Locke endorses a distinction between passive reflection and voluntary attentive reflection, which he occasionally labels contemplation. Failure to recognize this distinction properly has had an effect on interpretations of Locke’s theory of reflection, and caused puzzlement about the relation between reflection and consciousness. In particular, the function of reflection as a passive internal sense that produces simple ideas of mental operations has been downplayed in favour of the view that reflection in one manner or another involves attention and/or presupposes con-sciousness of mental operations. This has led a number of scholars to maintain, implicitly or explicitly, that Locke in fact abandons either his doctrine of sensation and reflection as the two exclusive sources of ideas or his doctrine of ideas as the only immediate objects of experience. According to one reading, ideas of mental operations are produced by virtue of consciousness, and reflection is assigned the role of forming definite ideas. This conflicts with Locke’s official doctrine of sensation and reflection as the only origins of ideas. According to another reading, ideas are not at all involved in our direct consciousness of mental operations, but the production of ideas through reflection is preconditioned by this primary consciousness. This means introducing immediate objects of experience that are not ideas, which conflicts with Locke’s commitment to ideas as the only immediate objects of all kinds of thinking.
Descartes affords several notions of consciousness as he explains the characteristics of the diverse features of human thought from infancy to adulthood and from dreaming to attentive wakefulness. I will argue that Descartes provides the resources for a rich and coherent view of conscious mentality from rudimentary consciousness through reflexive consciousness to consciousness achieved by deliberate, attentive reflection. I shall begin by making two general yet important remarks concerning the conceptual starting points of my investigation. First, in interpreting early modern notions of consciousness, it is important to notice that conscious thought is often deemed as self-relational involving reflexivity understood as a more or less attentive relation to self. 1 I will deploy the terms 'conscious' and 'consciousness' in reference to a wider array of experiential phenomena than that of self-consciousness, 1 The self-relative aspect of consciousness is often emphasized in passages which are closest to being definitions of consciousness or in which the significance or larger theoretical role of it is addressed. Consider the following. Ralph Cudworth (True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), 159) says that "Consciousness [.. .] makes a Being to be Present with it self, Attentive to its own Actions, or Animadversive of them, to perceive it self to Do or Suffer, and to have a Fruition or Enjoyment of it self ". John Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690), II, 27, 9) maintains that "consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things". The author of An Essay on Consciousness (Two Dissertations Concerning Sense, and the Imagination with an Essay of Consciousness (London, 1728), 144-145) gives a definition according to
contemporary caution against anachronism in intellectual history, and the currently momentous theoretical emphasis on subjectivity in the philosophy of mind, are two prevailing conditions that set puzzling constraints for studies in the history of philosophical psychology. the former urges against assuming ideas, motives, and concepts that are alien to the historical intellectual setting under study, and combined with the latter suggests caution in relying on our intuitions regarding subjectivity due to the historically contingent characterizations it has attained in contemporary philosophy of mind. In the face of these conditions, our paper raises a question of what we call non-textual (as opposed to contextual) standards of interpretation of historical texts, and proceeds to explore subjectivity as such a standard. Non-textual standards are defined as (heuristic) postulations of features of the world or our experience of it that we must suppose to be immune to historical variation in order to understand a historical text. although the postulation of such standards is often so obvious that the fact of our doing so is not noticed at all, we argue that the problems in certain special cases, such as that of subjectivity, force us to pay attention to the methodological questions involved. taking into account both recent methodological discussion and the problems inherent in two de facto denials of the relevance of subjectivity for historical theories, we argue that there are good grounds for the adoption of subjectivity as a nontextual standard for historical work in philosophical psychology.
It is a necessary condition for recognising change that there is a yardstick against which the change can be perceived. The same applies to changes that philosophical concepts undergo. This paper delineates standards for recognising conceptual change that meet the requirements of conscientious history of philosophy. More particularly, we want to argue for the need of what we will call non-textual standards. These are features of the world of experience that must be assumed to be shared between us and the historical authors we study. While they must be used in tandem with the recognised contextual standards of conceptual change, we will argue that without recourse to at least some non-textual standards, important kinds of conceptual change will remain inexplicable.
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