Abstract
Content and Consciousness (C&C) outlines a framework for thinking about the relation between mind and brain that has been hugely influential and salutary. This chapter discusses a relatively neglected aspect of this framework – the treatment of thinking and reasoning in Chap. VIII. Here Dennett distinguishes two senses of “thinking”, parallel to the senses of “awareness” distinguished earlier in the book. In one sense “thinking” refers to sub-personal information processing whose effects are manifest in our intelligent behaviour; in the other it refers to conscious mental acts involved in problem solving. In retrospect, this distinction anticipates the dual-process theories proposed by many contemporary cognitive and social psychologists, and the chapter shows how Dennett’s distinction can be developed to provide an attractive version of dual-process theory. After introducing dual-process theories, the chapter reviews Dennett’s remarks about thinking in C&C and shows how they suggest a reinterpretation of dual-process theory as a dual-level theory, grounded in the personal/sub-personal distinction also introduced in C&C. Later sections flesh out this theory, drawing on ideas from Dennett’s later work, set out some of its attractions and implications, and show how it can be extended by combining it with a dual-attitude theory of belief also inspired by ideas in Dennett’s work. The result is a picture of the human mind as a two-level structure, composed of a lower level of sub-personal informational states and processes and a higher, “virtual” level of personally constructed mental attitudes and operations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
References are to the second edition (Dennett 1986).
- 2.
As I use the term, dual-process theories contrast with dual-mode theories, which recognize the existence of two styles of reasoning but regard them as different modes of a single mechanism, or type of mechanism.
- 3.
- 4.
Evans, for example, stresses the role of preattentive Type 1 processes in supplying content to Type 2 processing and highlights the need for control processes that allocate resources to the two systems and resolve conflicts between them (Evans 2009).
- 5.
When I talk of consciousness in this chapter I mean access consciousness – roughly, availability to other central mental processes and to verbal report. The question is whether, in the case of thought, such access is (at least sometimes) associated with a different mechanism of behavioural control. I am not concerned with issues that arise specifically from the role of phenomenal consciousness, the putative subjective qualities of experience (for the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness, see Block 1995).
- 6.
Dennett gives an example using private diagram drawing, which he claims can also be used for self-stimulation (1991, p. 197, pp. 220–1).
- 7.
- 8.
The idea is that once an individual has discovered a useful behaviour, such as the knack of making a certain tool, selectional pressure will arise for other members of its community to acquire it too. Those who find it easy to learn the behaviour will be selected for over those who find it hard, and, over time, individuals who are predisposed to learn it will come to predominate in the community (e.g., Dennett 1991, pp. 184–7, 2003).
- 9.
Note that this assumes that we can intentionally generate sensory imagery. This might involve the mental rehearsal of action, as proposed by Carruthers (Carruthers 2006, 2009). The idea is that when an action schema is activated, an internal efference copy of it is created, which is used to create a “forward model” of the action. This then generates proprioceptive and other sensory representations of the movements involved, which are used to guide the execution of the action and anticipate its consequences. In mental rehearsal, Carruthers argues, action schemata are activated offline, with the muscle commands suppressed but the efference copies still issued. The sensory images produced are then received by input systems (audition, vision, speech comprehension, etc.), and the information they carry globally broadcast to modular subsystems. Where the rehearsed action is an utterance, auditory images (inner speech) are produced and interpreted, and their contents broadcast.
- 10.
It may be asked whether it is legitimate, within the framework of C&C, to talk of personal-level actions causally affecting sub-personal information processing. After all, Dennett repeatedly cautions against confusing the levels throughout the book. It is true that strict causal explanations of sub-personal events will be framed wholly in sub-personal terms, but we can talk loosely of token personal events having sub-personal effects, provided the events in question are identical with sub-personal ones. And although Dennett denies that some personal events (pains, for example) can be identified with sub-personal ones (C&C, p. 94), he does not issue a blanket ban on personal-sub-personal identifications, and suggests that we proceed on a case-by-case basis (pp. 16–18, 96). (At the extreme we can treat the personal descriptions as fused and identify them with descriptions of global physical state; Dennett 1987, p. 57). In the case of imagistic self-stimulations it is plausible to think that at least rough identifications can be made with sequences of sub-personal events, perhaps involving the offline activation of motor schemata, and causal explanations mentioning them should be understood as shorthand for more rigorous but less perspicuous explanations couched in such terms.
- 11.
Note, too, that self-stimulation may not always be beneficial. There can be negative thinking as well as positive, and habits of harmful self-stimulation may contribute to some psychopathologies, such as anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
- 12.
It is true (as mentioned earlier) that the results of thinking1 (the decisions, conclusions, and actions) and the beliefs and desires that explain these results, are ascribed to the person too. Thus in a sense there are two levels of personal activity here, and I solve the box problem by solving (in a constitutive sense) the problem of how to stimulate myself in relevant ways. But the inferential operations involved in solving the latter problem are wholly sub-personal.
- 13.
This is argued in detail in Frankish (2004).
- 14.
I thank the editors of this volume for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. Thanks are also due to Jonathan Evans, Eileen Frankish, Liz Irvine, and Maria Kasmirli for their comments and advice.
References
Block, N. (1995). On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18(2), 227–287.
Carruthers, P. (2006). The architecture of the mind: Massive modularity and the flexibility of thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carruthers, P. (2009). An architecture for dual reasoning. In J. St. B. T. Evans & K. Frankish (Eds.), In two minds: Dual processes and beyond (pp. 109–127). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (See https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/jonathan-evans).
Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (Eds.). (1999). Dual-process theories in social psychology. New York: Guilford Press.
De Neys, W. (2006). Dual processing in reasoning: Two systems but one reasoner. Psychological Science, 17(5), 428–433.
De Neys, W., Vartanian, O., & Goel, V. (2008). Smarter than we think: When our brains detect that we are biased. Psychological Science, 19(5), 483–489.
De Sousa, R. B. (1971). How to give a piece of your mind: Or, the logic of belief and assent. The Review of Metaphysics, 25(1), 52–79.
Dennett, D. C. (1978). Brainstorms: Philosophical essays on mind and psychology. Montgomery: Bradford Books.
Dennett, D.C. (1986). Content and consciousness (2nd ed.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (First edition 1969).
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.
Dennett, D. C. (1998). Reflections on language and mind. In P. Carruthers & J. Boucher (Eds.), Language and thought: Interdisciplinary themes (pp. 284–294). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dennett, D. C. (2003). The Baldwin effect: A crane, not a skyhook. In B. H. Weber & D. J. Depew (Eds.), Evolution and learning: The Baldwin effect reconsidered (pp. 69–79). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dienes, Z., & Perner, J. (1999). A theory of implicit and explicit knowledge. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(5), 735–808.
Epstein, S. (1994). Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious. The American Psychologist, 49(8), 709–724.
Evans, J. St. B. T. (1989). Bias in human reasoning: Causes and consequences. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2007). Hypothetical thinking: Dual processes in reasoning and judgement. Hove: Psychology Press.
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 255–278.
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2009). How many dual-process theories do we need? One, two, or many? In J. St. B. T. Evans & K. Frankish (Eds.), In two minds: Dual processes and beyond (pp. 33–54). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2010). Thinking twice: Two minds in one brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Evans, J. St. B. T., & Over, D. E. (1996). Rationality and reasoning. Hove: Psychology Press.
Evans, J. St. B. T., & Stanovich, K. E. (2013). Dual-process theories of higher cognition: Advancing the debate. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(3), 223–241.
Frankish, K. (2004). Mind and supermind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frankish, K. (2010). Dual-process and dual-system theories of reasoning. Philosophy Compass, 5(10), 914–926.
Frankish, K., & Evans, J. St. B.T. (2009). The duality of mind: An historical perspective. In J. St. B. T. Evans & K. Frankish (Eds.), In two minds: Dual processes and beyond (pp. 1–29). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kahneman, D., & Frederick, S. (2002). Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 49–81). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Libet, B. (2004). Mind time: The temporal factor in consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lieberman, M. D. (2009). What zombies can’t do: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to the irreducibility of reflective consciousness. In J. St. B. T. Evans & K. Frankish (Eds.), In two minds: Dual processes and beyond (pp. 293–316). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McClure, S. M., Laibson, D. I., Loewenstein, G., & Cohen, J. D. (2004). Separate neural systems value immediate and delayed monetary rewards. Science, 306(5695), 503–507.
Reber, A. S. (1993). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge: An essay on the cognitive unconscious. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reyna, V. F. (2004). How people make decisions that involve risk: A dual-processes approach. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13(2), 60–66.
Roberts, M. J., & Newton, E. J. (2001). Inspection times, the change task, and the rapid-response selection task. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human Experimental Psychology, 54(4), 1031–1048.
Ryle, G. (1979). On thinking. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ryle, G. (2009). The thinking of thoughts: What is “Le Penseur” doing? In G. Ryle (Ed.), Collected papers colume 2: Collected essays 1929–1968 (pp. 494–510). Abingdon: Routledge.
Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 3–22.
Smith, E. R., & Collins, E. C. (2009). Dual-process models: A social psychological perspective. In J. St. B. T. Evans & K. Frankish (Eds.), In two minds: Dual processes and beyond (pp. 197–216). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, E. R., & DeCoster, J. (2000). Dual-process models in social and cognitive psychology: Conceptual integration and links to underlying memory systems. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4(2), 108–131.
Stanovich, K. E. (1999). Who is rational? Studies of individual differences in reasoning. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Stanovich, K. E. (2004). The robot’s rebellion: Finding meaning in the age of Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stanovich, K. E. (2011). Rationality and the reflective mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(5), 645–726.
Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wilson, T. D., Lindsey, S., & Schooler, T. Y. (2000). A model of dual attitudes. Psychological Review, 107(1), 101–126.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Frankish, K. (2015). Dennett’s Dual-Process Theory of Reasoning. In: Muñoz-Suárez, C., De Brigard, F. (eds) Content and Consciousness Revisited. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17374-0_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17374-0_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17373-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17374-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)