La Supervisión De La Práctica Socioeducativa

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Concepts and Definitions of Consciousness
D M Rosenthal, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA
ã 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Introduction
The term ‘consciousness’ is used in several ways: to describe a person or other creature as being awake and sentient, to describe a person or other creature as being ‘aware of ’ something, and to referto a property of mental states, such as perceiving, feeling, and thinking, that distinguishes those states from unconscious mental states. Distinguishing these different concepts of consciousness is crucial in evaluating the major theories of what it is for a state to be conscious. Among those are first-order theories, on which a mental state is conscious if being in that state results in one’sbeing conscious of something; global-workspace theories, on which a state is conscious if it’s widely available for mental processing; inner-sense theories, on which a state is conscious if one senses or perceives that state by way of a special inner faculty; and higher-orderthought theories, on which a state is conscious if one is aware of that state by having a thought about it. We will considerthe advantages and shortcomings of these theories and variants of them.

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Concepts of Consciousness (I)
The ubiquity of consciousness in human life and mental functioning makes it easy to overlook that the term ‘consciousness’ is used for three distinct phenomena. Though related in various ways, these phenomena are different, and distinguishing them is important bothconceptually and theoretically. The term ‘conscious’ is used most frequently to refer to the condition of people and other creatures when they are awake and responsive to sensory stimulation. A creature lacks consciousness in this first sense when it is asleep, anaesthetized, in a coma, and so forth. The main concern with this kind of consciousness is to explain in biological terms the difference betweencreatures’ conscious

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and unconscious conditions. Important progress has been made on that front, for example, by Giulio Tononi and colleagues and by Steven Laureys. Because consciousness of this sort is a property of creatures, it is convenient to refer to it as creature consciousness. A second important phenomenon we call consciousness is a creature’sbeing conscious, or aware, of something. There are two ways creatures are conscious of things. A person or other animal is conscious of an object by seeing, hearing, or touching it, or sensing it in some other way. But one is also conscious of something, even without sensing that thing, if one has a thought about it as being present to one, that is, a thought that represents that thing as being inone’s immediate environment. Because we describe this phenomenon by reference to a grammatical object, we may call it transitive consciousness. Explaining transitive consciousness consists in explaining what it is for a thought to be about something and what it is for a perception or sensation to be of something. A third phenomenon is more controversial in nature, and is the subject of much recentscientific and philosophical literature. We are conscious of various things in virtue of our having perceptions of them or thoughts about them. But those perceptions and thoughts can themselves be conscious or not conscious. Subliminal perception is an example of nonconscious perceiving, and it is widely accepted that many thoughts occur nonconsciously as well, that is, outside our stream ofconsciousness. Since this phenomenon is a property of mental states, rather than of creatures that are in those states, it is convenient to call it state consciousness. Mental states, such as thoughts, perceptions, and feelings, were until the latter part of the nineteenth century seldom described as being conscious or not conscious. Theorists before that time tended to regard mental states as...