Topics Mind

Question Is there an "unconscious", or "subconscious", and if so why hold that such an entity exists.

Accepted:
October 10, 2005

Comments

I'm not sure what you mean by "unconcious". If something braodly Freudian, then I'm not in a position to answer this. But there is another notion of "unconscious" that figures heavily in comtemporary empirical psychology: It is the idea of processing or information that is inaccessible to conscious reflection. For example, the standard view in linguistics nowadays is that our ability to speak and understand our native languages depends upon all sorts of unconcious processing. The evidence for this view is the explanatory success of linguitic theory. It is possible, for example, to state an extremely general principle governing when a pronoun can be "bound by" an antecedent (that is, "refer back" to it) which will account for why the first but not the second of these can mean that John saw John in the mirror:

John saw him in the mirror.
John saw himself in the mirror.

There are all kinds of similar contrasts that the principles explain. Compare, for example:

Bill thinks it would be wrong to kill him.
Bill thinks it would be wrong to kill himself.

The former cannot mean that Bill thinks it would be wrong for him to commit suicide. It can mean either that that it would be wrong for some unspecified person to kill Bill or that it would be wrong for Bill to kill "him", where who that is is determined by context. The latter can mean only that Bill thinks it would be wrong for Bill to commit suicide. It cannot mean that Bill thinks it would be wrong for some unspecified person to commit suicide. Why? Well, "binding theory" explains that too.

The principles of binding theory appear to be correct for all known human languages. The question therefore arises why all normal human beings end up speaking a language for which those principles are correct. A priori, there are lots of possibilities, but the one that seems most plausible is that the principles of binding theory themselves (or something nearby) are known, unconciously, by normal human speakers and that these principles figure in the processing that leads us to hear these sentences as we do. Indeed, these principles are plausibly known innately, since they are not plausibly learned. But they are not, again, something most people consciously know.

Question Is there an "unconscious", or "subconscious", and if so why hold that such an entity exists. Accepted:October 10, 2005

Question Is there an "unconscious", or "subconscious", and if so why hold that such an entity exists.

Accepted:
October 10, 2005