Content and Consciousness by Daniel C Dennett

Author:Daniel C Dennett [Dennett, Daniel C]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Behavioral Sciences
ISBN: 9780415567862
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

AWARENESS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

XIV THE ORDINARY WORDS

The account of introspective certainty given in the last chapter is the first step in a theory of consciousness or awareness. The infallible reporter in the mind has evaporated, to be replaced at a different level of explanation by the notion of a speech-producing system which is invulnerable to reportorial errors just because it does not ascertain and does not report. This is just a first step, however, for there are more aspects of consciousness than just perceptual consciousness, and more things we do with speech than just make sincere reports of our experience.

This chapter will be an examination of our concepts of consciousness and awareness with a view not merely to cataloguing confusions and differences in our ordinary terms but also to proposing several artificial reforms in these terms. It is fairly common practice to use ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness’ as if they were clearly synonymous terms, or at least terms with unproblematic meaning, but I shall argue that these concepts, as revealed in the tangled skein of accepted and dubious usage, are an unhappy conglomerate of a number of separable concepts and that the only way to bring some order and manageability to the task of formulating a theory of consciousness and awareness is to coin some artificial terms to reflect the various functions of the ordinary terms.

The first thing to notice about the two words is that both of them have Intentional and non-Intentional uses. On the Intentional side, we speak of being conscious of this or that, aware of this or that, aware that such and such is the case, and – less naturally – conscious that such and such is the case. On the non-Intentional side, we speak of being just plain conscious or unconscious, and of being a conscious form of life, and, in rather artificial speech, of someone’s simply being aware, in the sense of being ‘on the qui vive’ or sensitive to the current situation. We also speak of conscious and unconscious motives or desires, but these can be assimilated under the Intentional idioms, as motives and desires we are conscious of.

Since ‘conscious that’ is at least unusual if not outright one of those things we ‘do not say’, and since ‘conscious of’ and ‘aware of’ are as close to being synonymous – to my ear – as any terms we are apt to find in ordinary language, a step in the direction of clarity and order can be taken by abandoning ‘conscious that’ and rendering ‘conscious of’ always as ‘aware of’, thus forming all the Intentional idioms with ‘aware’. Then if it can be agreed that the non-Intentional use of ‘aware’ (as in ‘the younger generation is so aware!’) is just a fancy way of speaking of alertness (‘heightened awareness’), it can be subsumed under the non-Intentional sense of ‘conscious’, where it means, roughly, ‘conscious to a high degree’ – whatever that means. The move, then, is to group all and only the Intentional senses of our

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