Search Forum:

My fuzzy question was, I think, really about the current meaning(s) of "mental" in the discipline of psychology.?G. E. Moore, one of the founders of linguistic analysis, did a powerful?article on "consciousness of a patch of blue" in which he goes to interminable lengths to distinguish the "patch of blue" from "consciousness of".?(Yes, his student Wittgenstein talks like a Skinnerian at times -- but at other times not,)? I once did a little bit of research on the word "consciousness" and as best I could discover it seems that its usual contemporary meaning?("awareness"), began to emerge, sort of, with Descartes and his meaning of "pensee" and, of course, the "cogito".?But it was only w ith Locke that it was fairly well?distinguished from "mind".?("Mind" means a highly complex reality which includes some objects of consciousness, e.g., images, concepts, feelings, as well as the many varied operations being considered here, plus much, much more.) The reality I'm trying to talk about is our activity of *being-aware-of* -- not just being aware of external things, but also the *being-aware-of* internal activities (e.g., being-aware-of sensing, being-aware-of judging, being-aware-of putting things in serial order, being-aware-of hoping, commanding, suffering, etc., etc., etc., and perhaps most amazingly of all?*being-aware-of being aware*.?(I think the Buddhists have a lot to teach the West about cs. and states of mind, but one doesn't see the relevance unless some very, very sharp distinctions are made.)? "Mind"?of course, has interested philosophers since at least Heraclitus with his notion of "nous", bu t?even the scholastics with all their sharp distinctions of va rious sorts, didn't get down to distinguishing "consciousness-of" from the *objects* of consciousness or from that highly complex reality, mind (mens, mensa) which *includes* cs.-of as a part.?Oh, they had a great deal to say about mind and mental activities/operations, especially the logical ones, but not about the simple act of being-conscious-of. Looks to me like Skinner took the easy way out and effectively denied there is such a thing as cs.-of by ignoring his very own experience.?But from my limited reading of Piaget I don't think he did, and I was wondering if he and other psychologists have retained the not-so-old notion that an intentional act has both 1) an object (real or not, complex or not, invented by mind or not) and 2) consciousness-of the object.?Consciousness is a big topic for phenomenologists, of course, but have they had any influence on the experimental?psychologists? It's just that looking into myself I find at least one constant -- consciousness-of.?Yes, it's the string that holds Hume's "bundle of perceptions" together, and I'm just wondering if psychologists these days are interested in it.