Colloquium - Tim Crane - Central European University

It is widely assumed that the contents of unconscious intentional states — e.g. beliefs and desires — should be understood in the same kind of way as the content of conscious intentional states. So, for example, if our conscious intentional states should be understood in terms of relations to propositions, so should our unconscious states. In this talk I reject this assumption and defend an alternative picture of the contents of unconscious and conscious intentional states. On this alternative picture, commonsense psychological attributions of unconscious intentional states should be thought of as models of parts of our entire unconscious psychological organization (what I will call our ‘worldview’). I argue that this way of thinking of unconscious intentionality makes better sense of attributions of intentional content in commonsense psychology, cognitive science and psychoanalysis.