Perhaps the largest and most diverse class of mental states are those that seem to involve various relations to thoughts: these are the states that are typically described by verbs that take a sentential complement as their direct object. Thus, while the direct objects of verbs such as touch or push are standardly physical objects, the direct objects of verbs such as believe, hope, expect, and want are the propositions picked out by such a clause:
John believes that the stock market will fall.
John expects the stock market to fall.
Mary wants to be a doctor.
Note that sentential complements need not always be expressed by a “that” clause: the word that (in English) may often be deleted, and a “to” clause is often used instead of a “that” clause when the subject of the complement is the same as the subject of the entire sentence; Mary wants to be a doctor means the same as Mary desires that she herself be a doctor.
Philosophers have called such mental states “propositional attitudes” because they seem in one way or another to involve some attitude that an agent—a human being, an animal, or perhaps a machine—has to a thought or proposition, which again is often taken to be the meaning of the sentential complement that expresses it. When John expects the stock market to fall, he stands in a certain relation to the proposition or sentence-meaning “the stock market will fall”; and when Mary wants to be a doctor, she stands in a different relation to the proposition or sentence-meaning “Mary will be a doctor.”
Yet another ambiguity arises when one speaks about an attitude; one can be speaking about the state of a person—as in It was her desire to be a doctor that led her to move to Boston—or about the proposition toward which a person has an attitude—as in Her belief about the stock market was the same as his. “The same attitude” can mean the same relation to possibly different propositions—She has the same belief in his goodness as she does in his sincerity—or the same proposition in possibly different relations—She believed what he doubted.
Sensations and qualitative states
Many mental phenomena do not appear (at least initially) to be propositional attitudes. First and foremost are the conscious sensations that people seem to experience in most of their waking moments. Talk of sensations is also a bit loose, in a way that can be crucial, sometimes referring to, for example, particular pains, itches, or mental images (what philosophers call “phenomenal objects”), sometimes to pain or itchiness itself, and sometimes to the properties of mental images (e.g., red or elliptical). In cases in which an experience is taken to reflect some real phenomenon in the world, descriptions of the experience are often ambiguous between an external phenomenon (The rose is red) and an inner one (The mental image is red). It is this ambiguity that gives rise to the familiar puzzle about whether a tree falling in an uninhabited forest actually makes any sound: one might say that it makes a sound in the external sense but not in the internal sense; there is the usual external cause of the mental experience, but there is no one in whom the experience is actually brought about. Many philosophers think, however, that experience itself is always described externally—or, as they put it, “transparently.” When a person describes his experience, he will use words, such as red and oval, that describe not the experience (e.g., the image) itself but the worldly object the experience is of.
Emotions, moods, and traits
Moods and emotions—such as joy, sadness, fear, and anxiety—are hard to classify. It is not clear that they form a “natural kind” about which any interesting generalizations can be made. Many of them may simply be complex composites of intentional and phenomenal states. Thus, fear might be a combination of a certain thought (the thought that there is an abyss ahead), a certain desire (a desire not to fall), and certain sensations (those peculiar to anxiety). Character traits, such as honesty or humility, might be long-term dispositions to have certain emotions and attitudes and to act in certain ways in certain circumstances. Although there is a sizable literature on the nature of emotions, moods, and traits, they are not at the centre of most discussions in the philosophy of mind and so will not be considered further in this article.
Main problematic phenomena
Philosophical discussions about the mind have tended to focus upon three main phenomena: consciousness, rationality, and intentionality.
Consciousness
The word consciousness is used in a variety of ways that need to be distinguished. Sometimes the word means merely any human mental activity at all (as when one talks about the “history of consciousness”), and sometimes it means merely being awake (as in As the anesthetic wore off, the animal regained consciousness). The most philosophically troublesome usage concerns phenomena with which people seem to be “directly acquainted”—as the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) described them—each in his own case. Each person seems to have direct, immediate knowledge of his own conscious sensations and of the contents of his propositional attitudes—what he consciously thinks, believes, desires, hopes, fears, and so on. In common philosophical parlance, a person is said to have “incorrigible” (or uncorrectable) access to his own mental states. For many people, the existence of these conscious states in their own case is more obvious and undeniable than anything else in the world. Indeed, the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) regarded his immediate conscious thoughts as the basis of all of the rest of his knowledge. Views that emphasize this first-person immediacy of conscious states have consequently come to be called “Cartesian.”
It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to say much about consciousness that is not highly controversial. Initial efforts in the 19th century to approach psychology with the rigour of other experimental sciences led researchers to engage in careful introspection of their own mental states. Although there emerged some interesting results regarding the relation of certain sensory states to external stimulation—for example, laws proposed by Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87) that relate the apparent to the real amplitude of a sound—much of the research dissolved into vagaries and complexities of experience that varied greatly over different individuals and about which interesting generalizations were not forthcoming.
It is worth pausing over some of the difficulties of introspection and the consequent pitfalls of thinking of conscious processes as the central subject matter of psychology. While it can seem natural to think that all mental phenomena are accessible to consciousness, close attention to the full range of cases suggests otherwise. The Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was particularly adept at calling attention to the rich and subtle variety of ordinary mental states and to how little they lend themselves to the model of an introspectively observed object. In a typical passage from his later writings (Zettel, §§484–504), he asked:
Is it hair-splitting to say: —joy, enjoyment, delight, are not sensations? —Let us at least ask ourselves: How much analogy is there between delight and what we call “sensation”? “I feel great joy” —Where? —that sounds like nonsense. And yet one does say “I feel a joyful agitation in my breast.” —But why is joy not localized? Is it because it is distributed over the whole body? … Love is not a feeling. Love is put to the test, pain not. One does not say: “That was not true pain, or it would not have gone off so quickly.”
In a related vein, the American linguist Ray Jackendoff proposed that one is never directly conscious of abstract ideas, such as goodness and justice—they are not items in the stream of consciousness. At best, one is aware of the perceptual qualities one might associate with such ideas—for example, an image of someone acting in a kindly way. While it can seem that there is something right in such suggestions, it also seems to be immensely difficult to determine exactly what the truth might be on the basis of introspection alone.
In the late 20th century, the validity and reliability of introspection were subject to much experimental study. In an influential review of the literature on “self-attribution,” the American psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson discussed a wide range of experiments that showed that people are often demonstrably mistaken about their own psychological processes. For example, in problem-solving tasks, people are often sensitive to crucial clues of which they are quite unaware, and they often provide patently confabulated accounts of the problem-solving methods they actually employ. Nisbett and Wilson speculated that in many cases introspection may not involve privileged access to one’s own mental states but rather the imposition upon oneself of popular theories about what mental states a person in one’s situation is likely to have. This possibility should be considered seriously when evaluating many of the traditional claims about the alleged incorrigibility of people’s access to their own minds.
In any event, it is important to note that not all mental phenomena are conscious. Indeed, the existence of unconscious mental states has been recognized in the West since the time of the ancient Greeks. Obvious examples include the beliefs, long-range plans, and desires that a person is not consciously thinking about at a particular time, as well as things that have “slipped one’s mind,” though they must in some way still be there, since one can be reminded of them. Plato thought that the kinds of a priori reasoning typically used in mathematics and geometry involve the “recollection” (anamnesis) of temporarily forgotten thoughts from a previous life. Modern followers of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) have argued that a great many ordinary parapraxes (or “Freudian slips”) are the result of deeply repressed unconscious thoughts and desires. And, as noted above, many experiments reveal myriad ways in which people are unaware of, and sometimes demonstrably mistaken about, the character of their mental processes, which are therefore unconscious at least at the time they occur.
Partly out of frustration with introspectionism, psychologists during the first half of the 20th century tended to ignore consciousness entirely and instead study only “objective behaviour” (see below Radical behaviourism). In the last decades of the century, psychologists began to turn their attention once again to consciousness and introspection, but their methods differed radically from those of early introspectionists, in ways that can be understood against the background of other issues.
One might wonder what makes an unconscious mental process “mental” at all. If a person does not have immediate knowledge of it, why is it not merely part of the purely physical machinery of the brain? Why bring in mentality at all? Accessibility to consciousness, however, is not the only criterion for determining whether a given state or process is mental. One alternative criterion is that mental states and processes enter into the rationality of the systems of which they are a part.
