The word consciousness is used in a variety of ways that need to be distinguished. Sometimes the word means merely any human mental activity at all (as when one talks about the “history of consciousness”), and sometimes it means merely being awake (as in As the anesthetic wore off, the animal regained consciousness). The most philosophically troublesome usage concerns phenomena with which people seem to be “directly acquainted”—as the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) described them—each in his own case. Each person seems to have direct, immediate knowledge of his own conscious sensations and of the contents of his propositional attitudes—what he consciously thinks, believes, desires, hopes, fears, and so on. In common philosophical parlance, a person is said to have “incorrigible” (or uncorrectable) access to his own mental states. For many people, the existence of these conscious states in their own case is more obvious and undeniable than anything else in the world. Indeed, the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) regarded his immediate conscious thoughts as the basis of all of the rest of his knowledge. Views that emphasize this first-person immediacy of conscious states have consequently come to be called “Cartesian.”

It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to say much about consciousness that is not highly controversial. Initial efforts in the 19th century to approach psychology with the rigour of other experimental sciences led researchers to engage in careful introspection of their own mental states. Although there emerged some interesting results regarding the relation of certain sensory states to external stimulation—for example, laws proposed by Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87) that relate the apparent to the real amplitude of a sound—much of the research dissolved into vagaries and complexities of experience that varied greatly over different individuals and about which interesting generalizations were not forthcoming.

It is worth pausing over some of the difficulties of introspection and the consequent pitfalls of thinking of conscious processes as the central subject matter of psychology. While it can seem natural to think that all mental phenomena are accessible to consciousness, close attention to the full range of cases suggests otherwise. The Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was particularly adept at calling attention to the rich and subtle variety of ordinary mental states and to how little they lend themselves to the model of an introspectively observed object. In a typical passage from his later writings (Zettel, §§484–504), he asked:

Is it hair-splitting to say: —joy, enjoyment, delight, are not sensations? —Let us at least ask ourselves: How much analogy is there between delight and what we call “sensation”? “I feel great joy” —Where? —that sounds like nonsense. And yet one does say “I feel a joyful agitation in my breast.” —But why is joy not localized? Is it because it is distributed over the whole body? … Love is not a feeling. Love is put to the test, pain not. One does not say: “That was not true pain, or it would not have gone off so quickly.”

In a related vein, the American linguist Ray Jackendoff proposed that one is never directly conscious of abstract ideas, such as goodness and justice—they are not items in the stream of consciousness. At best, one is aware of the perceptual qualities one might associate with such ideas—for example, an image of someone acting in a kindly way. While it can seem that there is something right in such suggestions, it also seems to be immensely difficult to determine exactly what the truth might be on the basis of introspection alone.

In the late 20th century, the validity and reliability of introspection were subject to much experimental study. In an influential review of the literature on “self-attribution,” the American psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson discussed a wide range of experiments that showed that people are often demonstrably mistaken about their own psychological processes. For example, in problem-solving tasks, people are often sensitive to crucial clues of which they are quite unaware, and they often provide patently confabulated accounts of the problem-solving methods they actually employ. Nisbett and Wilson speculated that in many cases introspection may not involve privileged access to one’s own mental states but rather the imposition upon oneself of popular theories about what mental states a person in one’s situation is likely to have. This possibility should be considered seriously when evaluating many of the traditional claims about the alleged incorrigibility of people’s access to their own minds.

In any event, it is important to note that not all mental phenomena are conscious. Indeed, the existence of unconscious mental states has been recognized in the West since the time of the ancient Greeks. Obvious examples include the beliefs, long-range plans, and desires that a person is not consciously thinking about at a particular time, as well as things that have “slipped one’s mind,” though they must in some way still be there, since one can be reminded of them. Plato thought that the kinds of a priori reasoning typically used in mathematics and geometry involve the “recollection” (anamnesis) of temporarily forgotten thoughts from a previous life. Modern followers of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) have argued that a great many ordinary parapraxes (or “Freudian slips”) are the result of deeply repressed unconscious thoughts and desires. And, as noted above, many experiments reveal myriad ways in which people are unaware of, and sometimes demonstrably mistaken about, the character of their mental processes, which are therefore unconscious at least at the time they occur.

Partly out of frustration with introspectionism, psychologists during the first half of the 20th century tended to ignore consciousness entirely and instead study only “objective behaviour” (see below Radical behaviourism). In the last decades of the century, psychologists began to turn their attention once again to consciousness and introspection, but their methods differed radically from those of early introspectionists, in ways that can be understood against the background of other issues.

One might wonder what makes an unconscious mental process “mental” at all. If a person does not have immediate knowledge of it, why is it not merely part of the purely physical machinery of the brain? Why bring in mentality at all? Accessibility to consciousness, however, is not the only criterion for determining whether a given state or process is mental. One alternative criterion is that mental states and processes enter into the rationality of the systems of which they are a part.