David M. Rosenthal
Encyclopedia
David M. Rosenthal is a philosopher at the City University of New York
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...

 (CUNY) who has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...

, particularly in the area of consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...

. He was educated at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 and then Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

. In addition to philosophy of mind, Rosenthal has research interests in the related field of cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

 and is Coordinator of the CUNY Graduate Center's Interdisciplinary Concentration in Cognitive Science. Rosenthal has also done work in philosophy of language
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...

, metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...

, ancient philosophy
Ancient philosophy
This page lists some links to ancient philosophy. In Western philosophy, the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire marked the ending of Hellenistic philosophy and ushered in the beginnings of Medieval philosophy, whereas in Eastern philosophy, the spread of Islam through the Arab Empire...

, and 17th-Century rationalism.

Higher-order thoughts

Rosenthal is best known for his higher-order-thought (HOT) theory of consciousness. He argues that no mental state is conscious if one is not aware of that state; so a mental state is conscious only if one is aware of oneself as being in that state. And he argues that we are aware of mental states that are conscious by having a thought that one is in that state. These higher-order thoughts are seldom conscious thoughts, and they are distinct from the states they are about. The standard mark in everyday contexts and in experimental psychology that distinguishes conscious mental states is that an individual can report the state; we are unable to report mental states that aren't conscious. Rosenthal argues that it's the higher-order thoughts that accompany conscious states that enable us to make such reports; because we have no such higher-order awareness of mental states that aren't conscious, we can't report them. Rosenthal has also argued that the higher-order-thought theory fits well with recent findings in psychology and neuropsychology (Lau and Rosenthal 2011).

Quality-space theory

Since mental states are conscious only if one is aware of those states, every mental state can occur without being conscious. That includes states that exhibit mental qualities, such as the perceptions and bodily sensations that occur in subliminal perception and in blindsight
Blindsight
Blindsight is a phenomenon in which people who are perceptually blind in a certain area of their visual field demonstrate some response to visual stimuli...

. This view goes against many contemporary views, on which mental qualities are tied inextricably to consciousness. So Rosenthal has developed a "quality-space theory" (also "homomorphism theory") of the mental qualities, which explains what qualitative mental states without appeal to consciousness. All mental qualities are individuated by their positions in a quality space that pertains to their sensory modality. More specifically, we can define a quality space of the physical perceptible properties that mental qualities enable access to, relying just on the ability to discriminate among those perceptible properties. Mental qualities, then, are the properties of mental states that make that discriminative capacity possible; so they are fixed by the positions they occupy in a quality space corresponding to the quality space of accessed perceptible properties. Because the quality spaces of perceptible properties are determined solely by the ability to discriminate among sample properties, independently of whether the perceptual states are conscious, mental qualities themselves can occur without being conscious. They occur consciously one when one is aware of oneself as being in the relevant qualitative state, on the HOT theory, when one has the relevant HOT.

Relation to other theories of consciousness

Rosenthal's HOT theory of consciousness resembles in some ways the traditional inner-sense theory, on which we are aware of conscious states by perceiving them. This theory has also come to be known as higher-order perception. Rosenthal's theory also resembles somewhat the theory of Franz Brentano
Franz Brentano
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views.-Life:Brentano was born at Marienberg am...

, on which our awareness of our own mental states is intrinsic to those states.

But the HOT theory avoids various difficulties that face the inner-sense theory, e.g., explaining what sensory modality the higher-order sensing could have (2004). And because the HOTs Rosenthal posits, unlike Brentano's intrinsic awareness, are external to the mental states they make one conscious of, the theory avoids difficulties Brentano's theory encounters about the individuation of mental states, as well as neuropsychological evidence (e.g., Libet
Benjamin Libet
Benjamin Libet April 12, 1916, Chicago, Illinois - July 23, 2007, Davis, California) was a pioneering scientist in the field of human consciousness. Libet was a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco...

) that mental states occur measurably before they are available for awareness (2004; 2005, ch. 2).

Global-workspace theories
Global Workspace Theory
Global Workspace Theory is a simple Cognitive architecture that has been developed to account qualitatively for a large set of matched pairs of conscious and unconscious processes. It was proposed by Bernard Baars...

 (Stanislas Dehaene
Stanislas Dehaene
Stanislas Dehaene is a professor at the Collège de France, author, and director of INSERM . He has worked on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. Dehaene was one of ten people to be awarded the James S...

, Bernard Baars
Bernard Baars
Bernard J. Baars is a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA., and is currently an Affiliated Fellow there. He is best known as the originator of the global workspace theory, a theory of human cognitive architecture and consciousness...

) posit that mental states are conscious in virtue of the wide availability of their content to various processing areas in the brain. The HOT theory has an advantage over such theories that it can explain the occurrence of conscious state whose content is not thus available, such as relatively peripheral perceptions and thoughts, and unconscious states whose content is widely available, such as repressed psychological states.

First-order theories, such as Dretske's
Fred Dretske
Frederick Irwin Dretske is a philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind. His more recent work centers on conscious experience and self-knowledge. Additionally, he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 1994...

 and Ned Block's, deny that a mental state's being conscious consists in some awareness of that state, and so have no easy way to explain the difference between conscious states and mental states that are not conscious. Rosenthal's HOT theory provides an intuitively natural way to do so.

Current research

Rosenthal is currently working on function of mental states' being conscious, which he argues is minimal, and on explaining why mental states do ever occur consciously if little utility results from their being conscious. He argues that the factors that explain why qualitative states, such as perceptions, often occur consciously are different from the considerations that explain why thoughts and other intentional states often occur consciously.

Rosenthal has also written extensively about the connection between consciousness, thought, and speech, and has edited several anthologies.

See also

  • American philosophy
    American philosophy
    American philosophy is the philosophical activity or output of Americans, both within the United States and abroad. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that while American philosophy lacks a "core of defining features, American Philosophy can nevertheless be seen as both reflecting and...

  • Consciousness
    Consciousness
    Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...

  • Philosophy of Mind
    Philosophy of mind
    Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...

  • List of American philosophers

External links

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