information should only coalesce in response to top-down probing of the
contents of experience. (‘Am I seeing someone in red to my right? Am I
seeing someone in yellow coming up just behind him?’ And so on.) Indeed
in general it seems that the requirements of on-line planning of complex
actions require an integrated perceptualWeld to underpin and give content
to the indexical thoughts which such planning involves. (‘If I throw it to
him justsothen I can move intothatgapthereto receive the return pass’,
and so on.)
So, why does Dennett think that phenomenal consciousness involves
language? In his 1991a (ch.10) Dennett isWrst of all eulogistic about the
virtues of higher-order thought (HOT) theory, but then argues that the
insertion ofthoughtbetween experience and its linguistic expression is an
unnecessary shuZe. All we have reason to believe in, on the basis of
introspection, is the existence of linguistic descriptions of our experiences,
in ‘inner speech’. And there is no good theoretical reason for postulating
that those descriptions encode a separable set of thoughts.
There are two distinct issues here. One is whether we should endorse an
‘encoding’ (or purely communicative) conception of natural language,
according to which weWrstentertain a thought which isthentranslated
into a linguistic medium. It is possible to reject this picture (as we suggested
in chapter 8 that we should) without endorsing a higher-order description
(HOD) account of consciousness. One could allow thatconsciousproposi-
tional thought is constituted by the manipulation of natural language
sentences, in inner speech, while denying that it is the availability of
experiences to such sentences which constitutes them as phenomenally
conscious. Rather, we can claim that the availability of experiences to
non-conscious HOTs would be suYcient to render them phenomenally
conscious, and we can claim that such HOTs are independent of language.
And at least theWrst part of this claim is surely well motivated. For recall
from section 3.3 above the salient features of our explanation of the
distinctive, problematic, aspects of phenomenal consciousness. This con-
sisted inanalogexperiential content being available to a concept-wielding
system containingrecognitional conceptsof experience. This was then able
to explain the conceivability of inverted and absent phenomenal proper-
ties, together with our temptation to insist that conscious experiences are
private, ineVable, and knowable with complete certainty by the subject.
Nothing in this explanation seems to require that the various HOTs
involved (for example, in a recognition-judgement targeted on an ex-
perience) should themselves be conscious. What does the work in the
explanation is the availability of experience to HOTs, not availability to
conscious HOTs.
The second – and real – issue, then, is whether propositional thought, as
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