Do unconscious mental states exist? Freud, Searle, and the conceptual foundations of cognitive science (Sigmund Freud, John R. Searle)

Do unconscious mental states exist? Cartesians answer “no,” claiming that consciousness is the essence of the mental. I consider two ways to defend unconscious mentation. Cognitivists, from Freud to contemporary cognitive scientists and semantic naturalists, claim that the common essence of the mental is intentionality in the form of brain representationality defined independently of consciousness, with consciousness merely an incidental property. Alternatively, Searle argues that unconscious contents are dispositions to cause conscious contents, leaving consciousness at the conceptual center of the mental.; I take Freud as paradigmatic of cognitivism and reconstruct and critique his argument for unconscious mental states. Because conscious content is essentially determinate, Freud's position that all mental states have the same essence implies that unconscious content is determinate. However, I defend Searle's claim that Quinian indeterminacy defeats behavioral and neurophysiological accounts of content, and extend the claim to other third-person accounts (functionalist, informational, teleosemantic) and to “mixed-system” accounts that use causal relations between non-conscious and conscious states to fix unconscious content. Thus, no available cognitivist account yields determinate unconscious content, and Freud's argument fails.; I argue that, although Searle is correct that unconscious content is defined in terms of conscious content, his Connection Principle is not an adequate basis for attributing genuine content. I thus offer an alternative account of consciousness-based unconscious content: A non-conscious brain state has content if its natural function is to represent whatever is represented by a specific conscious content (Teleological Connection Principle). The link to consciousness ensures determinacy, and the teleological component ensures genuine content. I defend the non-observer-relative status of natural-function ascriptions via a black-box-essentialist analysis that implies that natural functions are naturally selected effects.; Contrary to Searle's position, I claim that unconscious content offers a genuine “third level” of explanation between neurophysiology and conscious intentionality. However, cognitive science's postulation of “deeply unconscious” representations not functionally linked to consciousness is rejected on indeterminacy grounds. Unconscious and conscious content are essentially different, so the cognitivist claim that the study of brain representationality is the science of the mental fails. Unconscious mental states do exist, and their semantics must be consciousness based.