Topics Mind

Question In the later 1700's, many famous philosophers (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) held the 'transparency thesis', the view that all important mental contents could only be conscious. Is this position still defensible?

Accepted:
December 3, 2009

Comments

It is reasonably unclear what "mental" and "mind" mean overall, though it is clear that whatever it is the intellect is a central part of it, and so if some philosophers want to insist that the mind is to be taken as the conscious mind, there is nothing to stop them, and there is a reasonable point to their stipulation. But even as early as the turn of the 17c, Leibniz accepted unconscious thinking, and there is a very strong case to answer here. Not answering it can make the stipulation look very arbitrary.

Locke died in 1704, by the way, and Berkeley in 1753, so they did not hold the view that you attribute to them "in the later 1700s". And Hume's philosophical writing was done early on in his career; the Treatise and the Inquiry were published before 1750.

You might want to take a look at some of the recent work of John Searle, such as The Rediscovery of the Mind. Searle argues there that "The notion of an unconscious mental states implies accessibility to consciousness. We have no notion of the unconscious except as that which is potentially conscious." (p. 152). While this isn't quite an endorsement of what you call the "transparency thesis," I believe it might be seen as a quasi-descendant of the view you describe.

As an aside, the name "the transparency thesis" is nowadays often used by philosophers of mind to refer to quite a different phenomenon, namely, that when we introspect our experience, we don't seem to be able to attend directly to it; rather, our attention seems to slide right through to the objects of our experience.

Question In the later 1700's, many famous philosophers (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) held the 'transparency thesis', the view that all important mental contents could only be conscious. Is this position still defensible? Accepted:December 3, 2009

Question In the later 1700's, many famous philosophers (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) held the 'transparency thesis', the view that all important mental contents could only be conscious. Is this position still defensible?

Accepted:
December 3, 2009