Larry’s Reviews > Language, Thought and Consciousness: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology > Status Update

I guess the gist of PC’s “reflexive” theory of mind is that the fact that I can reflect on my thought through language “proves” something about the thought itself, but that’s only working under the assumption that the content of the thought exhausts the nature of the thought, which begs the question (I could also write down the content of my thought: what does THAT tell us about thought and writing?)

So it seems PC has talked himself into a corner: yes, conscious thought is bound to be linguistic, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the relationship between language and thought, unless it is separately demonstrated that conscious thought adequately represents the nature of thought tout court, which, short of Cartesian introspectionism, doesn’t sound like a viable option, esp not against Dennett

So either conscious thought is linguistic (universal agreement), or thought period is linguistic. But the move from the trivial to the interesting claim assumes there is a threshold separating them, and when pressed to justify that threshold, PC only says: there seems to be one. Which is irrelevant to there being one or not.

But it is conscious thought PC is interested in, and he wants to show that it involves language. Fair enough, but Dennett agrees. Only Dennett doesn’t think there is any threshold separating conscious from non conscious Xs, to which PC replies that it certainly seems that there is, to which Dennett replies that, again, he agrees, but, all the same, there isn’t.