Thought, Consciousness, and the Given

Abstract

How do we come to understand the nature of the thoughts that we and others have? And how do we come to have the conceptual resources needed to formulate such understanding? Many would say we understand the nature of thoughts simply by being subjectively aware of our own conscious thoughts. But it is unclear how consciousness could, on its own, provide the conceptual resources required for such understanding. An alternative account holds that we understand the nature of thoughts in a third-person way, by appeal to the speech acts that can express those thoughts. Such an account readily explains how we come to have the required conceptual resources. Wilfrid Sellars, in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and elsewhere, developed a view along those lines, appealing to considerations related to and in the spirit of the foregoing concerns. I'll describe and defend that view against two main objections. And I'll argue that any picture of consciousness on which it could reveal the nature of thoughts is independently untenable, and also that such a picture underlies what Sellars denounced as the Myth of the Given. In closing I explain how, given that we understand the nature of thoughts in such a third-person way, some of our thoughts come to be conscious.