Why Are Verbally Expressed Thoughts Conscious?

This is a seemingly innocuous question which David M. Rosenthal attempts to answer in a paper of the same name. I decided to look at this because of my suspicions that intentional communication is key to our conscious perception of mental states (and our intuitions that in itself is metaphysical or irreducible).

Beware treacherous waters ahead!

I've had a lot of trouble with this one. The man starts of easy but once the ball starts to role he uses the most convoluted rhetoric arguments. Maybe it's me that's been unusually dense these last few days but this stuff had me dizzy and frustrated; rereading every second line and generally uncomfortable from end to end. Anyhow I'll dig in:

I'm going to quickly explain Rosenthal's definition of so called 'High Order Thoughts' (HOTs), these play a big part and are integral to his explorations of consciousness. Basically a HOT is thinking about thoughts. Put differently it is the examination of sensually perceived information. So desire, doubt, anticipation, inclination, expectation, wondering etc. all constitute high order thoughts in Rosenthal's model.

When we think of a mouse and his perception that a cat lies in wait outside his hole we would assume that the mouse is responding to sensory stimuli which point to the presence of a cat outside the hole. We would not assume the mouse is in possession of a high order thought that inveigles a sense of expectation that there is a Tom to his Jerry lucking outside the hole. At a push however, would we be so sure that Tom doesn't harbour a HOT of desire that the mouse might wander out? Rosenthal doesn't put so fine a point on it, but the possibility of non-humans high order thoughts are not written off.

At this point I feel the need to point out my reservations of the definition of HOT. Obviously there is a separate order of intentionality between response to stimuli and a critical appraisal of that response but I can't see this as being how cognition works. Surely there is a spectrum of intensity attaching my HOT (desire) of food and the cat's lower order thought that its prey is present in is hole. Now you'd expect Rosenthal might be inclined to place a threshold of consciousness upon my suggested spectrum as the signifier or even the cause of these high order thoughts. But no, consciousness plays a different peripheral role in proceedings.

In Rosenthal's work consciousness is not just the phenomenon being investigated it also serves in the explanation. The delineation is as follows; an individual may be conscious of something and sometimes a mental state may be conscious. In other words a mental state may be conscious but you may not be conscious of it! Rosenthal refers to the conscious mental state as 'state consciousness' and to an individual conscious awareness of something as 'transitive consciousness'.

After these Rosenthal has one more condition on his use of the term consciousness, the 'transitivity
principle'. This is where 'mental states are conscious only if one is in some way conscious of them'. Meaning the process of a certain reception of stimuli becomes consciously available because you somehow perceive their results. I might be inclined to think of this in terms of 'pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps' an implausible act of levitation that seems an easy metaphor for this transivity principle. These are tricky principles and definitions but it seems Rosenthal has gone to arduous lengths in order to fit them in with his wide ranging theories of consciousness. For now I'll assume their unwieldiness s necessary!

Now I'm ready for the original premise of this post but it seems my will to type has left maybe tomorrow..