Starting from perceptual perspective shifting, Schooler focuses on the gap between self-reported experiences (the first-person perspective) and observable behavior (the third-person perspective). So consciousness versus self-awareness of being in a certain state, and the relationship of both of these to observable behavior is at the heart of the project. The main goal of the target paper is to introduce a new methodology for studying conscious versus unconscious states and processes. Although this is a very rich paper, we are not given too much information about the conceptual framework and the way in which Schooler’s proposal relates to the contemporary philosophical debate about consciousness, reportability, and accessibility. This aspect will be my focus: the relationship between philosophical theories of consciousness and Schooler’s account.
Schooler’s (this collection) project uses the combined strategy of self-reports, observable behavior, and physiological measurements of the body: a “trust but verify” (p. 8) approach to reports of subjects’ experience. He is interested in:
the relationship between people’s belief about their experience and empirical indices of their underlying mental states. [..] Moreover, the theory of the intermittent and imperfect nature of meta-awareness as a re-representation of experience […] provides a scaffold for conceptualizing the situations in which beliefs and underlying experience converge and diverge. (p. 19, emphasis added)
Though it sounds at the beginning as if Schooler is making a claim about internal states in general in general, it quickly becomes clear that he indeed makes a claim about the personal-level, or conscious internal states. In so doing, he transitions from internal states to a certain kind of internal state—a conscious one. Later in the paper we find similar transitions: first we find a statement that can be interpreted as talking about all internal states, or verbally reportable knowledge of one’s states, but then he immediately makes a statement about the underlying experience. For example, he informs us that in mind-wandering we can “identify situations in which all evidence suggests people are routinely lacking in their current knowledge of their on-going mental states” (Schooler this collection, p. 19, emphasis added). A little later we find a statement about experience, thus knowledge or beliefs about conscious states:
In short, a strong case can be made for the value of using 3rd person science to inform not only our understanding of people’s beliefs about their experience, but also to discern when those beliefs are likely to be accurate and when they may be inaccurate or incomplete. (Schooler this collection, p. 20, emphasis added)
A similar transition from a statement about internal states to a statement about conscious internal states, which as a result can be reported, can also found slightly earlier:
by using various reasonable markers of people’s internal states we have been able to examine the conditions under which people’s reports are more or less likely to be aligned with their experience. (Schooler this collection, p. 19, emphasis added)
To summarize, it seems that “what is going on in someone’s mind”, in Schooler’s terminology, refers to the conscious mind. His approach locates him in a group of thinkers[1] who challenge the notion of accurate reportability, or who challenge access as the main criterion for conscious experience. There is a very active contemporary dispute between defenders of what have been dubbed cognitive accounts of consciousness and proponents of non-cognitive accounts (Overgaard & Grünbaum 2011). Opponents of cognitive approaches associate consciousness with cognitive functions like controlled processing, working memory, selective attention, or some network of different cognitive processes.[2] Because of this association, these functions can be used to study consciousness from a third-person perspective. In contrast, non-cognitive approaches assume that consciousness cannot be operationalized in terms of cognitive function. Consequently, these accounts dissociate consciousness from cognitive capacities. Which leaves us (typically) with just subjective criteria as acceptable for studying consciousness. Obviously Schooler’s account is an example of a cognitive approach. In my opinion, this general dispute cannot be resolved by empirical evidence because neither of these approaches can be empirically falsified, or at least the empirical evidence can in principle be explained both ways—in essence we have a clash of intuitions, and the evidence can be interpreted as supporting opposing views.[3] However, the approach one favors will obviously determine one’s criteria of consciousness, the experimental methodology used, and, consequently, one’s findings. Nonetheless, I do not want to go too much into this very wide dispute, partly because I think it would be rather fruitless.[4] So for the purposes of this commentary, I will focus on issues within cognitive approaches alongside Schooler’s cognitive account. But the objections against cognitive accounts of consciousness in general are issues that Schooler, given his introduction of a cognitive methodological approach for studying consciousness, potentially needs to address.
By using mind-wandering as his main example, Schooler then proposes a list of criteria that—so the idea goes—might help us to get a better grasp on the conscious experience, and not just conscious states to which we attend or states of which we are meta-aware. This underlying conceptual distinction turns out to be essential for Schooler’s overall project.
One way of interpreting Schooler’s account is to see it as a combination of a number of claims, which is evident in the quote above. He himself, right after introducing the distinction, argues that the two cases come apart in mindreading, and the fact that “people routinely shift perspective (from simply experiencing to attempting to re-represent their experience to themselves) provides the foundation for a framework of scientifically investigating first person perspective” (Schooler this collection, p. 9). The implicit main argument of the paper can be reconstructed in the following way:
(1) Schooler introduces a conceptual distinction between experience and meta-qwareness as a re-representation of experience.
(2) He then presents empirical evidence that this conceptual distinction corresponds to reality, in mind-wandering and other cases.
(3) He then uses this evidence to suggest a general list of testable features for those interested in the empirical investigation of consciousness. The last issue is particularly important: in effect, Schooler suggests replacing the classical testable criterion for consciousness, (oral) reportability, or accessibility to introspection, by several criteria, which are testable and available from the third-person perspective.
(4) He claims that this gives us a principled new way of reconciling the tension between the first- and third-person perspective by introducing a higher meta-perspective, an ontological claim; in essence, this meta-perspective allows for a new strategy to solve the mind-body problem. We are promised the above-mentioned new “framework for scientifically investigating first-person experience” (Schooler (this collection, p. 9) resulting from the analogy of perspective shifting.