David M. Rosenthal (philosopher)

David M. Rosenthal
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy

David M. Rosenthal is a philosopher at the City University of New York (CUNY) who has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, particularly in the area of consciousness. He was educated at the University of Chicago and then Princeton University. In addition to philosophy of mind, Rosenthal has research interests in the related field of cognitive science and is Coordinator of the CUNY Graduate Center's Interdisciplinary Concentration in Cognitive Science. Rosenthal has also done work in philosophy of language, metaphysics, ancient philosophy, and 17th-Century rationalism.

Rosenthal is best known for his higher-order-thought (HOT) theory of consciousness. He argues that no mental state is conscious if one is not aware of that state; so a mental state is conscious only if one is aware of oneself as being in that state. And he argues that we are aware of mental states that are conscious by having a thought that one is in that state. These higher-order thoughts are seldom conscious thoughts, and they are distinct from the states they are about. The standard mark in everyday contexts and in experimental psychology that distinguishes conscious mental states is that an individual can report the state; we are unable to report mental states that aren't conscious. Rosenthal argues that it's the higher-order thoughts that accompany conscious states that enable us to make such reports; because we have no such higher-order awareness of mental states that aren't conscious, we can't report them. Rosenthal has also argued that the higher-order-thought theory fits well with recent findings in psychology and neuropsychology (Lau and Rosenthal 2011).

Since mental states are conscious only if one is aware of those states, every mental state can occur without being conscious. That includes states that exhibit mental qualities, such as the perceptions and bodily sensations that occur in subliminal perception and in blindsight. This view goes against many contemporary views, on which mental qualities are tied inextricably to consciousness. So Rosenthal has developed a "quality-space theory" (also "homomorphism theory") of the mental qualities, which explains what qualitative mental states without appeal to consciousness. All mental qualities are individuated by their positions in a quality space that pertains to their sensory modality. More specifically, we can define a quality space of the physical perceptible properties that mental qualities enable access to, relying just on the ability to discriminate among those perceptible properties. Mental qualities, then, are the properties of mental states that make that discriminative capacity possible; so they are fixed by the positions they occupy in a quality space corresponding to the quality space of accessed perceptible properties. Because the quality spaces of perceptible properties are determined solely by the ability to discriminate among sample properties, independently of whether the perceptual states are conscious, mental qualities themselves can occur without being conscious. They occur consciously only when one is aware of oneself as being in the relevant qualitative state, on the HOT theory, when one has the relevant HOT.

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