Two concepts of consciouness: the biological/private and the linguistic/social'

Abstract

How much of the mental life which we atribute to ourselves and fellow human beings should we atribute to other creatures, particulary those mammals to which we are most closely related in evolutionary terms, given that such cretaures do not communicate whith one another by means of anything resembling human natural language? The paper approaches this question historically by considering the positions taken by Aristotle, Descartes, the post-Darwinianns such as Romanes, the behaviorists down to Skinner, and contemporary philosophers such as Davidson and Fodor. A distinction is drawn between two concepts of consciousnes.: the biological/private which I argue we should not hesitate to attribute to all warm blooded vertebrates and the linguistic/social wich is exclusively human. The concept of consciousness as biological and private is the 'consciousness' of traditional introspective psychology and of 'Is consciousness a brain process? (Place 1956). It comprises the phenomena of selective attention, conceptualization, mental image formation, emotional reaction and motivation. The concept of consciousness as linguistic and social is the consciousness of Hegel, Marx, Vygotsky, Skinner and much contemporary philosophical psychology. It consists of an intergrated system of propositional attitudes (beliefs) all for which are either formulated or susceptible to formulation as sentences in natural language (Skinner's "contingency-specifyng stimuli" or "rules").