Locke on Consciousness

Locke’s theory of consciousness is often appropriated as a forerunner of present-day Higher-Order Perception (HOP) theories, but not much is said about it beyond that. We offer an interpretation of Locke’s account of consciousness that portrays it as crucially different from current-day HOP theory, both in detail and in spirit. In this paper, it is argued that there are good historical and philosophical reasons to attribute to Locke the view not that conscious states are accompanied by higher-order perceptions, but rather that conscious states constitute perceptions of themselves. Many aspects of John Locke’s philosophy of mind have received considerable attention in the past three centuries. His theory of personal identity in terms of memory; his alleged indirect realism about perception; the distinction between primary and secondary qualities; the attack on nativism; his psychologism about meaning; his empiricist views on concept acquisition, etc., have all been subject to extensive scrutiny and debate. But Locke’s theory of consciousness stands out as remarkably unattended to among his contributions to the philosophy of mind. There are two main reasons for this neglect. One is that consciousness itself has been out of favor with philosophers through most of the twentieth century, or at least the first three quarters thereof, dominated as they had been by behaviorist and functionalist ideas. The second reason for the little interest in Locke’s theory, however, lies with Locke himself. His remarks on consciousness are scattered and relatively scarce. There is no systematic discussion of the phenomenon. Thus, there is no mention of the word “consciousness” or any of its cognates in any of the 69 chapter titles, and only a handful within the 1122 section titles, of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. When it is mentioned in current-day philosophy, Locke’s theory of consciousness is often appropriated as a forerunner of Higher-Order Perception (HOP) theories, but not much is said about it beyond that. In this paper, we offer an alternative interpretation of Locke’s account of consciousness that portrays it as crucially different from current-day HOP theory, both in detail and in spirit. 1. Current-Day Higher-Order Perception Accounts of Consciousness One promising approach to consciousness construes it as a monitoring device: the faculty of consciousness is a mental scanner directed at the inner goings-on in the subject. Both David Armstrong and William Lycan have defended versions of this view. In the course of arguing for a materialist theory of the mind, Armstrong (1980: 199) defines consciousness as an internal self-scanning device or mechanism in the central nervous system, so that consciousness of our own mental state becomes simply the scanning of one part of our central nervous system by another part. It is part of the view that the scanning state and the state scanned must be distinct mental states; thus he writes that “it is impossible that the introspecting and the thing introspected should be one and the same mental state” (1968: 324). According to Lycan, the mental scanning constitutive of consciousness is carried out by means of attention mechanisms: [C]onsciousness is the functioning of internal attention mechanisms directed upon lower-order psychological states and events... Attention mechanisms are devices that have the job of relaying and/or coordinating information about ongoing psychological events and processes (1990: 755). On this view, consciousness involves the capacity to form second-order mental states, i.e., mental states whose objects are other mental states. This thesis is often called the Higher-Order Monitoring (henceforth, HOM) theory. A mental state is conscious, on this approach, just in case the subject is aware of it through a higher-order state. That is, a subject’s state S1 is conscious iff she entertains also a second-order state S2, such that S1 is the object of S2. For instance, a perceptual experience of a cube is conscious when, and only when, it is appropriately accompanied by a second-order state representing it.