The Role of Consciousness and Intentionality in Perception, Semantics, Representations and Rules
Renate Bartsch

Abstract:
The role of consciousness and intentionality in perception, semantics, 
  representations, and rules
Renate Bartsch

This paper discusses the role of consciousness in the distinctions between 
reception and perception, between a purely causal and a referential or 
denotational semantics, and between linguistic ability and linguistic analysis,
including representations and rules. The first two topics are treated by 
designing several thought experiments based on the phenomenon of blindsight. 
It is argued that reception, causal semantics, and linguistic ability do not 
require consciousness, while a denotational semantics, a notion of truth and 
reality, linguistic analysis, forming representations and rules, and following 
these require consciousness and imagination,like any design activity does. 
They presuppose a linguistic or a picturing medium in which they are formed. 
The medium is interpreted, i.e. connected to the world, via a neural network
background established in training as our linguistic ability, which does not 
contain symbolic or picturing representations. Rather it functions as a system 
of dispositions in the ability to interpret pictorial and linguistic 
representations and rules. Dispositions are potential neural activation 
patterns and themselves are not language­like or picture­like representations. 
It is further pointed out that rules and representations can only indirectly 
function in changing or forming linguistic ability by serving in consciously 
constructing series of examples, which in learning processes can be a basis, a 
training set, on which linguistic abilities then are formed or reformed.