – judging, believing and inferring – occurs in the natural order; but, at least sometimes, it seems hard to accept that there could be a fully satisfying reconstruction of thought in the terms favoured by the natural sciences – particularly, the physical and biological sciences (Davies, 1990). Some of our intuitions about thought are, in this way, similar to intuitions about consciousness; for consciousness, too, strikes many as somehow defying scientific explanation (McGinn, 1988). So, what is the connection between thought and consciousness? Is it, for example, only conscious beings that can be thinking beings? States and events of thinking are semantically evaluable. Acts of judging, states of believing and other propositional attitude states, such as states of desiring, or intending, have semantic content or aboutness. In virtue of their semantic content, belief states, for example, can be evaluated as true or false, correct or incorrect, depending upon how the world turns out to be. The aboutness that is characteristic of the domain of thinking is often known as intentionality. So, what is the connection between intentionality and consciousness? Does intentionality require consciousness? In his paper, 'Consciousness, explanatory inversion, and cognitive science' (1990a), John Searle delivers a strong affirmative answer to this question. According to Searle, it is not just that a thinking being needs to be a conscious being. Rather, a requirement of consciousness – of accessibility to consciousness 'in principle' – applies thought by thought, intentional state by intentional state. Thus, Searle's Connection Principle (1990a, p. 586): The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness. The Connection Principle plays a central role in Searle's paper. Both the argumentative route leading up to it, and the route leading from the Connection Principle to the consequences that Searle draws, merit careful attention. Contemporary cognitive science extends the notions of aboutness and semantic evaluability far beyond the domain of thinking, and far beyond what would ordinarily be regarded as the limits of accessibility to consciousness (even 'in principle'). Searle regards this as a major error, and moves from the Connection Principle to dramatic conclusions concerning cognitive science (1990a, p. 589): If we are looking for phenomena which are intrinsically intentional but inaccessible in principle to consciousness there is nothing there: no rule following, no mental information processing, no unconscious …