Thoughts, Processive Character and the Stream of Consciousness. (forthcoming in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies)

Transcription

1 Thoughts, Processive Character and the Stream of Consciousness (forthcoming in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies) Marta Jorba University of Girona Abstract. This paper explores the relation of thought and the stream of consciousness in the light of an ontological argument raised against cognitive phenomenology views. I argue that the ontological argument relies on a notion of processive character that does not stand up to scrutiny and therefore it is insufficient for the argument to go through. I then analyse two more views on what processive character means and argue that the process-part account best captures the intuition behind the argument. Following this view, I reconstruct the ontological argument and argue that it succeeds in establishing that some mental episodes like judging, understanding and occurrent states of thought do not enter into the stream but fails to exclude episodes like entertaining. Contrary to what it might seem, this conclusion fits well with cognitive phenomenology views, given that, as I show, there is a way for non-processive mental episodes to be fundamentally related to processive ones, such that they cannot be excluded from the phenomenal domain. This paper sheds light on the nature of different kinds of thoughts and questions a fundamental asymmetry between the perceptual and the cognitive domain when it comes to their ontology and temporal character. 1. Introduction When we consciously think a thought or entertain a certain proposition, we seem to undergo a certain experience, in the Nagelian sense that there is something it is like to be thinking, and thus we find some phenomenal character associated with the episode of consciously thinking. The mere existence of an experience of consciously thinking is not very problematic in itself, but controversy arises with respect to its nature (Bayne and Montague 2011; Smithies 2013). A question we need to answer is whether this phenomenal character is specifically cognitive or it is reducible to more familiar kinds of phenomenology, such as the sensory or emotional. The first position is defended by cognitive phenomenology views (Strawson 1994/2010; Siewert 1998, 2011; Horgan and Tienson 2002; Pitt, 2004, 2009; Chudnoff 2011; Smith 2011; Kriegel 2015; Jorba and Vicente 2014; Jorba forthcoming, among others), whereas the second position is held by deniers of cognitive phenomenology (Carruthers and Veillet 2011; Jackendoff 1987; Lormand 1996; Prinz 2011; Robinson 2005; Tye and Wright 2011, among others). The main argument examined in this paper lies within the kinds of arguments that first 1

2 state some asymmetry between cognition and perception and then draws some conclusions regarding the phenomenology of cognition. 1 In particular, the asymmetry in this case appears with respect to the ontology of mental episodes and their temporal structure. Tye and Wright (2011) argue that (i) anything that figures in the stream of consciousness must unfold over time, must be processive, (ii) that thoughts do not unfold over time, so, they conclude, thoughts are not elements in the stream of consciousness 2. Because of the ontological requirement they place on mental episodes, we will call this argument the ontological argument from now on. This conclusion seems to go against the intuitive and common view that, if anything figures in our stream of consciousness, then thoughts seem clear candidates, since our daily conscious life seems to be full of thinking episodes together with perceptual experiences, emotional episodes, and so on. Obviously, Tye and Wright do not want to deny that we are not conscious of our thoughts. The view is rather that thoughts enter into the stream by way of their sensory accompaniments, like inner speech and images, but not per se, that is, in virtue of being thoughts. Several things stand in need of clarification: what sense of thought are we talking about? Does the conclusion apply to all kinds of thought? And what does processive character exactly mean? Before presenting the argument in more detail, let me say that its conclusion has important consequences. One of them is that it gives an answer to the question of the reach of phenomenal consciousness (Bayne 2009). The reach of phenomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of which kinds of mental episodes 3 are phenomenally conscious and which are not. Given that this reading includes many reductionist positions one can maintain that there is phenomenal character of thought but that it is reducible to some other kind of phenomenology it can be illuminating to define the question of the reach as the question of which mental episodes are phenomenally conscious per se, that is, possess a specific phenomenology, and which not. As general views regarding the reach question, we can distinguish between expansionist and restrictivist views (Prinz 2011). These labels normally include different views and characterizations, 4 but in a broad way, restrictivists limit the extension of phenomenally conscious states to sensory and perceptual experiences, or even the emotional domain, while expansionists tend to include other kinds of mental states (such as high level perceptual states, emotions and affects, etc.) as phenomenally conscious by themselves, and thus they normally also include thought Tye and Wright s argument, thus, supports a restrictivist view of a reductionist sort, given that it restricts phenomenal character to just some experiences (mainly sensorial and emotional) and reduces the phenomenology of 1 See also Georgalis (2005), Martin (manuscript). 2 The expression stream of consciousness is famously coined by James (1890) 2007, who curiously enough also calls it stream of thought. 3 Lacking a better terminological choice, I will use the term episode as an umbrella notion neutral to the ontological categories of state, process, event, achievement, etc., without presupposing any specific temporal character to it. 4 And terminology varies a lot here: Bayne (2009) labels the positions as adopted by phenomenal conservatives versus phenomenal liberals, Kriegel (2015) prefers phenomenological inflationists versus phenomenological deflationists, and Siewert (2011), talks about inclusivism versus exclusivism. 2

3 thought to its non-cognitive accompaniments. Apart from the importance of the claim that a thought per se cannot possess phenomenal character for cognitive phenomenology debates, it is worth noticing that this argument has other philosophical implications. On the one hand, it puts forward a view on the possible constituents of the stream of consciousness, relying on an account of processive character as unfolding mental episodes and perduring episodes, as we will see. The appeal to the perdurance/endurance distinction is of theoretical import and problematic on its own (Sider 2001; McKinnon 2002) and here its application to consciousness will be discussed, thus constituting the guiding point of the paper. On the other hand, the argument also has implications for the accounts on the nature of conscious thought that try to elucidate its different kinds and the relation between them. My aim in this paper is thus to examine the relation of thought and the stream of consciousness with respect to its ontological status. This is motivated by Tye and Wright s (2011) ontological argument against cognitive phenomenology, with the implications that this discussion has when we apply to consciousness different theories of persistence over time and also for accounts on the nature of thought and its different kinds. The argument relies on two main notions, processive character and thought. I first examine the notion of processive character at work and argue that it does not stand up to scrutiny and therefore it is insufficient for the argument to go through. I then analyse three more views on what processive character is and argue that the process-part account best captures the intuition behind the argument. Following this view, I reconstruct the ontological argument and draw some consequences for cognitive phenomenology views. I claim that the ontological argument succeeds in establishing that some mental episodes like judging and occurrent states of thought do not enter into the stream but fails to exclude episodes like entertaining. This reasoning and conclusion can be seen as a development of the general suggestion of opposition to Tye and Wright s argument that was anticipated in Bayne and Montague (2011), when they claimed that even if the stream of consciousness is limited to acts and processes, it by no means follows that there can be no phenomenology of thought, for at least some thoughts do unfold over time (Bayne and Montague 2011, 3). 5 Contrary to what it might seem, the conclusion that some kinds of thought but not others can be in the stream fits well with cognitive phenomenology views, given that there is also a way for judging and occurrent states to be included in the phenomenal domain, as I will argue. In conclusion, this paper sheds light on the ontological aspects of thoughts and its relation to the stream of consciousness and questions a fundamental asymmetry between the perceptual and the cognitive domain when it comes to their ontology and temporal character. 2. The ontological argument Let s begin by presenting and examining in detail the argument that can be extracted from Tye 5 As it will become clear I differ from their interpretation, which states that, according to Tye and Wright s argument, acts can also enter into the stream. 3

4 and Wright (2011): (i) Anything that figures in the stream of consciousness must unfold over time; it must be processive. (ii) Thoughts do not unfold over time; thoughts are not processive. (Conclusion) Thoughts are not elements in the stream of consciousness. According to this view, it is only accompanying aspects of thoughts inner speech, subvocalizations, etc. which unfold over time, so it is only in virtue of these accompaniments that thought can be in the stream of consciousness. It is an important assumption of the argument that for something to have phenomenal character it must be in the stream of consciousness. This is a claim they are endorsing, as far as it is precisely the assumption of this connection that allows Tye and Wright to deny the existence of cognitive phenomenology, once they have concluded that thoughts do not and cannot enter into the stream of consciousness. Given that thoughts cannot enter into the stream, they cannot be the bearers of the relevant phenomenology: Thoughts, given that they lack the relevant processive features, simply aren t suited to be the bearers of the relevant phenomenology (Tye and Wright 2011, 343). Without this assumption the ontological argument would not be an argument against cognitive phenomenology but would just deny that thoughts enter into the stream, thereby leaving open whether they can have their phenomenal character by other means, without being in the stream 6. In connection with this, in the last section I will argue that there are various ways of being in the stream and so to be included in the phenomenal domain. The first premise expresses a condition for being part of the stream of consciousness, which is to unfold over time or to be processive. The second premise, just denies that thought meets the condition expressed by the first premise. Two important notions lie at the core of the argument: thought and processive character. Those are the notions which we need to clarify if we want to assess the argument. First, note that talking of thought is a rather vague way of stating it, for what kinds of mental episodes are they referring to? We can distinguish between judging that p, merely thinking that p, believing that p, considering that p, etc., and we might have important differences between them in relation to their processive character. Second, we need to know what processive means, for the processive character is what a certain mental episode must have in order to be included in the stream of consciousness. Let s begin with the second one. They cash out the processive character that constituents of the stream must have by appealing to the traditional distinction of ways in which an object persists in time, perdurance and endurance. What tells apart perdurance and endurance is the having of temporal parts: perduring episodes have temporal parts and enduring ones are wholly present at each instant at which they exist (Lewis 1986, 202ff). Temporal parts are said to be 6 I find such a path a conceptual possibility, but it would amount to a view in which we would have phenomenal mental episodes in the stream of consciousness and phenomenal mental episodes outside the stream of consciousness, and we do not seem to have any independent reason to hold such dichotomy, so I would proceed for now by assuming that for something to have phenomenal character, it must be in the stream of consciousness. 4

5 distinct parts at each moment of existence. Processive, unfolding episodes would then be those that perdure; and non-processive, non-unfolding episodes, would be those that endure. The distinction between perduring and enduring can be applied to mental episodes via the verb predicates classified by Vendler (1957). Vendler differentiates between episodes that different verb predicates pick out: states, achievements, activities and accomplishments. On the one hand, activities and accomplishments are processive, unfolding mental episodes, for which it makes sense to ask what are you doing? For activities, such as walking, every part is a case of performing the activity, as they progress in time in a homogeneous way. In contrast, accomplishments, such as drawing a circle, proceed toward a terminus that is logically necessary for the episode to be what it is. On the other hand, states and achievements are nonprocessive, non-unfolding. States, such as holding a belief, obtain for a period of time. Achievements, such as noticing something or recognizing someone, are instantaneous changes of states of which it makes no sense to say that they are something you are doing. 7 The second premise of the argument claims that thought does not meet the processive requirement necessary to be part of the stream. An initial claim is that thoughts endure and do not perdure, which means that once one begins to think that claret is delightful, one has already achieved the thinking of it (Tye and Wright 2011, 342). The thought is not grasped by first grasping the noun claret, then the copula is and finally delightful in a processive manner. Thinking the thought does not unfold over time in the way the string of sounds in a piece of music unfolds. Tye and Wright thus claim that the whole thought arrives at once (Tye and Wright 2011, 342). In their way of presenting the case, they seem to be claiming two main things: that to-think-that episodes endure ( once one begins to think that ), so they are not processive and that grasping the thought is also non-processive. Given their suggestion that thinking-that is an enduring episode, and enduring episodes are normally states, we have a reason to think that they are pointing to a kind of mental episode that is an occurrent and enduring state, referred to by the think-that expression (more on this notion below). But the scope of the argument is not restricted to thought states and graspings, as it can be also extended to the case of judging. This can be seen if go back to Geach s (1957) similar argument for the case of judging, a view Tye and Wright explicitly rely on. Geach proceeds on the assumption that acts of judging are individuated by their propositional content, that content can have a structure (some parts or elements), but these parts are not temporal parts of the mental act they individuate. In a reconstruction of this argument by Soteriou (2007, 545), he concludes that: the content of an aspect of the mind that is used to individuate that aspect of mind is neutral on the question of whether the aspect of the mind so individuated is an achievement, state, activity, or accomplishment even if that content concerns, say, an accomplishment or an activity etc. In Geach s view, then, judgments come out as not having temporal parts, precisely because they are individuated by their content and contents are neutral with respect to the perduring/enduring distinction. One could challenge the claim that judging 7 The difference between an achievement and an accomplishment is that the former is an instantaneous change in a state, and the second has an internal structure with temporal parts, but with a terminus. 5

6 acts are individuated solely by their contents, but what interests us here is that Geach does not attribute temporal parts to the act of judgment either: To judge that p, picks out an achievement, literally associated with an event without duration (instantaneous), according to Soteriou s reconstruction of Geach s argument (2009, 240) 8. The idea behind this claim would be that judging is an achievement on the basis of the impossibility of stopping the process halfway through an act of judging; which in contrast is possible with accomplishments such as drawing a circle. Whereas in the case of drawing a circle, if you stop the process halfway you have a case of partially drawing a circle; in the case of judging, if you stop the process halfway through you do not have a case of partially judging. It is worth mentioning that Geach also refuses the idea that judging is an activity, given that conditions for activities are not satisfied: if someone asks you what you have been doing all this time, the answer would admit saying imagining (activity), for example, but not judging (Geach 1969). As Soteriou (2007, 546) also states, unlike judging that p, imagining that p is something one can intend to do, and it is an activity one can intend to engage in for a period of time. Moreover, contrary to what happens with activities, every part of judging is not a case of performing the judging itself. Also, it should be noted that sometimes to judge also refers to a state of belief ( S judges that p ) 9, and so it can be considered a mental episode that endures, according to the present reasoning. As a result of this analysis, thus, we have that states (to think-that), achievements (grasping a thought and judging) are not processive, and following the argument, cannot enter into the stream of consciousness. We now go back to the notion of thought involved in the ontological argument. I think their treatment of thought stands in need of clarification and, once it is further specified, some results turn out to be problematic for the argument. On the one hand, we have mental episodes of grasping a certain proposition, for example, that claret is delightful. Probably grasping is similar to the case of understanding as a mental act, as we can take them for interchangeable categories in a folk-psychology analysis of these notions. Apart from grasping mental episodes, notice that they claim once one begins to think that claret is delightful (my emphasis). I suggested that this expression may be referring to enduring occurrent states of thought. They are occurrent because they are something that is happening at the moment but, as they endure, they are states. The expression occurrent states may sound surprising because happenings are not normally states. As it will become clear later, I am using this expression here to denote states the obtaining of which depends on the occurrence of some event (see also Soteriou 8 See Chudnoff (2015, 93ff) for an argumentation against Soteriou s view on thought in the stream of consciousness based on doubting Soteriou s view that what makes a thought conscious is a higher-order representation of it. Chudnoff (2015, 97-99) also points to possible problems in Tye and Wright s argument on the basis of the idea that what may hold for thinking that p may not hold for holding the thought that p in mind, as the latter is a more complicated state or event. In his reconstruction of Tye and Wright s argument, he argues that there is a tension between the premise that (a) if a thought persists, it does so by enduring, like a state and (b) some phenomenally conscious thoughts persist, and do so processively. (This last premise has sense with the additional one that this processive character can only come from a sensory vehicle that persists). However, as Chudnoff points out, he only emphasizes some options to resist Tye and Wright s argument, without further development. 9 This is the sense in which the act of judging can be said to have a habitual sense, even though it remains an achievement (García-Carpintero 2013). 6

7 [2009]). One question to ask then is: why do we need such a category over and above occurrent judging and states of standing beliefs? When talking about mental states of the cognitive sort, we normally refer to beliefs, which are states that point to the attitude we have when we take something to be the case. But the states of thought in question differ from beliefs in that some beliefs are standing, not occurrent, while all states of thought are occurrent and, moreover, states of thought do not presuppose the doxastic aspect of beliefs, namely, the fact that a belief implies taking the believed proposition to be true. Thus, occurrent states of thought cannot be the same as standing beliefs. Can they be equated to occurrent judging, though? Does Tye and Wright s phrase once one begins to think that claret is delightful. suggest that they are considering thought an act of judgment? Acts of judgments are occurrent mental episodes that are achievements and, as beliefs, they contain an element of commitment to the truth of the proposition judged. This doxastic element contained in judging is not clearly manifest in the case of the thinking-that, as we have already seen. 10 What they seem to have in mind is, then, a mental episode that is doxastic neutral, that is, it does not imply commitment to its truth (contrary to judging and believing) but is also occurrent (contrary to standing beliefs, which are dispositional states). This seems to generate the need for the category of occurrent states of thought, given that they are neither acts of judgments nor beliefs. To sum up, for Tye and Wright s (2011) thinking-that or an occurrent state of thought is something that endures: it does not have temporal parts, and grasping a thought is an achievement. What really unfolds are the accompaniments or phenomenal goings-on of thought, namely, the quintet of phenomenological episodes: Items that unfold in the right sort of way to be elements of the stream of consciousness are items belonging to the categories of our earlier quintet (Tye and Wright 2011, 342, footnote 19). Elements of the quintet include: perceptual experiences, conscious bodily sensations, imagistic experiences of a non-linguistic sort, conscious linguistic imagery and primary emotional experiences (Tye and Wright 2011, 329) 11. In a similar vein, for Geach, the act of judgment does not have temporal parts, as it is an achievement and the content of the act of judgment is neutral with respect to the unfolding over time question. Thus, the general view we are confronted with is that neither the act of judgment (achievement), nor grasping a thought (achievement) nor occurrent thought (state) unfold over time by themselves (without having an accompanying processive episode of the phenomenal quintet) and so they do not satisfy the condition required to be in the stream of consciousness and to be the bearers of the relevant phenomenal character. 3. Processive character as temporal parts 10 I diverge from Kriegel (2013) in his construal of thinking-that episodes as those that are doxastically committed in contrast with thinking-of mental episodes. It seems to me that thinking-that episodes do not necessarily have to be doxastic committed, as it is often an expression used in analogy to merely thinking-that, thereby expressing no commitment to the truth of the proposition thought. 11 Tye and Wright also defend a restrictivist view on cognitive phenomenology that also reduces the phenomenal character of thinking to the phenomenal character of (one or more) states of the quintet of phenomenal states. For an argumentation against this reductive strategy, see Jorba (manuscript). 7

8 One first sort of resistance to Tye and Wright s argument is their characterization of processive character by appealing to temporal parts. Is the very distinction between perdurance and endurance that clear, in the first place? The expression of temporal parts has been used in analogy with spatial parts. From the idea that an object can be said to be extended in space if it occupies a certain region, an object can be said to persist through time by occupying an interval of time. When an object is conceived by having these temporal parts that occupy its constituent moments, the object is said to perdure, as we have seen. Preceding and succeeding portions are the analogues of spatial parts (right/left, north/south, etc.) in the spatial domain. The introduction of enduring ways of persisting through time was motivated by the inadequacy of perdurance as applied to the self (Hofweber and Velleman 2011): to think that a given moment one is not all there seems a rather strange result. The self seems to persist by being totally present at each moment of one s life. Thus, to be enduring is to be wholly present at each moment of existence, which means that the whole (and not a part of the) object fits every sub-interval of the object s existence, so that the object is indivisible and has no temporal parts. But the enduring way of persisting through time, which is the one Tye and Wright attribute to thought, seems incoherent (Hofweber and Velleman 2011). What makes the notion of endurance incoherent is the interdependence ( ) between the concepts whole and part as applied to extended entities on the one hand and their temporal or spatial extents on the other. If one can conceive of an object s extent as divisible into sub-extents that is, into sub-regions of space or subintervals of time then one can conceive of the object itself as divisible into parts filling those subextents (Hofweber and Velleman 2011, 39). The idea is that if we can find a certain extension in an entity that is divisible into sub-extents, then it has parts. Applied to time, enduring states also have temporal parts. This incoherency, according to Hofweber and Velleman, is rooted in the very analogy with the spatial dimension. For the entirely present definition is something that stands for space but not for time, given that in space we have another dimension, time, along which the object changes its position in space (Hofweber and Velleman 2011, 39). But movement in time cannot be understood in these terms, since the dimension along which the object changes in position is the same as the one in which its position is being changed. I think Hofweber and Velleman s critique is a general one and so can be applied to the notion Tye and Wright are working with. The first doubt against their argument I have is that if processive means having temporal parts, then enduring states also come out as being processive, for we only need to have a certain temporal extension in which subdivisions can be made. And this is what seems to happen with states of thought like claret is delightful, which have a certain temporal extension and so can be said to have temporal parts. Following Hofweber and Velleman s critique of incoherency in regard to enduring episodes, the enduring character of achievements like acts of judgment and grasping a thought is also undermined: if we can attribute a certain temporal duration, being as minimal as it is, then we have a temporally extended event within which we can distinguish temporal parts. Thus, the very distinction between perduring and enduring Tye and Wright are embracing falls apart. Following this reasoning, if achievements also have temporal parts, given that they are 8

9 considered to be instantaneous events, what then distinguishes them from activities that don t go on for very long? This points to a problematic aspect for their account under the reading offered here and after applying Hofweber and Velleman s critique of endurance: appealing to temporal parts would not allow them to distinguish between enduring and perduring episodes in thought and achievements wouldn t be distinguishable from short activities. One could try to overcome such a problem by saying that the simple fact of being extended in time as occupying a certain time period is not the same as having temporal parts. Temporal parts, in contrast, requires that the object or element under consideration has different parts in different time stretches or time instants, so that it is satisfied by strings of inner speech, for example, or by a certain melody, but not by states of thought or achievements such as acts of judgment or graspings. But then the possible rejoinder here is to say that still enduring states or achievements have distinct parts at different times just in virtue of being part 1 at t1, part 2 at t2, and so on, that is, unless a more substantive account of what a distinct part is, the parts of enduring states at different times are distinct parts, at least because they have a different time index. One option at this point would be to exclude from the definition of what distinct parts are the feature of time, and so to block this objection, but we need to justify that this is not just an ad hoc addition. Another option that should be considered is that the difference between enduring and perduring episodes can be seen in another way: enduring episodes as those that exist at numerically different times and they are qualitatively the same at those different times, while perduring episodes would involve some qualitative changes of the episode at these different times. Arguably, this would apply to thought (as enduring) in contrast to perceptual experiences, for instance (as perduring). However, if we take the case of thought and a melody, as a paradigmatic perceptual item, it is not clear why the latter but not the former perdures in time, precisely because a melody can also be qualitatively the same during a certain period of time (a certain note), thus being equal in this respect to the thought. Tye and Wright seem to be aware of the objection I am considering when they say that the duration of a certain thought, the fact that we can have a thought for a period of time, just as we can feel a pain in our leg for some time, can lead to the appearance that thoughts are processive. So they regard a thought s duration in time as an apparent process. Why, though, is this process just apparent? In Tye and Wright s paper there is no argument that shows that temporal duration does not imply temporal parts (as they understand them), and it seems that, following their view, there is no reason to deny such entailment. In sum: if it could be argued that everything temporally extended possesses temporal parts in virtue of occupying different times, then Tye and Wright s appeal to temporal parts breaks down and we need a more substantive account to be able to distinguish different kinds of cognitive episodes from other elements in the stream, given that states and achievements would come out as episodes with temporal parts, which would be a problematic result for their own argument. Before concluding this section, it is also worth noting that Tye and Wright also support their ontological argument by appealing to introspection, in the following way: perhaps it will be replied that even though thoughts do not have a processive phenomenology, still they have a 9

10 phenomenology of their own that is non-processive. But even if this is coherent ( ) the fact is that when we introspect, we find no such phenomenology: the phenomenology available to us unfolds in the way explained above (Tye and Wright 2011, 343). This claim has to be understood in the wider context of their rejection of the phenomenology of thought thesis as endorsed by Pitt (2004), that is, the view that conscious thought has a proprietary, distinctive and individuative phenomenology. 12 But leaving aside Pitt s distinctive and individuative claims, they also oppose the weaker view that just defends the proprietariness or specificity of the phenomenal character of conscious thought, the view that we are calling cognitive phenomenology here. Besides stating that introspection does not support the cognitive phenomenology claim, they add that defenders of such a view must be mislocating the relevant phenomenal character to the thought itself when it should be kept in the (non-cognitive) experience 13 of thinking the thought. Even if this seems to support their argument, I think that their introspective claim here cannot be assessed, given that, as I have argued, they do not provide a clear conception of what processive character amounts to and, if we take the reference to temporal parts, then all temporal extended mental episodes do seem to have temporal parts, also introspectively. Now we have seen the problems with this account and that the acceptance of it would render thoughts as having temporal parts, thus invalidating the argument. However, we can consider other ways of cashing out processive that maintain the intuition of a certain dependence of the stream of consciousness on time without being that problematic. This is the task of the next section. 4. Other accounts of processive Given that we have relied on Hofweber and Velleman in their critique of the conception of endurance, we should note that they do not dispense with the distinction of perdurance and endurance but rather provide a way of understanding the terms that does not have the problems they raise against the traditional conception. Their proposal is to understand endurance, and so the wholly present feature as an object's identity being fully determined at every time at which it exists. An object is wholly present at a time if its identity is determined at that time, that is, if it is determined at that time which the object is (Hofweber and Velleman 2011, 19) For Pitt (2004), a proprietary or specific phenomenal character is a type phenomenology for thought that is different from the phenomenal character of perceptions, imaginations or emotions. The distinctiveness claim means that this specific phenomenology is not shared by all mental states within the same genus, i.e., thought, but rather that it is different for the thought that p and the thought that q. The individuative claim states that this phenomenal character is relevant for picking out the thought as the thought it is. 13 I have added non-cognitive in front of experience because it is implied in their view. 14 A certain object is fully determined at a time if it supervenes on all the properties that are intrinsic to that time. Intrinsic to a time, they say, is a limiting case of being local to a region of spacetime, and a property p is local to a region r iff some thing o in r has p, and o would still have p as long as all things within r have the same intrinsic properties, even if things outside r had different intrinsic properties. And an intrinsic property is one an object can have no matter what properties other objects have (Hofweber and Velleman 2011, 19). 10

11 This is not the place here to assess the details of this account, but rather to ask ourselves whether this approach to the distinction is of any help in the project of determining the temporal character of thought in relation to the stream of consciousness. The question we must ask then is whether any form of thought can be said to endure in this understanding of being fully determined at a certain time. Whatever the best account of mental episodes determination is, we do not need to answer this question to see that this approach may be inadequate. And the reason is the following: this application would result in the fact that those fully determined mental episodes would not be or enter in the stream of consciousness, whereas those not fully determined would be within it. Our stream of consciousness would then be composed or constituted by a set of not fully determined mental episodes, leaving the domain of fully a determined one as an unconscious one, and this would be systematically so. I consider this result of the account a rather bizarre view on the stream of consciousness, given that we do not seem to find any independent reason (outside the speculative application we have done) to place the object s determination as the central feature in virtue of which some mental episodes enter or not into the stream. To go in this direction, it seems to me, is to lose track of the original intention that lies behind the idea that constituents of the stream must be processive, and so misleadingly apply this distinction to the experiential domain. What seems to be missing in the accounts explored is a certain feature of the stream of consciousness that we have to consider, namely, the fact that it is not only something that continues in existence from time to time in a flux and is essentially occurrent and extended in time, but also at each instant is occurrently renewed: Even when experience does not change in type or content it still changes in another respect: it is constantly renewed, a new sector of itself is then and there taking place. This is because experiences are events or processes, and each momentary new element of any given experience is a further happening or occurrence (by contrast with (say) the steady continuation through time of one s knowing that 9 and 5 make 14) (O Shaugnessy 2000, 42) This occurrently renewed character was perhaps the underlying intuition that the temporal part view tried to explain, but as we saw, it is not without problems. One way to account for this constantly renewing character of the stream feature is to say that what characterises the processive character of the constituents of the stream is that they are also made of process-parts, in contrast with state-parts and transitions within. This is explained by O Shaugnessy s (2000) ontology of the stream of consciousness: the constituents of the stream of consciousness are not analysable in terms of mental states and events that are simply changes to and in states. Experiential mental episodes, in contrast to other non-experiential mental process, are processive in a way that their constituents cannot be singled out other than by appealing to process-parts, that is, they do not have state-parts as constituents, like in other non-experiential processes like physical movement. If the process of moving is constituted by state-parts we have: a time-interval, position-values and continuity of temporally adjacent position-values. If the process of moving is constituted by process-parts, we have a timeinterval, a moving process going on at each instant of that interval, and a continuity of spatiotemporally adjacent process-parts. Both analyses are correct for physical processes, he 11

12 claims. 15 But when it comes to experiential episodes, he argues that experiential processes differ fundamentally from non-experiential processes (like physical movement) in that if we were to freeze those processes, the experiential but not the non-experiential would disappear as such. What is unique in the experiential process in general is that you cannot provide a state-part if you freeze the flux of experience: in a process of listening, for example, you cannot provide constituting states that lie at the heart of such an occurrence. This view seems to accommodate well the intuition of the stream of consciousness in relation to time and to provide a way to distinguish between mental episodes that constitute the stream and those that not. Processive mental episodes would be those events and processes with process-parts, like hearing a melody, and non-processive mental episodes 16 would be those episodes that do not have process-parts, paradigmatically, belief or knowledge. Defining a mental episode as processive by appealing to process-part seems at least, circular, in the sense that we do not seem to have an independent grasp of process-part and state-part as to be able to understand the distinction. Am I simply assuming a prior grasp of the distinction, then? This would certainly be a problem for this proposal, but I think this is just partially the case. If we take the process-part account as a positive definition or processive, this is certainly circular and doesn t help elucidate the notion. But the account is not circular if we take it as involving other notions that can serve as a criterion or as a test for distinguishing processive episodes. In this sense, we could mention the idea of the account that says that every part of what is being considered is a case of performing the activity, as it is normally used to characterise activities. This would avoid the circularity concern. Moreover, the negative characterization can be useful for grasping the sense of processive character : not being constituted by states and changes to states. This can be known through O Shaugnessy s test of the freezing : if you were to freeze the process, there would be no state lying at the heart of it. If we have an independent grasp of what a state is, as we have, then this should not be problematic. Therefore, I think we should not take the process-part account as a definition of processive character but rather as providing a negative criterion and a useful test for recognizing experiential processive episodes. 5. The case of entertaining Given the above account of what processive character amounts to, now we can connect it to the original ontological argument. Remember that the requirement for an element of the mind to enter into the stream is that it is processive and, the original argument claims, thoughts are not processive and so they are excluded from the stream. According to the processpart notion of processive character, does the reconstructed argument go through? Can we find kinds of thoughts that meet such requirement? It seems that we can answer this question 15 He states that constituting a process like moving out of states like being at a position in space at a particular time, is not in competition with constituting such a process out of parts the same kind as itself (O Shaughnessy 2000, 45). 16 Following the distinction we have been using we might call them enduring episodes. 12

13 affirmatively: mental episodes of entertaining a certain proposition are processive in the way specified. In a mental episode of entertaining, we do not find state-parts as constituents of the mental episode, but rather all its parts are also processive, are process-parts. If we freeze the flux of experience, the mental episode of entertaining disappears as such, for we cannot find states as parts of this mental episode. What is entertaining, though? The functionalist orthodoxy in the account of cognitive attitudes normally posits beliefs and desires as the two necessary kinds of mental attitudes to which all others can be reduced to. But entertaining can be seen as a third kind of mental episode that is distinguished from the two main psychological attitudes of belief and desire by not exhibiting a direction of fit with respect to the proposition entertained, neither from world to mind, like belief, nor from mind to world, like desire. In effect, the mere entertaining of a certain proposition does not imply wanting it or not to be the case, nor believing or not believing it. This characterisation has been recently defended by Kriegel (2013) but goes back at least until Brentano ([1874] 1973) and establishes entertaining as a third kind of mental episodes not reducible to combinations of beliefs and desires. For Kriegel, the attitude of entertaining may be accompanied by beliefs or desires but does not contain beliefs or desires as components and, his argument goes, since belief and desire bear the fit direction to the world, a mental state that does not bear it cannot be analised in terms of them (Kriegel 2013, 4). Entertaining a thought is, thus, having a thought or playfully calling to mind a thought, similar to what Frege calls the mere apprehension of a thought (Frege [1892] 1980) and B.E. Johnson (1921, 4), Braihtwaite (1932, 130) and Price (1969, ) call acts of merely entertaining a thought. My view does not imply, however, that entertaining is not an action, that you do not do anything when you entertain a thought, because this characterisation is so far neutral with respect to this active component 17. There is another kind of mental episode in the vicinity of entertaining that has an interesting connection to the processive character, the episode of deliberating. Deliberation is a process by which we come to reach certain conclusions that are adopted as beliefs and judgements, or at least it has this attitude of being directed to this goal. In order to individuate the whole episode of deliberation, one needs to refer to a process by which we reach certain conclusions. The whole conjunction of the propositional contents that are entertained does not suffice to individuate the mental episode as one of deliberation, so we need to posit certain transitions between mental states; thus making the case for processive thought. The idea of 17 For the rejection of the idea that entertaining is an action and for a characterisation of it as belonging to the same metaphysical and epistemic category of perception, see Hunter (2003). It should be noted that there are similar mental episodes to entertaining, like considering, contemplating or deliberating, which can be easily confused with entertaining. We can follow Kriegel s (2013) suggestion that considering is the engaged mode of entertaining, whereas contemplating is the disengaged mode of entertaining. The difference is whether one is entertaining something with the aim of knowing whether one should believe it or not (considering) or with the aim of curiosity, for some pleasure, etc. (contemplating). Even if they are different kinds of entertaining, such distinction is neutral with respect to the processive character, as there is no connection between the modes of engaged or disengaged entertaining and its processive character. There is also another distinction in the vicinity: entertaining can be distinguished from merely entertaining in the sense that some principles hold for the generic notion but not for the specific one (Künne 2013), but this distinction does not have implications for our present purposes. 13

14 positing transitions is analogous to the case of rationalizing overt bodily action: to rationalize overt bodily actions, we do not only attribute mental states but relations, changes and transitions between them (Soteriou 2009, 235). If a deliberation is something like this, then we cannot consider it as part of the stream of consciousness, because its constituents are states and transitions between them, something excluded from the O Shaugnessy s ontological claim we have been adopting. The main difference between entertaining and deliberating here is that the first is a simple mental episode, while the second is a complex mental episode, that is, made up of other episodes. By simple I do not mean that it does not have parts, as I am claiming that entertaining has process-parts, but rather that deliberating has to be understood in relational terms. Deliberating is more complex than entertaining because it can have episodes of entertaining as parts of it, while the reverse does not hold, that is, entertaining cannot be construed as having episodes of deliberation as parts of the process. So we do not need to take such a distinction as one attaching mental episodes per se, but as one holding between episodes in a relational way. The complex character of deliberation (an episode made up of states and transitions and changes between them) is what makes it difficult for this process to be a constituent of the stream of consciousness. If talking of entertaining thus makes sense as a way to pick out a specific kind of mental episode, then I think we have localised a place to look for the processive character required for being a constituent of the stream of consciousness. And importantly here, entertaining may be accompanied by inner speech or mental images, but the episode as such does not reduce to those trains and images, they alone do not suffice to explain what it is to entertain a certain proposition. This is something both proponents and deniers of cognitive phenomenology could accept, given that it is a claim about the status of entertaining, and not about its phenomenal character. It is worth noting that what we have found may be a counterexample to Geach s conception of thinking. Consider his claim that I think it would be nonsense to say that I was thinking a given thought for a period of a beetle s crawl the continuous past of think has no such use. (The White Knight was thinking of a plan in that he thought certain thoughts successively; and for each individual thought was thinking would have no application.) (Geach 1969, 64). Whether the linguistic form includes the progressive or not is relevant to assess the category of certain verbs as states or achievements (do not occur in the progressive) and activities and accomplishments (occur in the progressive). In this way Geach denies that thinking is an activity, and thus it cannot be processive. But if what I have argued is correct and we have reasons to accept entertaining as a processive episode, and if entertaining a thought is a way of thinking a thought, then I would have pointed to a counterexample to Geach s conception of thinking. There would be a way of thinking, namely entertaining, for which the past continuous was entertaining would not imply a succession of different thoughts but rather an activity in itself. At this point, however, it could be objected that it is not clear how entertaining posits a challenge to Tye and Wright s view, in two different ways. First, entertaining that p requires grasping that p and hence understanding that p, which appears to be mental episodes that are 14