In The Centered Mind, Peter Carruthers argues that conscious thought is always sensory-based, relying on the resources of the working memory system. When abstract conceptual representations are bound into these images, we consciously experience ourselves as making judgements or arriving at decisions. Thus one might hear oneself as judging, in inner speech, that it is time to go home, for example. However, our amodal (nonsensory) propositional attitudes are never actually among the contents of this stream of conscious reflection. Our beliefs, goals and decisions are only ever active in the background of consciousness. They are never themselves conscious. Carruthers claims to explain in his book what the science of working memory shows us about the nature of human thought.
Carruthers's new book is a development of the thesis argued for in his previous book The Opacity of Mind, to which he frequently refers. It is therefore relevant to point out that one goal of that book is to challenge the almost unanimously-held view that knowledge of our own mental states is somehow special and radically different from knowledge of others, a view which he acknowledges has been accepted by all philosophical traditions in all cultures throughout history. By contrast, what he calls the Interpretive Sensory Access (ISA) theory claims that self-knowledge of most forms of thought doesn't differ in kind from knowledge of the thoughts of other people, though Carruthers also makes the stronger claim that ‘our only mode of access to our own thinking is through the same sensory channels that we use in figuring out the mental states of others'Footnote 1 (my italics).
I find Carruthers's thesis extremely puzzling, and sometimes quite opaque. I begin with an obvious problem about interpretation. If self-knowledge doesn't differ in kind from knowledge of others, then it follows that I come to have knowledge of my own mental states by a process of interpretation, in much that same way as I come to have knowledge of the mental states of others. But, since interpreting is itself a mental state, it follows that I can only come to have knowledge of my own interpreting by a prior process of interpretation, and an infinite regress clearly threatens. The conclusion seems forced on us: contrary to what Carruthers claims, self-knowledge must at some level be fundamentally different from knowledge of others.
Just as puzzling is the claim that our beliefs, goals and decisions are never themselves conscious. On page 238, Carruthers asserts that the sensorily embedded judgement to stop at the ATM on the way home is no more active than is hearing someone else say that they will stop at the ATM. In each case, we have a passively formed judgement that is caused by a prior action, in the one case, one's own, in the other case, the action of someone else. There is, Carruthers asserts, no such thing as conscious agency.
A number of concerns are raised by this passage. First, the claim that our decisions are never themselves conscious looks completely implausible. Think of someone who swears to take vengeance on the person who has gravely wronged him, or of one who is full of remorse for an injury inflicted on someone else, and who resolves to make recompense, or of Wagner's resolve to erect a monument to the ‘most beautiful of all dreams’ which resulted in the creation of Tristan, or Carruthers's own decision to write this book. It hardly makes sense to suggest that these were not conscious decisions. And the claim that such decisions are no more active than is hearing someone else say what they will do looks again to be simply incredible.
The claim that deciding to stop at the ATM is like hearing someone else say they will atop at the ATM raises further questions. Carruthers says that in each case we have a passively formed judgement that is caused by a prior judgement. I am unclear what the prior action is supposed to be, but can only conclude that it is the action of interpreting. However, if that is the case, then it raises again the difficulty I outlined above: the threat of an infinite regress of interpretings.
But the other problem with this passage is raised by the claim that the difference is that the action in the one case is one's own, but in the other it is that of someone else. It must be asked whether we can make sense of this distinction on the view of the nature of mind that Carruthers argues for. The problem is this: on Carruthers's view, there is no essential difference between self-knowledge and knowledge of others. Such knowledge is always the fruit of interpretation. If that is the case, then the picture that Carruthers presents is of a world in which each self is an interpreting system, able to interpret both its own states and that of others in essentially the same way. But if that is the case it is entirely unclear what it can mean to say that one of these systems is one's own, or mine. Imagine a number of machines, each of which is capable of scanning its own states and that of others. Each machine is identical to itself, and each has the properties it has, and once we have stated these necessary truths there is nothing else to be done except to describe these properties. What it would not make sense to say is that one particular token of the class of machines is oneself, or me. But if Carruthers can indeed make sense of the suggestion that selves are essentially different from such machines in this respect, and that it is indeed the case that one of the class of interpreting minds differs from all the others in simply being one's own, we need to ask how he grounds this distinction. It seems to me that the claim that one of these interpreting minds differs from all the others just in being oneself can only be grounded if Carruthers's fundamental claim is rejected. The mind that is one's own differs from all others in being the one to whose states one has privileged, if not infallible, access. Self-knowledge must, therefore, be profoundly different from knowledge of others.
A related problem arises with regard to Carruthers's claim that conscious thought is always sensory-based, relying on the resources of the working-memory system. At some level or other this involves awareness of what memory is, or of what it is to have an awareness of one's own past. But this awareness, it seems to me, is essentially first-personal, a matter of direct awareness of one's own state of consciousness. If we do not grant this, it is impossible to understand what it could be for some sensory item to linked to memory, or of what it is to have an awareness of one's past. Once again, this is incompatible with Carruthers's basic claim that self-knowledge does not differ fundamentally from knowledge of others. Interpreting others is a matter of bringing the template provided by one's own consciousness and one's privileged access to it to the behaviour of others.
The point can be generalised. If access to our own conscious thought is always sensory-based, that means that access to intentional states of consciousness is always through something which is non-intentional. But if that is the case, the question must be asked: how is it that the result of this process is recognised as an intentional state of consciousness? Once again, it seems to me, the answer can only be that one knows in one's own case what it is to have such states of consciousness. And this conclusion is not compatible with Carruthers's claim that self-knowledge does not differ essentially from knowledge of others.
What underlies Carruthers's view of the nature of mind, it becomes clear, is a rejection of the first-person perspective as something which is irreducible and fundamentally different from the perspective of others. It is therefore no surprise to see that Carruthers has dedicated his book to Daniel Dennett, who has claimed that ‘[y]ou've got to leave the first person out of your final theory. You won't have a theory of consciousness if you have the first person in there, because that was what it was your job to explain’.Footnote 2 I don't think this is a coherent view of the nature of consciousness. As I have tried to indicate, we can have no conception of what it is to ascribe states of consciousness to others through a process of interpretation unless we bring to their behaviour the template of our own consciousness. If we don't do this, the very notion of interpretation becomes impossible to grasp. Far from its being the case that the first-person perspective has somehow to be explained away, it is absolutely fundamental and irreducible. Of all the thoughts about the nature of the weather that are being entertained at this moment, one differs from all the others simply in being mine. That cannot be analysed away or reduced to something else.
How much does ‘the science of working memory and the cognitive sciences in general actually show us about the nature of mind? Far less than Carruthers claims. What it cannot do is to undermine the most obvious and immediate awareness we all have of our own decisions, emotions and reasonings. To suppose that it does is to remove, not only the privileged understanding we have of our own mental states, but also our ability to understand others.
