Not so HOT...

With an incredulous gasp Matthias read the final lines of Rosenthal’s article. He then set to work typing the following hyperbolic blurb all the while referring to himself in the third person… Just kidding, he wouldn’t do that to you. (Sorry for posting on your blog Louie)

In the course of his “Varieties of Higher-Order Theory,” Rosenthal argues that we need to rely on higher-order theories to explain how we can be conscious of conscious states. This consciousness of conscious states refers to our capacity for introspection. We can think about what we are thinking about, we can reflect upon our visual field. Rosenthal seems to think the only explanation for such experiences is a higher-order theory—specifically a higher-order thought (HOT) model. A HOT is essentially attached experiences in which “we are introspectively conscious of a state… in a deliberate attentively focused way” (24). Rosenthal initially characterizes the experience of conscious introspection as very ordinary (who hasn’t felt the sting of self-consciousness at a middle school dance?) but quickly asserts that “introspection involves actually being aware that we are conscious of those [mental] states” (24). Since the mental states themselves are conscious (in the state rather than transitive/introspective sense of consciousness) it sounds as though Rosenthal is embracing a third level of consciousness -awareness of consciously attending to conscious mental states. Though he is quick to recognize the potential for regress in higher-order theories, Rosenthal believes a variant of the HOT model escapes this worry. In doing so, he seems to mystify HOT consciousness, claiming that we aren’t typically conscious of any HOTs (33), and that we “are rarely conscious of that higher-order awareness” (37).
The retreat from the commonness of the experience of introspection seems in part motivated by a phenomenological argument. In an intuitively appealing passage, Rosenthal gives an account of the argument that leads many theorists to reject higher-order theories;

“When a state is conscious, we are conscious of that state. But, except for the
special case of introspective consciousness, we are not also conscious of being
conscious of the state; it seems subjectively that we are conscious of only one
state. So, if one relied on consciousness to reveal mental functioning, one would
conclude that, when a state is conscious, there aren’t two states but only
one” (31)

But Rosenthal claims this argument incorrectly assumes mental functioning is revealed to us by consciousness. The example he uses is that when viewing Warhol’s repetitions of Marilyn Monroe’s portrait, we subjectively seem to see the various portraits with the same degree of clarity, which we know empirically to be false. From Rosenthal’s perspective this proves that consciousness doesn’t accurately reveal mental functioning. The empirical fact that we don’t always consciously represent the world accurately seems irrelevant to the argument. Proving that subjective experience isn’t always accurate does little to advance Rosenthal’s argument. At most it shows that we shouldn’t rely entirely on introspection in our investigation of consciousness. It does not show that we need a higher-order theory to explain the phenomena of introspectable mental states. Through the article, Rosenthal has back-peddled on introspection turning it into a rare experience, partly because a phenomenal investigation of introspection doesn’t reveal a state of consciousness of a state of consciousness. Calling HOTs rare and saying that subjective experience is fallible doesn’t amount to a persuasive argument for the existence of HOT’s.