Conscious Thinking and Cognitive Phenomenology

Marta Jorba, Dermot Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351121415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book concerns the nature and character of conscious thinking from a philosophical perspective. One main aspect of conscious thinking addressed by the contributors is the phenomenal character involved in undergoing an episode of thinking or, in other words, the question of what it is like to think a certain thought, what has been called 'cognitive phenomenology'. This contested phenomenal character constitutes a form of phenomenal consciousness that needs clarification and further consideration within consciousness studies, cognitive psychology and philosophy.

The present volume brings together chapters on the topic that contribute to clarify the notions and questions involved in the discussion, expanding the scope of the debate on cognitive phenomenology to other relevant aspects of conscious thinking and related domains. Several different topics are treated in the book, such as the relation of cognitive phenomenology with rationality, with the self, with attention or with the notion of cognitive access, as well as consideration of particular kinds of experiences of recognition and the so-called 'aha' experiences.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Philosophical Explorations.

Conscious thinking and cognitive phenomenology: topics, views and future developments

Marta Jorba and Dermot Moran

This introduction presents a state of the art of philosophical research on cognitive phenomenology and its relation to the nature of conscious thinking more generally. We firstly introduce the question of cognitive phenomenology, the motivation for the debate, and situate the discussion within the fields of philosophy (analytic and phenomenological traditions), cognitive psychology and consciousness studies. Secondly, we review the main research on the question, which we argue has so far situated the cognitive phenomenology debate around the following topics and arguments: phenomenal contrast, epistemic arguments and challenges, introspection, ontology and temporal character, intentionality, inner speech, agency, holistic perspective, categorical perception, value, and phenomenological description. Thirdly, we suggest future developments by pointing to four questions that can be explored in relation to the cognitive phenomenology discussion: the self and self-awareness, attention, emotions and general theories of consciousness. We finalise by briefly presenting the six articles of this Special Issue, which engage with some of the topics mentioned and contribute to enlarge the discussion by connecting it to different areas of philosophical investigation.

What is the nature of conscious cognition or conscious thinking? What is it like to undergo an experience of thinking? What does it feel like? Does it have a “raw feel”? Or a kind of cognitive colouring of its own distinct from any accompanying emotional feeling? Is that intuitive sense of experiencing a sensation or something else? In recent years, the question of the experiential or phenomenal character of conscious thought, what has been generally called “cognitive phenomenology” has gained an important place within analytic philosophy of mind and also within recent discussion in phenomenology. The main questions in the debate include: does conscious thought have a proprietary phenomenal character, that is, does it have its own specific cognitive “phenomenology”?¹ Or can the phenomenal character of occurrent, conscious, cognitive episodes be explained solely in terms of more familiar kinds of phenomenal experiences – such as sensory, perceptual or emotional experiences (assuming that their phenomenality has been more fully limned)? Does conscious cognition (whose precise varieties also need to be carefully identified and disambiguated) have its own dedicated form of phenomenality or does that phenomenality reduce to the phenomenality of the accompanying sensuous or emotional states? If conscious cognitive experiences have their own peculiar phenomenology – how can it be characterised? Does it simply reduce to the experiences of attentiveness, voluntary control, reflective awareness, and so on, or are other experiences involved?

Needless to say, this area of research is divided between defenders and deniers of cognitive phenomenology, and arguments on both sides have been presented and discussed although often without taking great care to give fine-grained account of precisely what, for example, sensory or sensuous phenomenality means. There is often a rather general assumption that speaking of the phenomenology of cognitive experiences is somehow doing something that is close to the hearts of classic phenomenologists. And this raises an added question, therefore, whether the tradition of phenomenology has anything particularly relevant to contribute to the current debates concerning the phenomenality of cognition (“cognitive phenomenology” au sens courant).

The importance of these debates concerning cognition and its purported phenomenality can be seen in relation to various facts. Firstly, the claim that cognition has its own unique phenomenality questions various fundamental assumptions current in consciousness research, given that investigations on the phenomenal character or what-it-is-likeness of experience (Nagel 1974) are normally centred in the domain of sensations and perceptions, sometimes extending it also to bodily experiences, emotions or agency, but not specifically to experiences of thinking per se. Precisely because phenomenality has too readily been assumed to have a sensuous character, general theories of consciousness continue to be formulated at the expense precisely of excluding cognitive experiences. But, if it turns out, on the other hand, that there is a specific or proprietary phenomenal character of thought, how does this discovery in itself influence current theories of (phenomenal) consciousness? For a long time, for instance, the exercise of cognition has been regarded as something that can be replicated by machines and computers, but if it is has its own peculiar phenomenality, does this not complicate debates about computation and artificial intelligence?

Secondly, the puzzles about the nature, role and efficacy of consciousness, creating the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness, have been mainly treated in regard primarily to perceptual experiences. It is worth asking, then: how does cognitive phenomenology modify the characterisation of such puzzles? Do the same puzzles arise for conscious thought or cognitive experiences? Is conscious thought just another part of the easy problems of consciousness, related to informational processes and intentionality (Chalmers 1996)? If a defence of a specific cognitive phenomenology succeeds, it seems that the hard problem cannot be readily separated from the easy problems, or it might turn out that there are no easy problems of consciousness after all (Shields 2011).

Thirdly, investigating the character of the experiences of thought or thinking may very well modify established conceptions concerning the nature of conscious thought generally and in relation to other features exhibited by thought, such as intentionality, agency, rationality, etc. In this sense, the exploration of cognitive phenomenology might cast doubt, for instance, on those views of the mind that seek to sharply separate intentionality and phenomenal consciousness (see Horgan and Tienson (2002) and Montague (2010) for explanation). In general, thus, what is at stake is a fundamental questioning of assumed uses of “phenomenal character” as restricted to sensations and perceptual experiences and, thus, of our overall conception of the reach and nature of phenomenal consciousness. Earlier debates concerning the phenomenal character of experiences (closely tied to parallel debates concerning the existence of “qualia” and the “first-person” character of conscious experiences) tended to start from rather narrow premises and unexamined assumptions concerning phenomenality, one which restricted all phenomenology to a felt sensuousness.

The discussion of cognitive phenomenology contributes to various fields of philosophical and more broadly cognitive science research. Within philosophy, both analytic philosophy of mind and the tradition of phenomenology, as philosophical traditions and methodologies, can help shedding light on the topic, with the challenge of finding common grounds for debate beyond particular approaches and interests. Over and above the philosophical arena, cognitive phenomenology can become relevant for interdisciplinary research on consciousness and investigations on cognitive psychology, thus enriching those disciplines with different perspectives. In this way, cognitive phenomenology appears as a fruitful field of research with relevant connections in philosophical and empirical researches.

It is the aim of this Special Issue to contribute to enlarge the debate on cognitive phenomenology by presenting six articles that engage with the present discussion and also focus on some underexplored questions, including some reference to the history of the topic in the modern philosophical tradition. In this Introduction, we present an overview of the current state of the art on cognitive phenomenology and conscious thought, situating the topic in different fields of research. Then we contribute with a presentation of the main topics and views, and suggest new paths for future research and development. In the last section we introduce the contributed papers with a brief summary.

1. Conscious thinking: an underexplored domain?

What is the nature of conscious cognition or conscious thinking? Different answers have been given, at least, in three areas: philosophy, cognitive psychology and consciousness studies. Let us briefly present how conscious thought is treated in those three areas.

Within philosophy, two domains have been separately examined in philosophy of mind and phenomenology: the nature of consciousness and the nature of cognition or thought. What is the relation between them? One connection that has been established between cognition and consciousness appears when cognition is connected to perceptual experience. In this area, there is discussion concerning the question of the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience, and also on what is the relation of justification between perceptual experience and cognition, among other topics. These issues, however, are more concerned with the nature of perception and perceptual experiences, and the influence of thought on them, than with the nature of cognition or conscious cognition per se.

At the same time, one might feel perplexed with the title of this section that states that conscious thinking or cognition is a rather unattended or unexplored phenomenon, given that, at least since Descartes’ reflections on thinking and the self, considerations of conscious thinking have been quite at the centre of philosophical theorisation. The phenomenological tradition, beginning with Brentano and Husserl, has also discussed the nature of conscious awareness. These classical phenomenologists, however, have mainly focused their analysis on perceptual experiences and many other sorts of experiences – imagination, emotions, memory, and so on – without attending primarily to the structures of the experience of thinking as such (although both Brentano and Husserl have much to say about the nature and structure of judgement, it has not been primarily interrogated as a specifically conscious activity where the modality of its phenomenality is regarded as playing an essential role).

Moreover, it should be noted that the concepts of “consciousness” and “thought” have not retained a univocal meaning through history, and knowledge of the changes and of the evolution of these concepts might help shed light on the situation of cognitive phenomenology as the debate emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century (see Bayne and Montague (2011) and Siewert (2011) for a history of the question). Jansen’s contribution to the issue offers historical insights for the contemporary debate, by highlighting some aspects of Kant’s and Husserl’s accounts on thinking.

Within the analytical philosophical tradition, the contemporary debate on cognitive phenomenology began in the 1990s, and an important contribution to this was Goldman’s (1993), who did not preclude the idea of there being experiential or qualitative aspects of thoughts:

The terms qualia and qualitative are sometimes restricted to sensations (percepts and somatic feelings), but we should not allow this to preclude the possibility of other mental events (beliefs, thoughts, etc.) having a phenomenological or experiential dimension. (Goldman 1993, 24)

This paper was followed by a response from Lormand (1996), who posited a quartet of phenomenal states that did not, however, include thought. A view in support of Goldman’s insight was put forward by Strawson in the first edition of Mental Reality (1994), where he argues for the reality of cognitive experience presenting the much discussed case of the experience of understanding or coming-to-understand. In the same decade, Siewert (1998) also talks about sudden realisations or “insights” as thoughts for which no sensory elements might explain their phenomenal character. Of course, there is a much older debate in European philosophy (found for instance in Bergson (1946) or Lonergan (1992)) concerning the nature of intuition, including the intuitive grasp of cognitive states and their contents and objects (see Rooth and Rowbottom (2014) for a contemporary overview on intuitions), as well as discussions about the nature of insight and specifically the kind of moment of immediate understanding often described as the “Eureka” experience, “aha” moment or just as “insight”.

Goldman, Strawson, Siewert and others were the main precursors of the contemporary debate on cognitive phenomenology, which started to establish itself in the field philosophy of mind after that decade. Several works argued in favour of cognitive phenomenology in the beginning of our century (Horgan and Tienson 2002; Loar 2003; Pitt 2004; Graham, Horgan, and Tienson 2007, among others) but it was not until 2011 that a whole edited volume dedicated to the question was first published with the title Cognitive Phenomenology, edited Bayne and Montague (2011). More recently, a second edited volume by Breyer and Gutland (2016), The Phenomenology of Thinking: Philosophical Investigations into the Character of Cognitive Experiences addresses the cognitive phenomenology debate in the interface between analytic and phenomenological traditions in philosophy. The reasons for this revival are varied, but it may have been partially due to the proposals of various models of consciousness as higher-or-same order monitoring of mental states (as Prinz 2011 notes) and, certainly, to the interest in forms of intentionality as phenomenal intentionality in which intentionality is grounded in phenomenality (Kriegel 2014). The research in cognitive phenomenology was one aspect that paved the way for a new approach to the mind that countered functionalist and representationalist views.

It is useful to briefly highlight the situation in cognitive psychology and consciousness studies more generally. Within cognitive psychology, there is a well-established division between unconscious and conscious thoughts on the basis of two different cognitive systems or processes that underlie thinking (Frankish 2011): System 1 involves forms or reasoning that are automatic, intuitive, and mostly unconscious; and System 2 gives rise to forms of reasoning that are controlled, reflective and generally conscious. Research on conscious thought or cognition, thus, normally appeals to controlled and reflective forms of thinking, or even attentive thinking (Dijksterhuis and Nordgren 2006), somehow assuming that the conscious aspect of thought is thereby fully considered. But is the consciousness involved in conscious thought adequately described and explained by just appealing to attention, control, or reflection? Whereas sometimes these notions appear jointly in the characterisation of conscious thought, specific philosophical reflection should be able to distinguish and treat them separately and in relation to the (phenomenally) conscious character of thought. As another side of the same coin, much research on the area seems to be mainly focused on unconscious thought or cognition (Kihlstrom 2013), thereby leaving the connection to consciousness unattended.

One might think that the proper field of enquiry concerning the conscious character of thought is consciousness studies, given that thought is one mode or capacity within the mind. But the situation within consciousness studies does not give grounds for optimism: most research on consciousness is normally carried out in domains other than thought or cognition. Both scientific and philosophical theories of consciousness tend mainly to focus on sensory and perceptual experience, or even emotional, bodily experiences and action (Velmans and Schneider 2007; Block 2009; Van Gulick 2014), proposing general accounts of consciousness that normally do not have thought or cognition as its main explanandum. At most, theories that relate thought or cognition with consciousness characterise thought as a form of access consciousness (Block 1995), namely, a kind of consciousness (questioned by some as such, though) responsible for the information poised for the rational control of thought and action. As a symptom of the weak sense in which access consciousness is a form of consciousness, we can see that Block (2007) himself later prefers to talk about ‘cognitive access’.

As we have seen, the domain of conscious thought or cognition and its phenomenal character remains overlooked in cognitive psychology due to the dominant assumption that the conscious aspect is already explained by appeals to control, reflection or attention, and overlooked in interdisciplinary consciousness studies due to the latter’s focus on other domains of experience. In philosophy, the renewed interest in consciousness that began in the 1990s posed the question on cognitive phenomenology and its connection to conscious ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Conscious thinking and cognitive phenomenology: topics, views and future developments
• 2 The phenomenology of attitudes and the salience of rational role and determination
• 3 Thinking of oneself as the thinker: the concept of self and the phenomenology of intellection
• 4 Kant’s and Husserl’s agentive and proprietary accounts of cognitive phenomenology
• 5 The nature of unsymbolized thinking
• 6 Cognitive access and cognitive phenomenology: conceptual and empirical issues
• 7 Why Frege cases do involve cognitive phenomenology but only indirectly
• Index