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the  actualist view that a mental state is conscious if and only if it is the subject of some
actual Higher-Order judgement. The general idea is that a state is conscious if the subject
is  aware of it, where this is understood as a matter of the subject forming some actual
Higher-Order judgement about it. Later I shall consider a contrasting style of
 dispositional HOT theory (cf. Carruthers 2000).
I shall assume that the Higher-Order judgements at issue here are first-person
phenomenal judgements made using phenomenal concepts, of the kind discussed at
length throughout this book. In this respect I shall be going beyond existing advocates of
HOT theories, given that they do not invoke the specific analysis of phenomenal
judgements that I have developed here. Still, there seems nothing in my analysis of
phenomenal judgements to render them unfit for a role in HOT theories; indeed, they
seem just the kind of Higher-Order judgements that HOT theories need.16
On a first quick reading, the Actualist HOT view looks as if it cannot but receive strong
support from our empirical methodology for studying consciousness. Whenever subjects
phenomenally report themselves to be conscious-as-such, they will therewith have made
a Higher-Order judgement about some phenomenal state, and whenever they
phenomenally deny that they are conscious-as-such, they will not have made any such
Higher-Order judgement. The presence of a Higher-Order judgement would thus seem to
correlate perfectly with subjects' reports about consciousness-as-such. What better
evidence could there be that the essential characteristic of phenomenal consciousness-as-
such is the presence of a Higher-Order judgement?
But once we probe a little bit deeper, things prove less straightforward. Despite first
appearances, Actualist HOT theories do not in fact enjoy any such perfect fit with the
empirical methodology. They face an awkward problem in relation to Higher-Order
memory judgements. To find a good fit with the empirical methodology, we will have to
wait until section 7.13 and  dispositional HOT theories, which avoid this problem about
memory judgements.
To see the problem, consider this case: I see a red pillar-box, form no Higher-Order
phenomenal judgement about this at the time, but then later imaginatively recall the
experience of seeing something red. This certainly seems initially possible. Moreover, in
such cases subjects will presumably later report, on the basis of their later memory
judgement,  Yes, I consciously saw something red earlier . So the standard methodology
will count the earlier experience as conscious: after all, the subject has issued a
phenomenal report to this effect, and so the experience will go into the database of cases
we use to investigate the material referent of our phenomenal concept of consciousness-
as-such.
On the other hand, it is not at all clear that Actualist HOT theorists will want to count this
earlier experience as conscious. If no introspective Higher-Order phenomenal judgement
was made at the time of the experience, then on their view the status of that experience as
conscious will presumably have to depend on the occurrence of the later Higher-Order
memory judgement. But this seems silly. How can an earlier state be rendered conscious
by some later act of memory? What if the act of memory hadn't occurred? Then
presumably the earlier state wouldn't have counted as conscious. But surely the status of
some state as conscious must be fixed by how things are when it occurs, not by whether
or not something happens later.
There are a couple of ways in which Actualist HOT theorists might avoid this awkward
backwards causation of conscious status. One possibility would be to deny that the earlier
state does qualify as conscious, since no Higher-Order judgement was present at the
earlier time. This has a kind of cogency. But it seems quite ad hoc in relation to the
standard methodology of consciousness research. This methodology regards memory and
introspection as on a par as sources of information about phenomenal consciousness.
Indeed, memory is rather more important than concurrent introspective judgements in
many psychological experiments. Thus, unprimed subjects are subject to some
manipulation, and then afterwards they are asked,  What, if anything, did you experience
then? To deny the
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reliability of these reports would undermine any amount of apparently sound research. Of
course, the reliability of phenomenal memories should not be taken for granted: there are
well-known confounding effects, such as the tendency to confabulation (cf. Nisbett and
Wilson 1977, Nisbett and Ross 1980, Wilson et al. 1981). But we can recognize this
danger without dismissing all phenomenal memories of non-introspected experiences. It
seems quite unmotivated to hold that no positive memory judgements can ever be
accurate about the phenomenal status of non-introspected earlier experiences, even when
there are no independent reasons to distrust these memories, simply because Actualist
HOT theories would not otherwise make sense. This looks like the theoretical tail
wagging the methodological dog.
The other way for Actualist HOT theorists to respond to the problem of experiences
which are not introspected but are later remembered would be to argue that there aren't in [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]