Unconscious mental representation, Tim Crane (Department of Philosophy, CEU)
Ray Jackendoff has written illuminatingly about the relationship between conscious thought and linguistic representation, and how they are underpinned by unconscious mental representation. What he has called the ‘Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis’ states that conscious thinking is constituted by awareness of pronunciation of sentences and a ‘feeling of meaningfulness’; but that the main weight of meaning is borne by concepts, which are unconscious. I find Jackendoff’s claims about conscious thought plausible, but in this talk I will examine the idea that our conceptual representations are largely unconscious. This is something which is taken for granted by many cognitive scientists, but it is worth pausing for a while to figure out what it really means. What is the nature of these unconscious conceptual representations? Do we really have an explicit representation in our mind/brain for every concept we have? I will address these questions by comparing Jackendoff’s views with those of his former colleague, the late Daniel Dennett.