Verbal Disputes in the Theory of Consciousness

Abstract

The primary aim of a theory of consciousness is to articulate existence conditions for conscious states, i.e. the conditions under which a mental state is conscious rather than unconscious. There are two main broad approaches: The Higher-Order approach and the First-Order approach. Higher-Order theories claim that a mental state is conscious only if it is the object of a suitable state of higher-order awareness. First-Order theories reject this necessary condition. However, both sides make the following claim: for any mental state M of a subject S, M is conscious iff there is something it is like for S to be in M. This is the Nagelian Conception of consciousness. Taking the Nagelian Conception as a starting point, I contend that the best rationalizing explanation for the ways in which Higher-Order and First-Order theorists contribute to their dispute is to see those contributions as consistent responses to two distinct questions.

If we agree... not to worry about which mental phenomena deserve the honorific title ‘consciousness,’ it may seem that there is nothing left about which Block and I disagree. We might even agree to apply the term ‘conscious,’ in a special sense, to states that exhibit only thin phenomenality.

David Rosenthal (2002a: 660)

1. The Transitivity Principle

The relationship between what makes a mental state conscious and awareness of our mental states is a contested one. Consider:

1. Michael’s perception of the tree is conscious.
2. Michael is aware of his perceiving the tree.

According to Higher-Order (HO) theories of consciousness, (1) entails (2). This is because a mental state’s being conscious consists in its subject being suitably aware of it. HO theorists codify (2)’s entailment by (1) as the Transitivity Principle, or Transitivity for short:

Different HO theories will have different things to say about the way we are aware of our conscious states. For instance, Higher-Order Thought theorists (e.g., Rosenthal 2005) say that Michael is aware of perceiving the tree by having an appropriate higher-order thought (a ‘HOT’) about his perceptual state, while Higher-Order Perception theorists (e.g., Lycan 1996) will appeal to an appropriate higher-order perception (a ‘HOP’).

By contrast, First-Order (FO) theories of consciousness deny that (1) entails (2), and so reject Transitivity.[1] Beyond having this shared belief in the falsity of something, FO theories are a motley crew. One can be a naïve realist (e.g., Martin 2004), a qualia realist (e.g., Shoemaker 1994; Block 1996), or a representationalist (e.g., Dretske 1995; Tye 2000) and be a FO theorist. My interest, however, is in a certain subset of FO theorists. I am interested in FO theorists that purport to give a positive account of what it is for mental state to be conscious that is in direct conflict with the HO-theoretic approach. By this measure I count Ned Block, Michael Tye, Fred Dretske, and Jesse Prinz as FO theorists in the relevant sense.

I am also only interested in a mental state’s being phenomenally consciousness. So (2)’s entailment by (1) is shorthand for (2)’s entailment by (1*): Michael’s perception of the tree is phenomenally conscious. In this way, my focus is on what Block (2011) calls ‘ambitious’ HO theorists; if a HO theorist might be read as giving an account of some other form of consciousness (e.g., introspective consciousness), then the FO theorist might have no qualm with that sort of HO theorist. By the ambitious measure I count David Rosenthal, Uriah Kriegel, Rocco Gennaro, and Josh Weisberg (amongst others) as HO theorists in the relevant sense.[2]

In our epigraph, David Rosenthal suggests that his disagreement with Ned Block—and presumably other FO theorists—comes down to a disagreement about what phenomenon deserves the honorific ‘consciousness.’ Rosenthal was likely being facetious.[3] Nonetheless, I’ll argue that Rosenthal’s speculation, made in jest or not, is right: the dispute over Transitivity, I contend, is verbal. By exploring the actual practice of current HO and FO theorists and the semantics of conscious state ascriptions, this paper attempts to build a model of what, at bottom, is going on the dispute between HO and FO theorists. What makes the model successful is that it provides the best rationalizing explanation for the ways in which parties from both sides of the aisle contribute to the dispute over Transitivity. This picture will strike many as highly revisionary, and because of that, the burden of proof is high. To that end, I close by attempting to speak to the intuition that HO and FO are engaging in a debate that is well worth having, even if—contra the standard picture—it is not at the level of literal expression of conflicting semantic contents.

2. The Nagelian Conception of Consciousness

We begin with the Nagelian Conception of consciousness, or ‘TNC’:

TNC plays a curious role in the philosophical literature. On the one hand, its presence is rife. Block (a FO theorist) tells us that,

And Michael Tye (another FO theorist) says,

Likewise, according to Rosenthal (a HO theorist),

And Uriah Kriegel (another HO theorist) says,

So despite the disagreement over Transitivity, TNC is common currency for HO and FO theorists alike. On the other hand, HO theorists are not only keen to point out that TNC entails or at least strongly suggests Transitivity, but that this fact is obvious. It is so obvious, we are told, that to think otherwise is to abuse or misunderstand TNC. Here are two examples.

The first concerns an exchange between Block (2011a) and HO theorist Josh Weisberg (2011). Recapitulating Block’s criticism of HO theories, Weisberg tells us,

Weisberg is not convinced:

By Weisberg’s lights, to characterize mental states of which a subject is wholly unaware as conscious—to reject Transitivity—is to employ a ‘merely technical sense of the term.’ Block didn’t mean this as a complement. I doubt Weisberg did either.[5]

A second example comes in Block’s discussion of visual extinction. Visual extinction is caused by damage to the parietal lobe. Extinction subjects can report stimuli on either side of their visual field so long as the stimuli are not presented simultaneously. If both stimuli are presented at once—one on the unimpaired side of the visual field and one on the impaired side—such subjects can only report the stimulus on the unimpaired side. Perception of the stimulus on the unimpaired side thus ‘extinguishes’ perception on the impaired side. Block (2001: 203) makes three claims of interest here: (i) that extinction subjects do not know—indeed cannot know—or be aware, of their perceiving the stimuli in the impaired portion of their visual field; (ii) that TNC is true; and (iii) that despite (i) and (ii), extinction subjects nonetheless undergo conscious experiences with respect to the impaired portion of their visual field.[6] Rosenthal regards (iii) as wildly implausible. He says,

Now compared to Weisberg, it is perhaps less clear that Rosenthal is charging Block with linguistic abuse; after all, he says that allowing for phenomenality in states of visual extinction “does not fit comfortably" with the Nagelian usage. That doesn’t have the same linguistic ring as saying that someone’s usage of a term is a merely technical usage. But in fact this is not all Rosenthal is saying. The comparison with what it’s like to be a table suggests something stronger, viz., that Block’s usage does not even remotely fit comfortably. To my ear, that ought to strike one as at least hinting at the possibility of linguistic abuse. So there is a sense in which Rosenthal is making essentially the same point as Weisberg: if there is something it is like to see extinguished stimuli on Block’s account, then Block is abusing TNC. Block is not just wrong about visual extinction. He is obviously wrong. He simply doesn’t get TNC. That’s quite a claim.[7]

In sum, the presumption—at least for the HO theorist—is this: if one thinks that Transitivity is false, one cannot have TNC in mind. Such is the real import of Weisberg’s right-back-at-you to Block. Weisberg is not being flippant. He is insisting that Block must be talking about something else entirely given TNC. These observations raise the following possibility in an acute form: could HO and FO theorists disagree about Transitivity because they disagree, perhaps implicitly, about the meaning of TNC?

3. The HO-FO Dispute is Verbal

4. ‘Conscious’ and Metalinguistic Negotiation

I have provided a model of the dispute between HO and FO theorists according to which HO and FO theorists are best interpreted as speaking two languages: HO-English, where Transitivity is true, and FO-English, where Transitivity is false. What makes this model successful is its ability to provide the best rationalizing explanation for the ways in which the relevant parties contribute to the dispute. And what charity tells us, I’ve suggested, is that the parties’ contributions are most reasonably explained as consistent responses to two different questions. In other words, the dispute between HO and FO theorists is verbal.

My thesis is radical. If true, it rewrites the default and predominant picture of a central debate in discussions about consciousness. This on its own will cause some unease. So, by way of closing, I want to quell at least one source of that apprehension.

When we say a dispute is verbal, we are saying that disputants are in a sense not really disagreeing, or that they are just disagreeing about language. Of course, this is far from the self-conception of HO and FO theorists. Even if claiming that HO and FO theorists are engaging in a verbal dispute enables us to see them as uttering truths, and so charitably understanding what they are saying, it doesn’t give us a way to charitably understand what they are doing in partaking in these disputes. Thus we might ask, if it is true that HO and FO theorists are expressing compatible propositions at the level of literal content, what have HO and FO theorists been doing all of these years that makes their dispute seem so deep and important, i.e., a genuine, substantive disagreement? Or to put the question slightly differently, how could a collection of smart, careful philosophers end up in a verbal dispute without realizing it?[30]

This question is natural. It is liable to come up whenever a long-standing, seemingly deep dispute is said to be verbal. If we say, with Hirsch, that the debate over composition is verbal, we’ll want to know how this could have escaped the notice of universalists and nihilists who are no doubt diligent and attentive. But it’s also not clear how much force the question really carries. The charge on the table is that there is something fundamentally awry in the dispute between HO and FO theorists. As such, we shouldn’t expect a perfectly tidy picture, or anything resembling the preservation of the participants’ entire self-conception.[31]

All the same, I recognize that the current proposal would be strengthened if there was a story to tell. So here is a tentative one: HO and FO theorists are engaging in a metalinguistic negotiation. A metalinguistic usage of a term consists in a speaker using a term to express a view about the meaning of that term, or to express a normative view about how that term ought to be used (Plunkett 2015: 834). It is well-known that we don’t always express our disagreements via literal semantic content. Genuine disagreements can also be expressed in a language via pragmatics. A metalinguistic dispute is a dispute that centers on pragmatically communicated information involving speakers who employ a metalinguistic usage of a term. A metalinguistic negotiation is just a normative metalinguistic dispute. It is a dispute wherein the speakers’ metalinguistic use of a term does not, as Plunkett and Sundell put it, “simply involve exchanging factual information about language, but rather negotiating its appropriate use” (2013: 15).[32]

An example. Suppose two guests on a sports radio talk-show are debating whether Secretariat, the famous racehorse, is an athlete. The guests concur on Secretariat’s prowess as a racehorse. They know he won the Triple Crown in 1973, and they know that he set speed records at all three races, and that his time at the Kentucky Derby still stands over forty years later. Still, one guest endorses the sentence ‘Secretariat is an athlete,’ the other guest endorses its negation. Now, upon hearing this, one might immediately shout ‘Verbal Dispute!’ Yet even if the dispute is verbal at the object-level, one can nonetheless preserve the intuition that there is a substantive disagreement by ascending to the metalinguistic level. The guests on the radio talk-show are arguing about how ‘athlete’ ought to be used.[33]

This is a dispute worth having. How we use words often matters (Chalmers 2011: 516; cf. Thomasson 2017). ‘Athlete’ is like ‘marriage’ or ‘torture.’ Thomasson (2017) observes that when we ask whether a non-human animal like Secretariat can be legitimately treated as an athlete, we are in an important sense negotiating how they are viewed and treated given the status being an athlete confers in our society. And whether non-human animals ought to be viewed and treated in this manner is well worth arguing about. As Thomasson (2017: 13) notes, it is for this same reason that metalinguistic disputes are not just ‘about words’. Far from it: although speakers use these utterances (e.g., ‘Secretariat is an athlete’, ‘Waterboarding is not torture’) to reinforce or alter the norms for using the terms in question, what’s at stake when we negotiate the use of a term like ‘athlete’ or ‘torture’ is something that is very much about the world and the people in it (cf. Thomasson 2017: 12, Plunkett & Sundell 2013: 19).

So, to say that HO and FO theorists are engaged in metalinguistic dispute is to say that they are advocating for what they think ‘consciousness’ should mean, or how it should be used. We have a verbal dispute at the object-level, but a genuine substantive disagreement at the metalinguistic level. And such substantive metalinguistic negotiations can be easily confused for substantive object-level disputes. Think about the Secretariat case; when we argue over what counts as an athlete, this dispute does not seem verbal. It seems deep. The reason it seems deep is because it is. It’s just not deep at the level we think it’s deep at; it’s not deep at the object-level. Hence diligent and attentive participants to the debate don’t realize that their (object-level) dispute is verbal.

But is this plausible? Is the debate about Transitivity relevantly similar to the debate about Secretariat? I’m not sure. An immediate challenge is that theorists on both the HO and FO sides might just deny that they see themselves as pragmatically communicating something normative about our linguistic or conceptual scheme. The strength of this worry will depend to some extent on how we model metalinguistic negotiation, and here is not the place to engage that issue.[34] This point notwithstanding, I do think there is a case to be made. Plunkett (2015: 847) identifies a set of criteria that provide defeasible evidence that a philosophical dispute is a metalinguistic negotiation. These criteria are:

• (a) There being evidence that a dispute is occurring (i.e., an exchange that looks like a genuine disagreement);
• (b) There being evidence that there indeed is a genuine disagreement, at least somewhere;
• (c) There being evidence that the disputants are using the same key terms in different ways;
• (d) There being evidence that the disagreement is normative (i.e., not descriptive).

On (a), there is no doubt, of course, that HO and FO theorists are at least having a dispute. The relevant parties enter into various linguistic exchanges wherein they appear to express a genuine disagreement over the truth-value of Transitivity. We’ll grant (b) for sake of argument. With respect to (c), we saw that it is grossly uncharitable to treat HO and FO theorists as meaning the same thing by TNC. HO theorists either explicitly endorse the Operator View, or implicitly by way of the Emphatic Argument. They speak HO-English. But it uncharitable to interpret the FO theorist as also speaking HO-English. For if she did, she would be making a painfully obvious a priori error every time she endorsed ¬Transitivity.

Regarding (d), that the disagreement isn’t about what the terms actually mean helps us make sense of Block and Weisberg’s barbs (Section 2) that each other’s use of ‘consciousness’ is technical. Sure, you are in pain when you are just in the first-order state, but you are not (ex hypothesis) aware of it. But—Weisberg might say—who cares? He can (and will) agree that the subject feels some when they are in that first-order state, but perhaps Weisberg’s point is that ‘conscious’ should be used to describe states we care about—i.e., states we aware of. We don’t care about pains that we are not aware of, at least directly. Block (2011: 426) invokes a similar move when he says that the ‘what-it-is-likeness’ that truly matters isn’t present in cases of empty HOTs, since in such cases no first-order state is present. To appeal to what we care about, as both Weisberg and Block do, in judging whether a mental state is conscious, is to advocate on pragmatic grounds for a certain conceptual scheme. Indeed, even if Stoljar is right that FO-English is English, having realized this, I doubt Weisberg (or Rosenthal, or any HO theorist) would let matters rest. They would, I bet, continue to negotiate for how ‘consciousness’ ought to be used. That’s a tell-tale sign of (d).

All of this suggests that there may be something to the idea that HO and FO theorists are engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation. Settling the matter, however, is a problem for another day.

Acknowledgements

For comments on an ancestor version of this paper, I thank audiences at the Australian National University and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and for comments on a more recent version I thank an audience at Texas Tech University. For especially helpful comments, written and otherwise, I thank Mahrad Almotahari, David Chalmers, Jonathan Farrell, Christopher Hom, Saja Parvizian, David Rosenthal, Jeff Speaks, Joel Velasco, and two anonymous referees. Extra special thanks go to Dave Hilbert and Daniel Stoljar: Dave, for wise council on this project from its infancy, and Daniel, for providing the semantic framework that made the project possible, and for encouragement throughout.

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Notes

1. There are other, subtly different, formulations of Transitivity that are orthogonal to the HOT and HOP implementations of Transitivity mentioned here. Although these alternative formulations have their virtues, they would unnecessarily complicate the present discussion, especially given that FO theories reject those formulations too. For a discussion of these other formulations in a different context, see Gottlieb (2016).

2. It is less obvious that Armstrong (1968) and Lycan (1996) are ambitious HO theorists.

3. Although we occasionally see others at least taking the idea seriously. See, e.g., Byrne (2004), a FO theorist, and Kriegel (2009), a HO theorist. I discuss Kriegel’s take in Section 3.4.

4. Kriegel (2009) is a self-representationalist. Self-representationalism counts as a version of HO theory since it entails Transitivity, and appeals to higher-order content, i.e., content whose subject matters involves representations or representational properties.

5. The backstory concerns a version of the ‘empty HOT’ objection to the HOT brand of HO theories, which Block deems fatal. Nothing to follow turns on these details.

6. See also Block (2008: 291). Block is not alone amongst FO theorists in endorsing (iii). See, for instance, Dretske (2006: 167).

7. Perhaps feeling pulled by such reactions, some FO theorists have floated the idea of preserving something like Transitivity by saying that conscious mental states are mental states we are ‘automatically’ aware of, in a way akin to how one automatically laughs one’s laugh or dance’s one dance (e.g., Block 2007; Tye 2009). At least in Block’s case, it is hard to see what this could come to aside from a highly deflationary view of HO awareness, since it won’t amount to any form of perceptual or cognitive access of the state in question, and will not—as the extinction case shows—be the sort of awareness that results in knowledge or being able to express that knowledge in verbal report. It’s also important to note that this option has never been fully and explicitly endorsed by FO theorists, or unpacked in any meaningful detail, save from the obvious truth that it is the sort of awareness that, if real, is reported by means of an internal accusative. Indeed, Tye actually denies that the relevant sense of ‘experiencing an experience’ consists in being conscious of that experience, saying that “supposing otherwise is no more plausible than supposing that if I have a laugh at a joke and in so doing I laugh a laugh at the joke, I am laughing at my laugh” (2009: 5). In any event, the point is this: for our purposes, ‘HO awareness’ picks out non-deflationary HO awareness-of. Awareness of a mental state will thus imply subject-level access to that state, or at least subject-level access to some features of that state. Mental states that are not even accessible, like those at play in visual extinction, are not objects of (non-deflationary) HO awareness.

8. More accurately, it’s an imagined public language. Hirsch thinks that semantic externalism commits us to this stipulation. But for doubts about the necessity of this stipulation, see Jackson (2013).

9. For HO and FO theorists to have a verbal dispute it only need be the case that they take the expression under dispute to have different meanings, whether or not this ultimately reflects any real difference in literal meaning for them. They need not be having what Chalmers (2011) calls a ‘narrow’ verbal dispute. I also assume that whenever speakers use an expression, they do so with beliefs about its meaning, be they tacit or explicit.

10. Karen Bennett’s (2009: 40) case of someone who uses ‘telephone’ to refer to leprechauns is a nice example of this.

11. Nagelian Transitivity is unlike (a) and (b) as it does not include an explicit quantifier, and unlike (c) as it is an indicative, not an interrogative. And like (a) and (b) but unlike (c), Nagelian Transitivity does not explicitly use the term ‘what.’ Despite these differences, Nagelian Transitivity is still a ‘what it is like’-sentence for our purposes.

12. The viability of Stoljar’s project is predicated on the meaning of ‘what it is like’-sentences not being a technical matter. On this sort of view, ‘what it is like’-sentences involve terms that may look like ordinary terms but in fact have a distinct meaning determined—as Stoljar (2016: 1183) puts it—by the ‘technocrats’ (i.e., philosophers of mind). Talk involving ‘what it is like’ would be like talk about ‘work’ in physics. Call this view the Technical Account (e.g., Lewis 1995: 140). The Technical Account is highly problematic (see, e.g., Stoljar 2016; Farrell 2016). There are several issues, but to just mention one: if the Technical Account were true, we would expect the relevant technical terms to be explicitly introduced as such. This is because technical terms sound and look just like their ordinary counterparts. Yet as Jonathan Farrell (2016) notes, that’s not what we find. And he is right: Nagel doesn’t do this, and neither do Wittgenstein (1980), B. A. Farrell (1950), or Sprigge (1971) before him. (‘What it is like’-talk, it turns out, predates Nagel.) I’m also setting aside views where TNC is meaningless (Hacker 2002), false, or trivial (Snowdon 2010). This is defensible given the ubiquity of TNC amongst HO and FO theorists.

13. My reliance on Hirsch’s framework is therefore rather minimal. Moreover, the question of charitable interpretation is relatively tractable, at least when compared to applying principles of charity to disputes about ontology. As we will see, HO theorists are rather forthcoming about what they mean by ‘what it is’-talk.

14. Two notes. First, Stoljar is concerned with ‘what it is like’-sentences in their stereotypical context of use. By ‘stereotypical’ Stoljar means the ways of using such sentences that speakers regard as routine, even if those ways are not mandated by their linguistic meaning. Stoljar uses the example ‘he has all the qualities of his father’ to convey this idea (2016: 1176). If we only consider this sentence’s linguistic meaning, the sentence could express propositions about any qualities. But it is good qualities that are relevant in its stereotypical use. Second, Stoljar is concerned with explicating the linguistic meaning of ‘what it is like’-sentences and the propositions—here, truth-conditions—expressed in a context by such sentences, not those conveyed (2016: 1164).

15. See Brogaard (2012) for broader readings of ‘feeling.’

16. For the distinction between thing-awareness and fact-awareness, see Dretske (1999).

17. Eric Lormand (2004) takes ‘seems’ to implicate an inner sense specifically, resulting in a view akin to Lycan’s HOP theory

18. In fact, there is even more latitude than this. I have formulated the Operator View in terms of a particular operator (‘it seems to you that’) because (as we’ll see) this is how Rosenthal interprets TNC, and this is how Stoljar himself formulates the Operator View. But as Stoljar (2016: 1186, Footnote 26) also notes, the Operator View could be formulated in terms of other sentential operators such as ‘Michael represents it as being the case that,’ or non-sentential operators like ‘Michael is aware of.’ The bedrock claim for our purposes is simply that, on the Operator View, ‘for the subject’ express a proposition concerning some sort of awareness-relation that holds between a subject and a mental state or event.

19. Everyone that I know of who is committed to Operator View in print is a HO theorist. See also Hellie (2007a), Weisberg (2011), and Janzen (2011).

20. Levine (2006) denies that the awareness-of relation we bear to our mental states is representational. He is in this respect closer to Hellie (2007b).

21. Remember: with Stoljar, we are in the first instance not interested in the linguistic meaning of ‘what it is like’-sentences, but what propositions ‘what it is like’-sentences stereotypically express. (See Footnote 14).

22. Different FO theorists will of course give different accounts of the nature of the affective relations described by ‘what it is like’-sentences in FO-English. But that’s perfectly consistent with the present point.

23. What Rosenthal calls ‘conscious mental states’, Block (2001) calls conscious mental states with ‘reflexivity,’ and he agrees that reflexivity is just higher-order awareness.

24. I tend to think that the difference between self-representationalists (those who do think there is a constitutive relationship between the higher-order awareness and the lower-order target) and traditional HO theorists (those who don’t think this) is not as significant as it is sometimes supposed. Kriegel (2009) says that conscious states are self-representational, but these states are actually comprised of two distinct vehicles. What motivates Kriegel to deny that there is a state for each vehicle—as would be the case on traditional HO theories—is just that the vehicles are bound together as a complex by some “psychologically real” relation.

25. In the background here is Rosenthal’s Sellarsian quality space theory of perception. Unlike consciousness-based theories, where consciousness is the only way we can know about mental qualities, the quality space theory is a perceptual-role theory. On this view, mental qualities figure into perceptual discriminations, which may or may not be made consciously (Rosenthal 2010: 274). The upshot for our purposes is that the very same qualities that occur when we are aware of our mental states—qualities like Q—occur when we are not aware of our mental states.

26. Kriegel (2003b: 2) uses ‘qualia’ interchangeably with Rosenthal’s ‘sensory qualities’ and ‘mental qualities.’

27. I thank an anonymous referee and Joel Velasco for pressing this specific way of adjudicating the dispute.

28. What about adjudication in terms of neural realization? It is occasionally said that HO theories implicate the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as essential to consciousness (e.g., Lau & Rosenthal 2011), but this is controversial. For example, on Gennarro ‘Wide Intrinsicality’ HO theory (2011: 278), only introspection requires PFC activity. Gennarro claims that it is posterior areas (e.g., inferior parietal cortex) that are essential to consciousness proper, which is exactly what Prinz says (2012: 98) on his FO ‘AIR’ theory.

29. Take note of how the method of elimination works. After banning the contentious term T found in the originally disputed sentence s, you get an alternative sentence s* in a newly restricted vocabulary (i.e. a vocabulary without T). The dispute over s* must be part of the dispute over s. Chalmers defines ‘part of’ like this: “a dispute over s* is part of a dispute over s when: (i) if the parties were to agree that s* is true, they would (if reasonable) agree that s is true, and (ii) if they were to agree that s* is false, they would (if reasonable) agree that s is false” (2011: 527). Now suppose we were to replace ‘John’s visual state is conscious’ with ‘John’s visual state is the sort of state that seems like it cannot be reduced to a physical state,’ such that ‘conscious’ is banned. The claim is this: there are participants in the HO-FO debate that would reasonably affirm (or deny) the former while denying (or affirming) the latter. That’s evidence that disputes over the latter are not part of disputes over the former, and I think the same point can plausibly be made for most other ways of substituting out the term ‘conscious.’

30. I thank an anonymous editor at Ergo and Christopher Hom for pressing me to clarify this issue.

31. See Thomasson (2017) for this point when it comes to disputes about physical object ontology.

32. My discussion of metalinguistic disputes and metalinguistic negotiation here and in the rest of this section is an extension of, and thus indebted to, the work of Delia Belleri, David Plunkett, Timothy Sundell, and Amie Thomasson.

33. The Secretariat case originally comes from Ludlow (2008), but has since been discussed heavily.

34. Conversational implicature is an obvious option for understanding what is done pragmatically in metalinguistic negotiation, but it isn’t the only option, nor is it plainly the best option. For discussion, see Thomasson (2017).