CONSCIOUSNESS

80 1. Philosophy
a picture, whereas the paradigmatic example of a discursive is a sentence. Of course, Fodor’s
concern lies not with representations in general, but with mental representations, and he offers
empirical evidence that people enjoy mental representations of both sorts. Fodor suggests that
mental states such as thoughts are discursive, whereas states of, for example, mental imagery
are iconic. Since Fodor believes mental icons are ipso facto unconceptualized, he thereby
presents a spirited defense of the existence of what is known as non-conceptual content. Fodor
claims that what cleaves the distinction between icons and discursives is the fact that discursives
have what he calls canonical decompositions, whereas icons do not. Fodor acknowledges
that both icons and discursives are compositional insofar as the structure and semantic
properties of the wholes are dependent on the structure and semantic properties of the parts.
However, Fodor maintains that what marks the difference between them is the way in which
the parts of these representations compose. Since icons lack canonical decompositions, they
thereby lack structure and so are unrestricted in the ways in which their parts compose. By
contrast, discursives have canonical decompositions and hence have structure, and thereby are
restricted in the ways in which their parts compose. My main aim in this paper is to challenge
Fodor’s way of drawing distinction between icons and discursives. I remain (mostly) neutral
about whether there is non-conceptual content, and I do not even dispute that there may be a
distinction between discursives and icons. But, whether or not a distinction can be drawn, I do
not think that we can draw it the way Fodor does. After briefly discussing Fodor’s program in
general and his way of drawing the distinction, I turn to some reasons to think that icons are
structured. In short, I argue that Fodor conditions for being an icon are at once too permissive
and too restrictive. Fodor’s account entails that few or none of the things that we traditionally
take to be icons, such as pictures, are iconic and that all sorts of things we do not take to be
representations, such as footprints, are icons. I then catalogue several extant accounts of pictorial
representation. I suggest that, on any of these plausible theories, icons are structured and
I proffer a way to understand the sense in which icons have canonical decompositions. I then
briefly discuss some empirical evidence that all mental representations, even at the earliest
stages of visual processing, have structure. In closing, I critique Fodor’s reasons for thinking
there are unstructured mental icons in the first place, and question the utility for Fodor’s
theory in general of admitting unstructured icons into our mental ontology. I conclude we are
thus better off thinking that Fodor’s condition for iconicity should be rejected. P1
81 What is an Unconscious Mental State? Berit Brogaard
(Philosophy, University of Missouri, St. Louis, St. Louis, MO)
Conscious mental states have phenomenal character. There is something it is like to be
in them. Having phenomenal character is sufficient for mentality. Furthermore, having a representational
phenomenal character is sufficient for having intentional content. Unconscious
states do not have phenomenal character. Yet intuitively some unconscious processes are (or
correlate with) intentional mental states, for instance, dorsal stream processes and the residual
visual processes responsible for blindsight. Here I consider and reject four candidate accounts
of unconscious intentional mental states: dispositionalism, interpretivism, functionalism and
potentialism. Dispositionalism treats the dispositions of individuals to behave or feel or think
in certain ways as constitutive of mental states. However, this view has severe drawbacks. It
misclassifies states that merely mimic states grounded in the right sort of underlying realizer.
Interpretivism takes an unconscious state to be an intentional mental state just in case an ideal
interpreter would judge that this is so. This sort of account encounters the same sorts of difficulties
as dispositionalism when an individual’s behavior is not grounded in the right sort of
underlying realizer. Functionalism does better in this respect. Though functionalism takes an
unconscious state to be an intentional mental state just in case the state satisfies a certain prespecified
role, the specification of the role can involve specifications of properties of underlying
realizers. However, because functionalism does not require that unconscious mental states
are adequately connected to phenomenal consciousness, it predicts that unconscious states
that evidently are not states of the mind are mental states. Potentialism holds that an unconscious
state is a state that has the potential to become conscious. However, on its most natural
rendition, this view is implausible, as unconscious intentional mental states do not have the