The emergence of the vocabulary of consciousness

The term ‘consciousness’ and its cognates are surprisingly late arrivals in the English vocabulary. No occurrence is to be found in Shakespeare. The first recorded case according to the Oxford English Dictionary is in the early seventeenth century. Initially ‘to be conscious’, like its Latin prototype ‘conscius’, meant: to be privy to something or some secret. So one might be said to be conscious to a murder or to an assignation. Applied to a person, it meant sharing a secret with another, and its common form was ‘to be conscious of such-and-such [information] to A [a person]’ from which it rapidly mutated into ‘to be conscious of such-and-such to oneself’ when the secret was not shared. What one was said to be conscious to oneself could be facts in general, facts about other people, and facts about oneself. By mid-century ‘to another’ and ‘to oneself’ had become dispensable, and ‘consciousness to something’ was transformed into ‘consciousness of something’. What one could be conscious of was any piece of information, including past, present, and future facts about oneself. The objects of consciousness were not initially subjective mental phenomena. When these were incorporated, they were limited to what one can feel, such as sensations, emotions, and moods. ‘Self-conscious’ was a mid-seventeenth century innovation. ‘Being conscious’ (i.e. awake) as opposed to ‘being unconscious’, as well as ‘subconscious’ are mid-nineteenth century additions, and ‘class-consciousness’, ‘money-conscious’, and ‘dress-conscious’ are twentieth-century supplements. By then the vocabulary of consciousness had become a useful and unproblematic array of relatively specialized instruments in our linguistic toolkit, which will be examined below.

Unfortunately ‘conscious’ and its family fell into the hands of philosophers in the mid-seventeenth century. The tale begins in France with Descartes’s novel use of ‘conscius’ (in Latin) and ‘la conscience’ or ‘conscient’ (in French). It occurs but once in his Meditations (1641) but becomes prominent in his Replies to Objections and later writings. It was Descartes who first invoked the idea of consciousness as a mark of the mental, and confined its extension to the contents of a person’s mind to which only he is privy. Consciousness of the contents of one’s own mind (which Descartes misleadingly denominated ‘thoughts’) is, he argued, indubitable, infallible, and transparent. Consciousness is confined to the present operations of the mind and is a cognitive faculty. We cannot be conscious of something’s being so unless it is so. We cannot have a ‘thought’ (in the extended sense) without knowing that we do and cannot make a mistake in taking ourselves to be thinking, doubting, supposing, seeming to perceive, feeling an emotion or mood. This novel notion rapidly caught on, and was further developed by John Locke, who introduced an epistemological twist: we know our thoughts, or more generally our experiences, by means of an inner sense (subsequently denominated ‘introspection’), for we perceive our perceptions. Consciousness of the operations of the mind is self-consciousness, in as much as one is conscious of one’s inner states and experiences as being states and experiences of one’s self).

It was Descartes who first invoked the idea of consciousness as a mark of the mental, and confined its extension to the contents of a person's mind to which only he is privy.

The faults in the early modern conception of consciousness

In almost every respect this philosophical conception of consciousness is mistaken. The mistakes have played havoc with our reflections ever since the seventeenth century.