The persistent problem of targetless thought

Targetless thought raises a persistent problem for higher-order theories of consciousness. In cases of targetless thought, a subject represents herself as being in a mental state that she in fact lacks. One popular response among proponents of the higher-order theory is to say that it can appear to a subject that she is in a conscious mental state, even though that mental state doesn’t exist (Picciuto, 2017; Rosenthal 1997, 2011; Weisberg, 2010). Recently Brown and Lau (2019) and Lau and Rosenthal (2011) have shifted the debate to empirical ground, and offered evidence for real-world cases of targetless thought. In this paper, I give an alternate explanation of the evidence which avoids the need to posit targetless thoughts. As I argue, this challenges the empirical argument for the higher-order view because it shows that the evidence on offer does not discriminate between the first-order and higher-order theories of consciousness.