The Quality of Unconscious Thought

David Pitt argues that whereas conscious thinking must be understood in qualitative terms, unconscious processes that feed into thought and cognition can be modelled without this commitment — hence without positing unconscious qualitative characters. Qualityfree neural-computational processes, instead, perform the functions we would have expected genuine unconscious mentality to fulfil, so Pitt suggests. I argue, against Pitt, that we need to extend the qualitative conception of mental content, especially thought content, to the unconscious. The core reason I give is that the phenomenal intentionalist critique of causal naturalist approaches to content, that accounts of content in terms of causation cannot capture the determinacy of conscious thought, applies also to Pitt's attempt to do without unconscious qualitative characters when modelling the unconscious processes that feed into conscious thought and cognition. Phenomenal intentionalists are right that only mental qualities can enable the mind–brain to dice contents and content-related operations sufficiently finely as to capture the way cognition actually works. Hence, as well as a quality of conscious thought we must posit qualities of unconscious thought. A thoroughgoing phenomenal intentionalism, thus, in view of the role of unconscious cognition in mental life overall, needs to posit unconscious qualitative characters, notably of thought.