. The word ‘conscious’ seems to have more than one sense, a fact which may have led to confusion on some of the topics mentioned below. In particular, two senses need distinguishing. In a strong sense to be conscious involves reflective awareness and perhaps a conception of oneself as opposed to other things. In this sense consciousness involves some intellectual or rational capacity and may be limited to the human level. But in a weaker sense anything that can have sensory experiences, especially that of feeling pain, can be called conscious. Problems will then also arise about the relations between these senses, and perhaps others: where, for instance, do being conscious of something and being conscious that something fit in, and what sort of things can one be conscious of?
In the early and mid-twentieth century the influence of verificationism led to a decaying of introspective psychology and encouraging of behaviourism and materialism, at least in their methodological versions; consciousness therefore, while seldom denied outright, received little attention, in either of its senses. Recently, however, it has returned to favour. How far can any description be given of what seems ineffable, e.g. the colour red as it appears to our sight? Cf. QUALE and the problems mentioned there. Can consciousness, without necessarily being denied, be dispensed with in describing our mental life in physical or FUNCTIONALIST terms? Can consciousness be studied and defined in its own right, or can it only be regarded as a feature of various mental phenomena, such as feelings, thoughts or emotions? Are animals conscious, and could artefacts ever be so? What would count as their being so? Freud taught us that desires etc.
can be unconscious, so what account should we give of these? See MIND.
P.Carruthers, ‘Brute experience’, Journal of Philosophy, 1989. (Claims non-human animals are not conscious.)
M.Davies and G.W.Humphries (eds), Consciousness, Blackwell, 1993. (Essays, both new and reprinted, covering psychological and philosophical issues, and with a long introduction.)
D.C.Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown, 1991. (Offers to explain how consciousness arises.)
F.Dretske, ‘Conscious experience,’ Mind, 1992. (Consciousness of and consciousness that, etc.)
O.Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered, MIT Press, 1992. (Claims that consciousness, though real, is ‘neither miraculous nor terminally mysterious’ (p. xi), and can be explained in terms of the science of the brain.)
R.Kirk, Raw Feeling, Clarendon, 1994. (Claims to bridge the gap between physical phenomena in the brain and conscious phenomena like sensations by showing that there are essential links between them.)
W.G.Lycan, Consciousness, MIT Press, 1987. (Defends a version of functionalism.)
T.Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, Philosophical Review, 1974, often reprinted. (Influential in rehabilitation of interest in consciousness.)
K.V.Wilkes, ‘Is consciousness important?’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1984. (No.)
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