Folk Psychology and Phenomenal Consciousness

In studying folk psychology, cognitive and developmental psychologists have mainly focused on how people conceive of non-experiential states such as beliefs and desires. As a result, we know very little about how non-philosophers (or the folk) understand the mental states that philosophers typically classify as being phenomenally conscious. In particular, it is not known whether the folk even tend to classify mental states in terms of their being or not being phenomenally conscious in the first place. Things have changed dramatically in the last few years, however, with a flurry of ground-breaking research by psychologists and experimental philosophers. In this article I will review this work, carefully distinguishing between two questions: First, are the ascriptions that the folk make with regard to the mental states that philosophers classify as phenomenally conscious related to their decisions about whether morally right or wrong action has been done to an entity? Second, do the folk tend to classify mental states in the way that philosophers do, distinguishing between mental states that are phenomenally conscious and mental states that are not phenomenally conscious? Over the course of the last several decades a great deal of progress has been made on the question of how people understand a variety of psychological phenomena. This work on folk theory of mind, or folk psychology, is typically involved in explaining how we are able to predict agentive behavior by ascribing and reasoning about mental states like beliefs and desires. In particular, folk psychology is thought to be involved in our judgments that certain objects are agents and our interpretation of their movements as intentional actions (Malle; Gopnik and Meltzoff; Wellman; Perner). There is also a range of mental states, however, that have been extremely important in the philosophical discussions of the mind since at least the time of Descartes, but that have attracted little attention from psychologists working on folk psychology. These are states such as feeling pain, seeing red, hearing a C#—in brief the states that are thought to be phenomenally conscious, in philosophers' jargon. While researchers have had relatively little 1 To appear in Philosophy Compass. This research was assisted by a Dissertation Completion Fellowship, which is part of the Andrew W. Mellon / American Council of Learned Societies Early Career Fellowship Program.