Comments on David Rosenthal's "Consciousness, content, and metacognitive judgments".

David Rosenthal’s higher order thought theory of consciousness (HOT) is one of the best articulated philosophical accounts of consciousness available. The theory is, roughly, that a mental state is conscious in virtue of there being another mental state, namely, a thought to the effect that one is in the first state. The second mental state is ‘‘higher order’’ since it is about a mental state. Furthermore, the thinker does not think that the higher order judgment is arrived at by conscious inference. For example, my belief (memory, thought, wish) that my child is sleeping in the other room is conscious in virtue of my having another, second order, thought to the effect that I have this belief (thought, memory, wish), where this thought is not the result of a conscious inference. Of course, there is a lot that turns on the exact details, which we will examine later. Rosenthal’s paper ‘‘Consciousness, Content, and Metacognitive Judgments’’ seems to be occasioned by an apparent problem for his theory. Metacognitive judgments are judgments about one’s mental states, e.g., that one remembers something or does not know something and so on. He notices that metacognition, i.e., ‘‘the access we have to whether, or how likely it is that, we know something,’’ involves, similarly to consciousness, higher order access to mental states we are in. However, and here is the problem, we can make metacognitive judgments without consciously accessing the state’s intentional content; i.e., we can judge that we know something without the content in question being conscious. I can, for example, judge that I know what the capital of Hungary is without being aware that it is Budapest. Rosenthal’s example of this is the ‘‘tip-of-the-tongue’’ phenomenon. But this raises a question about HOT: after all, if one can have higher order access to mental states without those states being conscious, there might be something wrong with the theory of consciousness according to which the consciousness of a mental state consist in our having a higher order state about that mental state.