idea that any organism capable of mental-state-consciousness would need
to possessconceptsof experience, and so be capable of higher-order
thoughts (HOTs).
We conclude that higher-order theories will entail (when supplemented
by plausible empirical claims about the representational powers of non-
human animals) that very few animals besides ourselves are subject to
phenomenally conscious mental states. Is this a decisive – or indeed any –
consideration in favour ofWrst-order accounts? Our view is that it is not,
since we lack any grounds for believing that animals have phenomenally
conscious states. Of course, most of us do have a powerful intuitive belief
that there is something which it islikefor a cat or a rat to experience the
smell of cheese. But this intuition is easily explained. For when we ascribe
an experience to the cat we quite naturally (almost habitually) try to form a
Wrst-person representation of its content, trying to imagine what it might
be like ‘from the inside’. (There is at least this much truth in thesimulation-
isttheories discussed in chapter 4.) But when we do this what we do, of
course, is imagine aconscious experience – what we do, in eVect, is
represent one of ourownexperiences, which will bring its distinctive
phenomenology with it. All we really have reason to suppose, in fact, is
that the catperceivesthe smell of the cheese. We have no independent
grounds for thinking that its percepts will be phenomenally conscious
ones. (Certainly such grounds are not provided by the need to explain the
cat’s behaviour. For this purpose the concept of perception,simpliciter,
will do perfectly well.)
3.5 Two objectionsNotice that it is not only animals, but also young children, who will lack
phenomenal consciousness according to higher-order thought (HOT)
accounts. For as we saw in chapter 4, the evidence is that children under,
say, the age of three lack the concepts ofappearanceor seeming –
or equivalently, they lack the idea of perception as involvingsubjective
states of the perceiver – which are necessary for the child to entertain
HOTs about its experiences. Dretske (1995) uses this point to raise an
objection against HOT-theories, which is distinct from the argument from
animals discussed above. He asks whether it is not very implausible that
three year olds, on the one hand, and younger children, on the other,
should undergo diVerentkindsof experiences – namely, ones which are
phenomenally conscious and ones which are not. Granted, the one set of
children may be capable of more sophisticated (and higher-order)
thoughts than the other. But surely their experiences are likely to be
fundamentally the same?
Cognitivist theories 259