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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/4/2016, SPi

The Given
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/4/2016, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/4/2016, SPi

The Given
Experience and its Content

Michelle Montague

1
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/4/2016, SPi

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Michelle Montague 2016
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2016
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Printed in Great Britain by
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/4/2016, SPi

To Galen
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/4/2016, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/4/2016, SPi

Acknowledgments

Many people have helped me complete this book, and I can’t hope to
thank all of them here. But, first, and as always, thanks to my family for
keeping it real. More philosophically, I have benefited a great deal from
discussions with Tim Bayne, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Sam Coleman,
Owen Flanagan, Peter Goldie, Lisa Janis, Vicky Johnson, Uriah Kriegel,
Graham Oddie, Antonia Phillips, David Pitt, David Rosenthal, Rachel
Singpurwalla, David W. Smith, and Dan Zahavi. Many thanks, also, to
two anonymous referees who provided excellent comments, and to
Peter Momtchiloff for his editorial expertise and for keeping everything
on track.
In the summer of 2012 I was a visiting fellow at the Research School of
Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. This
gave me the opportunity to present different parts of the book to the
ANU philosophy department, to an audience at the Australasian Phil-
osophy Association Conference in Wollongong, and most exotically, to a
group of panpsychists on Lady Elliot Island, the southernmost coral cay
of the Great Barrier Reef. The University of Texas at Austin granted me
leave in the spring of 2015 allowing me to devote my full attention to
finishing this book.
Finally, I would especially like to thank Galen Strawson for his loving
support, philosophical and otherwise.
Parts of chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 have been published elsewhere,
although each chapter is a major revision of those earlier publications.
Part of chapter 6 appeared in T. Bayne and M. Montague (eds) Cognitive
Phenomenology under the title ‘The phenomenology of particularity’;
part of chapter 7 appeared in U. Kriegel’s (ed) Phenomenal Intentionality
under the title ‘The Access Problem’; part of chapter 8 appeared in
P. Coates and S. Coleman (eds) Phenomenal Qualities under the title
‘The Life of the Mind’; part of chapter 9 appeared in S. Roeser and
C. Todd (eds) Emotion and Value under the title ‘Evaluative
Phenomenology’.
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/4/2016, SPi

Contents

Introduction 1
1. Intentionality, Phenomenology, Consciousness,
and Content 7
1.1 Intentionality, Phenomenology, and Consciousness 7
1.1.1 Intentionality 7
1.1.2 Phenomenology 8
1.1.3 Consciousness is a phenomenological phenomenon 8
1.1.4 Kinds of phenomenology 14
1.2 Intentionality and Content 16
1.2.1 The reductive naturalization project 17
1.2.2 The separation of intentionality and phenomenology 21
1.2.3 The traditional notion of content 23
1.3 Conclusion 29
2. A Brentanian Theory of Content 31
2.1 What Is Given in Experience 31
2.1.1 Phenomenological givenness 31
2.1.2 Categorization of content 33
2.1.3 What (exactly) is phenomenologically given? 37
2.1.4 Awareness of awareness 41
2.1.5 All content is representational content 46
3. Awareness of Awareness 49
3.1 Accounts of Awareness of Awareness 50
3.1.1 Higher-order views 50
3.1.2 Same-order representational views 56
3.1.3 Same-order non-representational views 62
3.2 Summary of Chapters 1–3 65
4. P. F. Strawson’s Datum 68
4.1 The Transparency Thesis 70
4.1.1 What is the transparency thesis? 70
4.1.2 Transparency, Standard representationalism,
and Disjunctivism 73
4.2 The Datum 75
4.2.1 Distinguishing between our perceivings
and the objects of our perceivings 75
4.2.2 The datum and awareness of awareness 77
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x CONTENTS

4.2.3 Disjunctivism, Standard representationalism,

and the datum 77
4.2.4 The datum and the unconscious 82
4.2.5 Conclusion 84
5. Brentanianism, Standard Representationalism,
and Fregean Representationalism 85
5.1 General Representationalism 85
5.1.1 Three theories 85
5.2 Standard Representationalism and Fregeanism 88
5.2.1 Standard representationalism 88
5.2.2 Objections to Standard representationalism 90
5.2.3 Fregeanism 91
5.2.4 An objection to Fregeanism 92
5.3 Back to Brentanianism 94
5.3.1 Another look at Brentanianism 94
5.3.2 Veridicality: ‘Eden’ 100
5.3.3 Veridicality: ‘The relativity of our “reallys” ’ 103
5.3.4 Inverted earth and inverted spectrum 109
6. Perception of Physical Objects: The Phenomenological
Particularity Fact 114
6.1 The Phenomenological Particularity Fact 117
6.1.1 The problem of phenomenological particularity 117
6.1.2 Generalists about phenomenological content 119
6.1.3 A generalist attempt to account for phenomenological
particularity 122
6.1.4 Particularists about phenomenological content 125
6.1.5 Martin’s account of phenomenological particularity 127
6.2 Object-positing 136
6.2.1 Object-positing and cognitive phenomenology 136
6.2.2 Object-positing and reference 139
7. Perception of Physical Objects: The Access Problem 142
7.1 The Access Problem 142
7.1.1 The ‘particular-way’ condition 142
7.1.2 Broad conceptions of sensory phenomenology 147
7.2 Russell’s Principle 148
7.2.1 Discriminating knowledge: an internal proposal 148
7.3 The Matching View 150
7.3.1 Perceptual identification: seeing, hearing, and smelling 150
7.3.2 A closer look at seeing 153
7.4 Evans and Demonstrative Identification 155
7.4.1 Evans’s focus on tracking and locating 155
7.4.2 Against Evans 159
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CONTENTS xi

7.5 The Limits of Error: How Wrong Can One Be? 161
7.5.1 A hierarchy of properties 161
7.6 Objections and Responses 165
7.6.1 Thoughts about the shed 165
7.6.2 Objection 1 166
7.6.3 Objection 2 167
7.6.4 Objection 3 170
7.7 Not a Hallucination 170
7.7.1 The importance of counterfactuals 170
8. Cognitive Phenomenology: What Is Given in Conscious
Thought 173
8.1 What Cognitive Phenomenology Is and Isn’t 177
8.1.1 Cognitive phenomenology, perceptual phenomenology,
and sensory phenomenology 177
8.2 Conscious Thought and Unconscious Thought 181
8.2.1 Distinguishing conscious thought from unconscious
thought 181
8.3 Access-consciousness and Cognitive Accessibility 183
8.3.1 Block’s notion of access-consciousness 183
8.3.2 Access-consciousness (cognitive accessibility) is not
sufficient for conscious thought 186
8.4 Against Cognitive Phenomenology: The Sensory
Phenomenology Proposal 192
8.4.1 The simple sensory proposal 192
8.4.2 The conscious content principle 197
8.4.3 Inner speech and the conscious content principle 198
8.4.4 Causation and the conscious content principle 200
8.5 The Givenness of Conscious Thought: Cognitive-
phenomenological Content, Internal Representational
Content, and External Representational Content 204
8.5.1 How the kinds of content are related 204
8.5.2 Cognitive-phenomenological content and external
representational content 206
8.5.3 Cognitive-phenomenological content and internal
representational content 207
8.5.4 Cognitive-phenomenological content and basic concepts 212
9. Evaluative Phenomenology: What Is Given in Conscious
Emotion 216
9.1 Representation of Emotion-Value Properties and Evaluative
Phenomenology 219
9.1.1 Representing ‘sadness’, ‘joyousness’, and ‘tragicness’ 219
9.1.2 Evaluative phenomenology is sui generis 222
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xii CONTENTS

9.2 Awareness of Awareness and Evaluative Phenomenology 226

9.2.1 Evaluative awareness 226
9.2.2 Evaluative phenomenology and emotion-value properties 228
9.2.3 A distinctive experience of value 230
9.3 Fine-grained Evaluative Phenomenology 231
9.3.1 Evaluative phenomenology as fine-grained as value
properties 231
Concluding Remarks 235

Bibliography 237
Index 247
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Introduction

This is a book about the given—about what is given to us in experience.

There is a great deal of disagreement about what this is. Wilfrid Sellars
made the notion of the given infamous when he wrote about ‘the Myth of
the Given’ (1956: 33). According to Sellars, when objects and states of
affairs are given to us in perceptual experience (for example), they are
given to us in terms that are essentially determined, at least in part, by the
operations of certain conceptual capacities that belong to us as rational
beings, as self-conscious discursive thinkers. We fall into ‘the Myth of the
Given’ if we think that what is given can be given without already being
saturated with some of the conceptual capacities we possess as rational
knowers: if we think that ‘sensibility’ on its own can deliver unconcep-
tualized, ‘raw’ material to our cognitive capacities. The (supposed) myth
of the given is not the view that something is given to us in experience, it
is a false view of what is given. The conceptual capacities we have as
discursive knowers must already be implemented to some extent in
anything that can properly be said to be given in experience, and must
not be thought of as coming into operation only as responses to what has
already been given in sensory experience. It is difficult to specify precisely
the minimum conceptual apparatus one needs to acknowledge as being
already in play in constituting what is given in experience in order to
avoid the myth of the given, and this book will not treat Sellars’ philoso-
phy in any detail. Nevertheless I am, like Sellars, concerned with what is
given in experience and with what is necessary for the given—the given
that actually is given!—to be given.1

1
There is another element of the given which has very much preoccupied McDowell
(see e.g. McDowell 1994), and that I will not be concerned with at all. He is concerned with
how what is given in perceptual experience can play a suitable role in justifying our
perceptual beliefs.
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 INTRODUCTION

One of the main goals of a theory of our mental life is to provide a

general theory of mental content, which I will often refer to simply as
‘content’. A general theory of mental content should cover both con-
scious and unconscious or non-conscious content, in whatever sense
there may be said to be unconscious mental content.2 In this book,
however, my main interest is in giving an account of conscious mental
content, the content of conscious experience—a general theory of what is
given to us in experience. One assumption I will make, and won’t fully
argue for here, is that our foundational notion of content is the notion of
content we derive from conscious experience. That is, our grasp of what
mental content is is fundamentally—essentially—based on our experi-
ence of what is given in conscious experience. Once we have this notion
of mental content grounded in conscious experience, we can then ask, is
there such a thing as unconscious content and if there is such a thing,
what can it be?
By ‘experience’ I mean conscious experience, conscious awareness—
conscious perception, conscious emotion, conscious thought. I take it to
be true by definition that all experience is conscious experience, although
I will also regularly use the phrase ‘conscious experience’.3 I take it that
conscious thoughts are just as much experiences as episodes of conscious
perception and conscious emotion. Consciously seeing the rising sun is a
visual experience, consciously thinking that temperance is a virtue is a
cognitive or thought experience, consciously feeling angry about the state
of the economy is a cognitive and emotional experience. I agree with
Moore when he says that
the distinction between sensation and thought need not detain us here. For, in
whatever respects they differ, they have at least this in common, that they are
both forms of consciousness or, to use a term that seems to be more in fashion
just now, they are both ways of experiencing. (1903: 437)

Some may find it strange, given their terminological allegiances, to apply

the word ‘experience’ to thoughts, but I hope to show that such termino-
logical allegiances mask a fundamental fact about conscious thought—
the fact that it possesses its own distinctive non-sensory kind of experi-
ential character.

2
I will use unconscious and non-conscious interchangeably.
3
This is not to say that others have not used the notion of unconscious experience.
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INTRODUCTION 

I am going to focus on four fundamental notions: intentionality,

phenomenology, consciousness, and content.4 I will argue that all experi-
ence involves all these four things. I believe that the key to giving an
adequate general theory of the given—of what is given in experience—
lies in specifying the nature of these four things and correctly character-
izing their relationship. Unsurprisingly, these tasks are intertwined.
I begin in chapter 1 by introducing all four notions: intentionality,
phenomenology, consciousness, and content. I expound the idea that
consciousness is essentially phenomenological, and present what I take
to be three irreducibly different kinds of phenomenology: sensory, cog-
nitive, and evaluative. I then briefly consider the approach to questions
about intentionality and content that was standard in analytic philoso-
phy in the 1970s and 1980s. I end by introducing an alternative notion
of content inspired by the work of Franz Brentano. I’ll call it the
‘Brentanian account of content’, although it is important to note straight
away that it extends the notion of content found in his early and most
well-known work in one absolutely fundamental respect, by allowing
that physical objects like tables and chairs can be counted as among as
the contents of experience in addition to purely phenomenological
features. It is for all that properly called a Brentanian account of content,
for Brentano precisely makes this move himself in his later work.5
In chapter 2 I develop the Brentanian theory of content in more detail.
I begin by listing the different kinds of mental content. I then focus
on one of the theory’s essential elements: the idea that all conscious
experience is in a certain fundamental sense ‘self-luminous’ or ‘self-
intimating’—the idea, in other words, that all conscious awareness in
some manner constitutively involves awareness of that very awareness. It
may be thought that in introducing the notion of ‘same-order’ awareness

4
I don’t really want to separate the notions of consciousness and phenomenology, but
I am doing so for the time being because the separation is common in current discussion of
these issues.
5
In the first publication of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1874, Brentano
restricts his theorizing about what the mind can have as content to ‘phenomena’, which are
defined as appearances and can be understood as mental in our contemporary terminology.
In the republication of Book II of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1911 and in
his Nachlass essays published in 1924, Brentano abandons his restriction to phenomena. In
his revised view, all mental activity must have a Reales as an object, a concrete individual
thing.
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 INTRODUCTION

of awareness in this way, and linking it tightly to consciousness, I have

wandered off the main topic: that I am no longer talking about my main
subject, mental content. I hope it will become clear that this is not so.
A further doubt about the Brentanian approach may arise from the
fact that Brentano holds that all mental content is conscious content, and
essentially so;6 it may be thought that this sort of notion of content
cannot possibly be adequate given the present-day debate about mental
content, which lays great stress on the idea that there is non-conscious
mental content. But although the viability of the idea of non-conscious
mental content seems intuitively obvious to most analytic philosophers
today, it is not without its difficulties.7 I ask the reader to reserve
judgment on the matter until I elucidate the Brentanian theory in more
detail.
In chapter 3 I compare the Brentanian account of awareness of
awareness I favor to other theories that accept some form of the aware-
ness of awareness thesis and argue for the superiority of the Brentanian
theory. In particular I consider four theories: Rosenthal’s higher-order
theory, Kriegel’s same-order theory, a Husserlian inspired theory, and
Thomasson’s adverbial theory. (Although Thomasson’s view is not
strictly an awareness of awareness view, she is in sympathy with some
of its central insights.)
In chapter 4, I offer a new consideration in favor of the awareness of
awareness thesis. I examine a point made by P. F. Strawson: that in
ordinary everyday experience we naturally distinguish the experience
itself from the object of experience, and never mistake the one for the
other. I argue that Brentanianism can accommodate this datum, while
Naïve Realist theories and ‘Standard representationalist’ theories cannot.
In chapter 5, I consider experience, in particular perceptual experience, in
particular visual experience. I focus on the property attributions that we may
be said to make simply in having experience as we do—the property
attributions that are as I say ‘made in experience’. I argue that the Brentanian
account of content provides the best explanation of these attributions,
comparing it to three other accounts: ‘Standard representationalism’,

6
By the phrase ‘conscious content’ I mean the conscious entertaining of content. I’ll
discuss this phrase in more detail in chapters 3 and 8.
7
See e.g. Searle 1992, Strawson 1994: ch. 6, 2008, Gertler 2007.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/4/2016, SPi

INTRODUCTION 

‘Fregean representationalism’, and an elaboration on Fregean representa-

tionalism proposed by Chalmers (2006).
In chapters 6 and 7 I consider object perception, again focusing on
visual experience. In chapter 6 I argue that an adequate theory of object
perception must account for the fact that it is part of the experiential or
phenomenological character of many of our perceptual experiences that
they are experiences of individual particular objects. I call this ‘the
phenomenological particularity fact’. I reject what I call the ‘generalist
approach’ and the ‘particularist approach’ to the phenomenological
particularity fact, and suggest that many perceptual experiences, veridical
or not, essentially involve types of demonstrative thoughts that them-
selves involve ‘bare demonstratives’; that is, roughly, mental elements of
the form that thing, which constitute a fundamental category of our
thinking and indeed our experience in general—the category object. This
fundamental category of thought—the category object—which typically
makes our experiences object-positing, is what accounts for the phenom-
enology of particularity. I further claim that object-positing is best
understood as a species of cognitive phenomenology.
In chapter 7 I focus on the following questions: How exactly do we
achieve access to the things with which we stand in perceptual intentional
relations? When we perceive some particular thing, what exactly makes it
the case that we have that very thing in mind? What mechanism deter-
mines which object a perception is of ? I call this the ‘access problem’.
I defend a view I call the ‘matching view’. It imposes a necessary condition
on a perceptual experience’s being about an object: there must be a certain
degree of match between the properties an object has and the properties
the perceptual experience represents the object as having.
In chapter 8, I argue that conscious thought cannot be adequately
characterized without appealing to a distinctive kind of non-sensory
cognitive phenomenology. The chapter begins with a question: What
distinguishes a conscious occurrent thought from a non-conscious occur-
rent thought (assuming there are non-conscious thoughts)? What features
must be present for us to classify a thought as conscious? I argue that the
notion of ‘access-consciousness’ cannot provide a satisfactory answer to
this question, and that we must appeal to phenomenological properties.
If this is right, a further question arises: What kind of phenomeno-
logical features are required? Can we give a satisfactory account of what
makes an occurrent thought a conscious thought solely by reference
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/4/2016, SPi

 INTRODUCTION

to sensory phenomenology—including both verbal and non-verbal

imagery? Predictably by now, I argue that we cannot. We must appeal
to a distinctive kind of phenomenology, cognitive phenomenology, in
order to say what conscious thought consists in. This constitutes a further
argument for the existence of cognitive phenomenology. I conclude the
chapter with a discussion of the kinds of content present in thought and
how they relate to one another.
Finally, in chapter 9, I argue that there is a distinctive kind of phenom-
enological content associated with emotional experiences, which I call
‘evaluative phenomenology’. The term is apt because, I argue, emotional
experiences are essentially experiences of value or as of value, or what I will
sometimes call ‘value experiences’. I end this chapter with a discussion of
the fine-grainedness of evaluative-phenomenological content.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/4/2016, SPi

1
Intentionality,
Phenomenology,
Consciousness, and Content

1.1 Intentionality, Phenomenology,

and Consciousness
1.1.1 Intentionality
Intentionality can be simply characterized. It is nothing more or less than
the phenomenon of something’s being about something or of something
in the sense of ‘of ’ given which a picture can be said to be of something,
such as a bath or a battle. I will focus on mental intentionality, the
intentionality of actual mental states or events, e.g. thinking that grass
is green, judging that the weather is bad, and seeing the shed at the
bottom of the garden. I will therefore say little about the sense in which
non-mental things like books and photographs can correctly be said to
be intentional, or to have intentionality, because they can correctly be
said to be about things, or of things. I will also focus on the intentionality
of concrete entities like mental states, and say little about the sense in
which abstract entities like propositions can be said to have intentional-
ity. Finally, I will focus on conscious mental intentionality, e.g. conscious
perception, conscious thought, and conscious emotion. I will, however,
also gesture towards what I take to be the most promising characteriza-
tion of unconscious mental intentionality. (It will be clear when I am
concerned with unconscious intentionality.)
I will move freely between speaking of ‘mental states’, ‘mental epi-
sodes’, ‘mental occurrences’, and ‘experiences’, bearing in mind that it is
sometimes important to distinguish between mental states and mental
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/4/2016, SPi

 INTENTIONALITY , PHENOMENOLOGY , CONSCIOUSNESS , AND CONTENT

occurrences. In much of what follows I will use the terms ‘representa-

tion’, ‘representational’, and ‘representational properties’ instead of the
terms ‘intentional’ and ‘intentional properties’. I take these two sets of
terms to be interchangeable, and I choose to use the former set only for
ease of exposition rather than for any substantive theoretical reasons.
However, when I am discussing the general phenomenon of ‘ofness’ or
‘aboutness’, it is most natural to stick to the term ‘intentionality’.
1.1.2 Phenomenology
Phenomenology can be characterized in a familiar way as the phenom-
enon of there being ‘something it is like’ experientially, to be in a mental
state, something it is like, experientially, for the creature who is in the
state. It is a matter of a state’s having experiential qualitative character or
subjective phenomenological character.1 For example, there is something
it is like to taste warm cornbread, or feel sleepy, or faintly uneasy, or
suddenly remember a missed appointment, or find something funny.
One can of course equally well say that there’s something it is like to be a
cube, or a glass of water—it’s to have such and such qualities or prop-
erties. So when I speak in what follows of there being something it is like,
or of ‘what-it’s-likeness’, I will always mean something specifically
experiential. This is how the phrase is standardly used in present-day
philosophy of mind.2
1.1.3 Consciousness is a phenomenological phenomenon
The task of offering even an initial uncontroversial characterization of
consciousness is more difficult. To begin, there is a sense in which one can
be said to be conscious of something x although one is completely
unaware that this is so, as in the case of subliminal perception. This
suggests that one may legitimately talk of unconscious consciousness of
x! I am, however, going to put aside this sense of ‘conscious’. Even if one
agrees that one may be said to be conscious of an object x in the case of a

1
The term ‘phenomenology’ was originally used to designate a method of theorizing,
most famously employed by Brentano 1874, Husserl 1900–01, and Sartre 1943, according to
which one studies conscious mental phenomena from the ‘first-person perspective’. See e.g.
Smith 1989, Siewert 1998, Thomasson 2005, Zahavi 2006 for contemporary uses of this
method.
2
Some philosophers find the ‘what it’s like’ locution uninformative and attempt to
elucidate phenomenology in other terms. See e.g. Kriegel 2009, Siewert 2011.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/4/2016, SPi

INTENTIONALITY , PHENOMENOLOGY , CONSCIOUSNESS , AND CONTENT 

subliminal perception of x, there is also a clear sense in which one is not

conscious of x. One would not wish to say that that subliminal percep-
tion is itself conscious.3
Any remotely plausible account of the mind must allow that there is
such a thing as conscious experience, conscious feelings, conscious
sensations. Given the way I understand the terms ‘experience’, ‘feeling’,
and ‘sensation’, the adjective ‘conscious’ is redundant—as mentioned
above. We can certainly register features of the environment without
having any conscious experience in so doing, but to have a sensation,
to have a feeling, to have an actual experience, is necessarily—by
definition—to undergo a conscious mental episode.4
But in spite of wide agreement that experiences, sensations, and
feelings are necessarily conscious, there is still disagreement about
whether the concept of consciousness is a unitary concept.
What do I mean by ‘unitary’? If the concept of consciousness is a
unitary concept, in the sense in which I intend it, then all conscious states
are conscious in virtue of possessing some one particular type of property
or set of properties. On one natural view, for example, all conscious states
are conscious simply in virtue of instantiating a phenomenological
property or properties. On this view, instantiating a phenomenological
property or properties is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of
being a conscious state. It is really all there is to being conscious. If the
concept of consciousness is not a unitary concept in the intended sense,
then conscious states may also be (qualify as) conscious states in virtue
of instantiating some other different type of property or properties.
Some conscious states may be conscious in virtue of instantiating a
phenomenological property, because this is a sufficient condition of
being a conscious state, but other conscious states may be conscious in
virtue of instantiating some other non-phenomenological property or set of

3
Rosenthal 2005 marks this distinction by introducing the terms ‘transitive conscious-
ness’ and ‘state consciousness’. In having a subliminal perception of a ball, for example, one
is transitively conscious of the ball, but the perceptual state is not itself conscious; the state
in question does not have ‘state consciousness’. Dennett 1995, however, might disagree with
how I am making the distinction here. For Dennett, sometimes the difference between a
subliminal perception or a case of blindsight perception and an uncontroversial conscious
episode is one of degree, not of kind.
4
Not everyone agrees that sensations are by definition conscious. See e.g. Rosenthal
2005.
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