Pragmatic Perspectives on the Psychology of Meaning

A recurrent idea in the history of psychology is that one is conscious of outputs but not of the complex processes underlying the generation of outputs, which is evident in the out-of-the-blue, “eureka-like” experiences associated with intuition. We examine how this idea may suffer from a logical fallacy and may thus have inadvertently hindered progress on the study of the intimate liaisons among high-level central processes, intuition, and overt action. It is proposed that, for various reasons, the only undisputable output in the nervous system is overt action. Once this is accepted, the overlooked relationship between conscious central processes and overt action can be examined. A review of the evidence reveals that conscious processing is in the business of, not low-level perceptual processing, motor control, or action production per se, but of constraining a peculiar form of knowledge-based, integrated action-goal selection, which can lead to integrated actions such as holding one's breath. Unconscious processing can influence behavior indirectly, by producing these conscious constraining dimensions that modulate action-goal selection, or directly, through unintegrated actions such as reflexively inhaling or responding to a subliminal stimulus. From this standpoint, eureka-like intuitions reflect not an atypical brain process but the general nature by which unconscious machinations influence action either directly or indirectly, through the limited purview of consciousness.