Conscious Conceptual Thought

In this dissertation I defend the view that the phenomenal character of some conscious experiences is constituted in part by conceptual representations, including conceptual representations which are independent of sensory representations. In Chapter 1 I present an overview of debates in cognitive phenomenology. In Chapter 2 I survey arguments throughout the history of philosophy centered on the non-imageability of certain mental states to demonstrate how purely sensory views of the mind vastly constrain what is thinkable. In Chapter 3 I survey contemporary arguments in the cognitive phenomenology debate, and I provide several arguments in support of cognitive phenomenology focused on introspection on perception, introspection on thinking, and the temporality of thought. In Chapter 4 I analyze tip-of-the-tongue experiences, drawing evidence from the psychology of language production to show that these are experiences in which a subject is conscious of a conceptual representation of the referent of the desired word independent of a phonological representation of the word. In Chapters 5 and 6 I critically analyze the positions of recent empirically informed philosophers who argue that attention and working memory are fundamentally sensory, such that we are never conscious of conceptual representations, or that we are only conscious of them in a limited way. In contrast, I provide a breadth of empirical evidence demonstrating that we can attend to conceptual representations and retain them in working memory, and that we have capacities for doing so independently of sensory representations. In total, I show that phenomenology and psychology are in a mutually confirming agreement, vindicating our introspective intuitions regarding the cognitive richness of experience.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Humanities

Grantor

Rice University

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Medeiros, Darren Joseph

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Siewert, Charles

• cognitive phenomenology
• consciousness
• concepts
• metacognition
• attention
• working memory

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1911/113314

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.rice.edu:1911/113314