The role of consciousness and intentionality in perception , semantics , representations , and rules Renate

This paper discusses the role of consciousness in the distinctions between reception and perception, between a purely causal and a referential or denotational semantics, and between linguistic ability and linguistic analysis, including representations and rules. The first two topics are treated by designing several thought experiments based on the phenomenon of blindsight. It is argued that reception, causal semantics, and linguistic ability do not require consciousness, while a denotational semantics, a notion of truth and reality, linguistic analysis, forming representations and rules, and following these require consciousness and imagination, like any design activity does. They presuppose a linguistic or a picturing medium in which they are formed. The medium is interpreted, i.e. connected to the world, via a neural network background established in training as our linguistic ability, which does not contain symbolic or picturing representations. Rather it functions as a system of dispositions in the ability to interpret pictorial and linguistic representations and rules. Dispositions are potential neural activation patterns and themselves are not language-like or picture-like representations. It is further pointed out that rules and representations can only indirectly function in changing or forming linguistic ability by serving in consciously constructing series of examples, which in learning processes can be a basis, a training set, on which linguistic abilities then are formed or reformed.