David Rosenthal is an American philosopher who has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, particularly in the area of consciousness and related topics.
Rosenthal is a founding member and past president (2008) of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
So HOTs make it appear subjectively that our awareness of our conscious states is direct and transparent.
Because HOTs are seldom conscious, we know about them not from first-person access, but because they are theoretical posits whose occurrence is established by their significant explanatory role.
10); another example is why the so-called essential indexical appears to be irreducible, along with other features of the awareness and identification of the self (Rosenthal 2012).
On Rosenthal's quality-space theory, mental qualities are fixed not by consciousness, but by their role in the perceptual discrimination of stimulus properties.
Mental qualities are what conscious and unconscious perceiving have in common, in virtue of which they are both genuinely perceptual.
Those who hold that mental qualities are intrinsically conscious typically appeal to intuitions to that effect.
Rosenthal argues that we should not credit such intuitions, since they rely on subjective awareness, which in turn has no access to any mental phenomena that are not conscious.
Also, taking such intuitions at face value has an anti-theoretical effect, disallowing anything not sanctioned by first-person access.
A special benefit of quality-space theory is that it enables an independent, non-question-begging way to individuate the sensory modalities (Rosenthal 2015).
Rosenthal notes that this is a signal advantage of the combined theory, since we typically describe what it is like to be in conscious qualitative states in just such comparative terms.
The comparative account of conscious mental qualities is in this way an advantage of the combined quality-space and HOT theory.
But that version has typically been advanced in combination with the intentionalist view that perceiving is exclusively conceptual.
Global-workspace (GW) theories (Stanislas Dehaene & Lionel Naccache, and Bernard Baars) posit that mental states are conscious in virtue of their content's having wide availability to various downstream processes.
But Rosenthal argues that GW theories face the difficulty that many mental states, such as relatively peripheral perceptions and stray thoughts, can be conscious even though their content is minimally available if at all.
The real complaint is simply that HOT theory doesn't construe subjective awareness as intrinsic to conscious states.
Rosenthal argues that it is doubtful that such a model is compatible with any explanation in psychological terms of the variety of ways in which there is something it is like to be in a conscious state.
Rosenthal argues that taking that intuition at face value precludes any informative explanation of what it is for a state to be conscious.
Rosenthal has also written extensively about the connections among consciousness, thought, and speech, and has edited and co-edited several anthologies.