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Commentary on On the Nature of Repressed

Contents
David Livingstone Smith

Director, New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology,
Portland, Maine, U.S.A.
Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: David Livingstone Smith (2003) Commentary on On the Nature of Repressed Contents,
Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 5:2, 147-151, DOI:
10.1080/15294145.2003.10773419
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Neuro-Psychoanalysis, 2003, 5 (2)

147

Commentary on On the Nature of Repressed Contents

David Livingstone Smith (Portland, Maine)

ARE UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL STATES REALLY

NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL DISPOSITIONS?
WHY SEARLES MODEL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
WONT DO
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it.

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George Santayana

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science provide

important concepts and tools for making sense of
the architecture of mind. One of the most prominent
contributors to the debates in this arena is the philosopher John Searle. Vesa Talvitie and Juhani
Ihanus have taken the very useful step of exploring
how Searles approach might clarify our conception
of the unconscious. Although I do not share their
evaluation of Searle, I applaud their effort.
I shall first explore the historical background of
the debate that Searle has revived (a position very
much like the one that he espouses was widely held
in the nineteenth century) and then go on to present
Searles theory and some objections to it, culminating in an argument against the dispositionalist position derived from the work of Sigmund Freud.
Finally, I shall comment on some reservations expressed by Talvitie and Ihanus about my interpretation of the strength of this argument.
Historical Background
In order to come to grips with the debate about the
nature of unconscious mental states, one must begin
in the seventeenth century, when Ren Descartes
propounded his highly influential model of the
mind. The Cartesian platform was built from three
planks, each resting upon the previous one, namely:
1. Minds and bodies are different kinds of thing,
which interact with one another. Bodies are material things, operating on mechanical principles,
whereas minds are nonmaterial things.
David Livingstone Smith: Director, New England Institute for
Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, Portland, Maine,
U.S.A.
I would like to thank Prof. Adolf Grnbaum for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

2. Minds are entirely conscious. They can neither

be mistaken about nor ignorant of their own
contents.
3. Introspection provides a true account of mental
contents.
Over the centuries, aspects of the model were modified (most notable, the notoriously problematic
claim that body and mind interact), but the fundamental notion that mind is a nonphysical and entirely
conscious entity remained the dominant psychological perspective until at least the early decades of the
twentieth century.
During the nineteenth century, developments in
the sciences were undermining the Cartesian conception of the mind from five directions. In 1847
Helmholz, Joule, and Meyer discovered the Law of
Conservation of Energy, which effectively ruled out
causal relations between material brains and immaterial minds. In 1859 Darwin published his Origin of
Species, which hinted that human beings evolved
from other creatures under the impact of physical
selection pressures. He made this explicit in The
Descent of Man (1871) and argued for the psychological continuity between human beings in The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872). The birth of neuroscience demonstrated that
mental processes were at the very least dependent
upon the physical brain. In particular, the birth of
aphasiology demonstrated that language itself,
which had been hailed as a distinctive feature of the
immaterial mind, was neuroanatomically and neurophysiologically based. Systematic clinical observations of neurological conditions such as the agnosias, and psychiatric conditions such as hysteria,
suggested the existence of mental phenomena beyond the reach of introspection. The revival of Mesmerism in the new and more scientific form of hypnotism demonstrated that it is possible to act under
the influence of ideas of which one is unaware.
For the purpose of this discussion, we will mainly
concentrate on the implications of the mounting
evidence for the existence of unconscious ideas,
which created a terrible bind for the advocates of the
Cartesian point of view. How could the existence of
unconscious mental contents be squared with the
belief that all mental states are conscious? There
were two possible moves. One was to claim that the
states in question are mental but not really unconscious. Putatively unconscious mental states were

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148

understood as the mental states occurring in a dissociated portion of ones own consciousness. If a mind
contains a split-off secondary consciousness, the
contents of this consciousness might be inaccessible
to the primary consciousness in much the same way
that the contents of another persons consciousness
are inaccessible to it. The other alternative was to
claim that the states in question were unconscious
but not really mental. Advocates of this viewpoint
argued that what appeared to be unconscious mental
states were actually neurophysiological dispositions
to form conscious mental states and were not themselves intrinsically mental. Franz Brentano, Gustav
Fechner, John Stuart Mill, William Carpenter, John
Hughlings Jackson, and Henry Maudsley were all
proponents of this approach, which defined the
mind as The individuals conscious process, together with the dispositions and predispositions
which condition it (Baldwin, 1902, p. 83). Fechner
gave a very concise summary, as follows:
Sensations, ideas, have, of course, ceased actually
to exist in the state of unconsciousness, insofar as
we consider them apart from their substructure.
Nevertheless something persists within us, i.e. the
bodymind activity of which they are a function,
and which makes possible the reappearance of sensation, etc. [Fechner, cited in Brentano, 1874, p.
104]

Freud toyed with both the dissociationist and the

dispositionalist approaches early in his career but
came to reject both, along with the entire Cartesian
scheme, arguing that the mind is a function of the
brain, that introspection is methodologically unsound, and that cognitive processes are intrinsically
unconscious (Smith, 1999, 2002).
Dispositionalism Redux
John Searle has revived a version of the dispositionalist thesis, arguing that conscious mental
states are occurrent, and unconscious mental
states are really dispositions to form conscious mental states. According to Searles theory, unconscious
mental states are not really mental: they are simply the causal substrate for conscious mental states.
They are called mental because of what they can
do, rather than because of what they are.
Searle calls the claim that unconscious mental
states are really just possible conscious mental
states the Connection Principle (CP). He has two
versions of CP. The version that I have just described is concerned with the causal features of the
relationship between conscious and unconscious
states. The other version, which focuses on the
logical relationship between the two, asserts that in
order for a state to be an unconscious mental state it

David Livingstone Smith

must be the sort of thing that could be conscious in

principle (Searle, 1995, p. 548).1 In the remainder
of this discussion I will confine my attention to the
causal version of CP, as Searle for the most part
does himself.
Searle writes:
Mental states are supervenient on neurophysiological states in the following respect: Type-identical
neurophysiological causes would have type-identical mentalistic effects. Thus, to take the famous
brain-in-a-vat example, if you had two brains that
were type-identical down to the last molecule, then
the causal basis of the mental would guarantee that
they would have the same mental phenomena.
[Searle, 1992, pp. 124125]

This entails that physical states are causally sufficient, though not necessarily causally necessary, for
the corresponding mental states (p. 125).
This is a very peculiar conceptualization of supervenience. Supervenience is normally regarded as
constitutive rather than causal. It is a relationship
between what are commonly called levels of organization. So, for instance, the liquidity of water
supervenes upon its molecular composition. The
relationship between the micro-constitution of water and the property of liquidity is not at all like a
causal relationship. It makes sense to say that fire
causes smoke, but it does not make sense to say that
the micro-composition of water causes its liquidity:
the composition of water does not cause its liquidityit is its liquidity at temperatures between 0oC
and 100oC under normal atmospheric pressure. The
fact that water displays liquidity only within this
temperature range illustrates that constitutive supervenience is causally sensitive. Causal relations between changes in temperature and changes in the
state of the microstructure of a sample of water
determine which of its supervenient dispositional
properties will manifest at any given time.
Supervenience holds between properties (in this
example, the property of having the microstructure
H2O and the macroproperty of liquidity), whereas
causal relations hold between events. Event tokens
are temporally ordered (event a is either before,
after, or simultaneous with event b) whereas properties are not. Searle goes on to claim that he is
proposing a causal form of supervenience (Searle,
1992), which he dubs vertical causation to distinguish it from the usual horizontal causation, but
it is unclear how if at all the causal form of supervenience differs from ordinary constitutive supervenience.
1
The two conceptions of CP seem to be at odds with one another, in
that the neural states claimed by Searle to supply the dispositional basis
for conscious thoughts are, by his own account, not the sort of things
that can in principle become conscious because they allegedly lack the
crucial element of aspectual shape.

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On the Nature of Repressed Contents Commentaries

149

According to Searle, intentional states necessarily possess a property that he calls aspectual shape
(the term intentional is used in its philosophical
rather than its vernacular sense to mean contentbearing). An intentional state possesses aspectual
shape insofar as it presents its conditions of satisfaction under some aspects and not others (Searle,
1995, p. 548). This seems to be a nonlinguistic
version of what philosophers call the sense of a
term. Although they all have the same referent,
Mark Twain, Sam Clemens, and the author of
Huckleberry Finn each have a different sense. It is
this difference in sense or intensionality that accounts for the fact that if the statement Paul believes that Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer is true,
it does not follow that the sentence Paul believes
that Sam Clemens wrote Tom Sawyer is also true.
Aspectual shape is, as it were, the sense of a
mental state. Although Searle is a self-avowed materialist, he believes that mental properties are irreducibly subjective, supervening upon the physical
properties of the central nervous system. The
aspectual shape of mental states exemplifies their
essential subjectivity, which cannot be exhaustively or completely characterized solely in thirdperson, behavioral or even neurophysiological
predicates (Searle, 1992, p. 168).
We can now bring these various points together
and examine Searles argument on behalf of the
dispositionalist thesis. Unconscious mental states
possess a purely neurophysiological ontology.

that it would be foolhardy to adopt it as a workable

theory of unconscious mental states.
Searle asserts that aspectual shape cannot be
exhaustively characterized in third-person terms.
This may be true, but he supplies us with no arguments or evidence that it is. In any case, his framing
of the issue appears to be misconceived. The more
pertinent question is whether or not aspectual shape
is constitutively fixed by a set of subvenient neurophysiological properties that can be characterized in
third-person terms. Clearly, if aspectual shape is
neurally coded in some fashion, it must in principle
be possible to describe this neural code exhaustively
in third-person terms. What if aspectual shape isnt
neurally coded? This alternative seems incompatible with physicalism. After all, if aspectual shape is
not constitutively fixed on the neural level, if there
are no neural properties that vary systematically
with the conscious states supervening upon them,
then even the aspectual shape of conscious mental
states is inexplicable within a physicalist framework. I therefore find myself in agreement with Max
Velmans, who writes that It is likely . . . that all
neural representations of internal or external events
code those events under some aspects and not others. Indeed it is difficult to envisage how any representational system could be constructed differently
(Velmans, 1990, p. 629).
Additional problems arise when Searle gets down
to the specifics of the relationship between neural
dispositions and conscious mental items:

1. Neurophysiological phenomena can be exhaustively characterized in third-person terms.

This sort of dispositional ascription of causal capacities is quite familiar to us from common sense.
When, for example, we say of a substance that it is
bleach or poison, we are ascribing to a chemical
ontology a dispositional causal capacity to produce
certain effects. [Searle, 1992, p. 161]

2. Truly mental states possess aspectual shape.

3. Aspectual shape cannot be exhaustively characterized in third-person terms.
4. Therefore, unconscious mental states are not
truly mental.
If unconscious mental states are not really mental,
what are they? The dispositionalist thesis is brought
in to answer this question. They are, says Searle,
states possessing an objective neurophysiological
ontology which has power to cause conscious
subjective mental phenomena (Searle, 1992, p.
168).

Dispositionalism and its discontents

Searles story about the nature of those items that
are commonly (albeit in his view, mistakenly) called
unconscious mental contents is riddled with difficulties. I regard Searles account as so problematic

Notice that although these dispositions operate

causally (in the horizontal sense) rather than constitutively, Searle takes the dispositional powers of
bleach and poison to be analogous to the dispositional power of unconscious neural states to produce conscious states. Is it really plausible to claim
that neural events bring about mental events in the
same kind of way that bleach turns a washrag white?
In order for the brain to produce conscious states in
the manner that bleach turns a rag white, brain and
mind would have to be separate things (the bleach
acts upon the rag). This cant be right. For a
physicalist it has got to be neurons all the way
down!
Freud developed a powerful argument against the
dispositionalist position, which I call the Continuity
Argument (CA) (Freud, 1912, 1913, 1915, 1926a,
1926b, 1940a, 1940b). CA takes as its starting point
the observation that conscious mental life is seman-

150

tically discontinuous. Our thoughts are often interrupted, or jump from subject to subject, and yet
despite these discontinuities there is something that
secures the overall continuity of mental life.

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The data of consciousness have a very large number

of gaps in them; both in healthy and in sick people
psychical acts often occur which can be explained
only by presupposing other acts, of which, nevertheless, consciousness affords no evidence. . . . Our
most personal daily experience acquaints us with
ideas that come into our head, we do not know from
where, and with intellectual conclusions arrived at
we do not know how. [Freud, 1915, pp. 166167]

How can the discontinuity of conscious thought be

reconciled with its overall continuity? What is it
that supplies the semantic glue? Whatever it is, it
cannot be conscious, because, as we have already
noted, conscious mental life is discontinuous, but it
must be mental, because only mental processes can
secure mental continuity.
All these conscious acts remain disconnected and
unintelligible if we insist upon claiming that every
mental act that occurs in us must also necessarily be
experienced by us through consciousness; on the
other hand, they fall into a demonstrable connection
if we interpolate between them the unconscious acts
which we have inferred. [p. 167]

Freud is well aware that the dispositionalist will

claim that these ideas existed in a nonmental state
prior to making their appearance in consciousness.
At this very point we may be prepared to meet with
the philosophical objection that the latent conception did not exist as an object of psychology, but as
a physical disposition for the recurrence of the same
psychic phenomenon. [p. 167]

He then responds:
The obvious answer to this is that a latent memory
is, on the contrary, an unquestionable residuum of a
psychical process. [p. 167]

Note that Freud does not assert that the latent states
are nonphysiological. Freud was a physicalist and
held that latent or unconscious mental states possess
both a neural ontology and mental properties. Unconscious mental states are states of the central
nervous system that encode representational content. But doesnt Freuds response to the dispositionalist position simply beg the question? Not
if we carefully unpack its implicit content.
The example of unconscious problem-solving is
particularly useful for driving home the importance
of CA. Consider Melvin Calvins discovery of the
mechanism of carbon-dioxide assimilation in photosynthesis, for which he won the Nobel Prize for
chemistry in 1961. Calvin records that, although he
had been working on this problem for a long time,

David Livingstone Smith

the answer came to him quite suddenly and unexpectedly at a time when he was not consciously
occupied with it. In Calvins own words:
One day I was sitting in the car while my wife was
on an errand. For some months I had had some
basic information from the laboratory that was incompatible with everything that, until then, I knew
about the cycle. I was waiting, sitting at the wheel of
the car, probably parked in the red zone, when the
recognition of the missing compound occurred. It
occurred just like thatquite suddenlyand suddenly, also, in a matter of seconds, the cyclic character of the path of carbon became apparent to me.
But the original recognition of phosphoglyceric
acid, and how it got there, and how the carbon
dioxide acceptor might be regenerated, all occurred
within a matter of 30 seconds. So, there is such a
thing as inspiration, I suppose, but one has to be
ready for it. I dont know what made me ready at
that moment, except that I didnt have anything else
to do but sit and wait. And perhaps that in itself has
some moral. [Calvin, 1992, pp. 6768]

Let us assume that the last time Calvin had consciously thought about photosynthesis had been
three hours prior to his revelation in the parking
lot (the exact interval is unimportant). I will refer
to these moments as T1 and T2, respectively. Calvin
did not consciously understand the mechanism of
carbon-dioxide assimilation at T1 and had not consciously thought about it at all between T1 and T2.
The obvious inference is that he had thought about
the problem unconsciously between T1 and T2, for
otherwise his sudden enlightenment at T2 would be
nothing short of miraculous! From a materialist
standpoint, we can say that a subset of the neurophysiological processes occurring in Melvin
Calvins brain during the interval between T1 and T2
instantiated thoughts about the mechanism of carbon-dioxide assimilation. Notice that we must infer
that during the interval Calvin was thinking about
photosynthesis; in other words, we cannot imagine
that these thoughts were devoid of content.
We can set out the Continuity Argument more
formally as follows:
1. There are gaps in the semantic continuity of
conscious mental life.
2. Only content-bearing mental processes can provide mental continuity. Nonmental processes do
not possess semantic content and therefore cannot provide semantic continuity.
3. All mental events are caused.
4. In cases where a conscious mental event at T1 is
followed by (a) a period of conscious mental
activity semantically discontinuous with it, or (b)
a period during which conscious mental activity
has ceased entirely, and (c) which is in turn

On the Nature of Repressed Contents Commentaries

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followed by the involuntary occurrence of a conscious mental event at T2 the content of which
provides a solution to the problem addressed at
T1, which (c) cannot reasonably be attributed to
any cause other than the subjects own mental
activity, then:
5. The subjects unconscious mental activity is a
necessary cause for the event at T2.
6. Therefore, unconscious mental states can be occurrent.
But this conclusion is precisely what Searle would
have us disbelieve! According to Searles conception, the relevant neurophysiological processes occurring in Calvins brain between T1 and T2 were
not about carbon-dioxide assimilation. In fact, these
neural states were not about anything. They merely
had the dispositional powers to produce thoughts
about carbon-dioxide assimilation given the right
circumstances. This is more than implausible, it is
arguably incoherent.
Talvitie and Ihanus remark of my interpretation
of CA in a previous publication (Smith, 1999) that
it is not self-evident whether aspectual shape is
needed for continuity between T1 and T2. When
looking at the performance of computers . . . we can
find continuity between different inputs and outputs, yet in computers there are surely no mental
processes and later remark that it is . . . hard to say
what it means to say that mental processes are
needed for continuity when it is not known what
the mental meansSmith does not define the
term. It is worth noting that the question of whether
or not computers instantiate mental functions remains a lively debate in cognitive science. Indeed,
Searle is a prominent contributor to this debate.
However, the heart of the issue is this. Whatever
ones theory of what constitutes mental life, it seems
intuitively self-evident that whatever goes on between T1 and T2 in Calvin-style examples (and there
are many of these in the history of scientific discovery and in everyday life) seems inescapably mental.
Is it really conceivable that the solution to a profound problem in biochemistry is accomplished
nonmentally? If we grant that Calvins discovery
was produced by mental processes, we must conclude either that (a) only syntactic processes occur
between T1 and T2 and that, contrary to Searle,
syntax is sufficient for mentality, or (b) semantic
processes occurred between T1 and T2 and that,

151

contrary to Searle, neurophysiological processes

possess content. The implications of the Continuity
Argument appear to trap the Searlean between a
rock and a hard place.
Talvitie and Ihanus remark quite rightly that It is
problematic to show how repressed contents would
exist other than as neurophysiological structures.
But what is at stake is not the neural ontology of
mental events, it is the question of whether that
neural ontology allows occurrent unconscious mental events: whether unconscious thoughts are merely
conscious thoughts that might occur, or whether
they are thoughts occurring now.

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