Most of us think of Freud as like a cartoon figure. He's on t-shirts and posters and as the butt of all kinds of jokes and so on. I think many of us are ambivalent is to precisely his role in contemporary thought. On the one hand, it's very common to, for instance, see a friend who is sharpening all their pencils and making sure all their other writing utensils are in good order and say, "Oh, they're being very anal." For example, or somebody might say your behavior is very neurotic. It's common sense to describe aspects of human behavior in terms that Freud and many of his colleagues popularized in the first part of the 20th century. On the other hand, as I have said, many people think of Freud as someone poised between science and literature, and it's by no means the case that psychoanalysis as a movement has anything like the prestige that he did 50-75 years ago. So, I think many of us are ambivalent as between on the one hand, we want to try to explain our own and others� behavior in psychoanalytic terms or at least using some of the principles of psychoanalysis. But on the other hand, we're not sure that that theorizing passes muster according to contemporary standards, in a sense you want to have our cake and eat it too, when it comes to using psychoanalytic ideas. The question is, is that a legitimate attitude to have and if not, why is it not? But back to the principle of Inference to the Best Explanation. Just to make sure we're clear. In principle, it is a perfectly adequate way of trying to justify a hypothesis as to how things work. So, for example, about a century ago, in the early part of the 20th century, scientists came forward with the idea of plate tectonics as an explanation for a number of phenomena that are otherwise puzzling such as earthquakes and the creation of mountain ranges. For about a half a century after that, evidence about the spreading of the seafloor came to provide pretty powerful justification for that theory. So, that while generally speaking, one can't observe the movement of plates that make up the crust of the Earth, Nevertheless, one can get indirect evidence such as seafloor spreading, growth of mountains, eruption of volcanoes, and many other things that can be accounted for according to the theory of plate tectonics, and if that's right, that provides powerful support for that theory. That's a theory that is widely accepted by scientists today. Can something like that happen for Freud's approach? That's a question that we'll be asking. Now, as Freud begins to present his theory of the primarily unconscious mind, he tells us that there are two crucial hypothesis in psychoanalysis that are described as an insult to the entire world. One of them is first of all, the claim that there are unconscious processes. The second one is the idea that those particular unconscious processes are primarily engaged with impulses of a sexual and violent character that he thinks are the bulk of what's happening in our unconscious minds, and according to him, explain a lot of human behavior. Whereas today, it's second nature, almost to suppose that there are unconscious processes that account for human behavior, a century or so ago that would indeed have been shocking. If we think of the incredible influence that Descartes and many of his followers had on primarily Western intellectual inquiry, it should come as no surprise that the idea of a mental state is almost something that brings with it by definition the idea that it would be conscious. Remember, phosphorescence if you're in a state of believing or wanting or expecting or wondering or experiencing something then you can't help but notice that, at least if you pay a tiny bit of attention to your own mind. That's why Descartes was able to in the process of developing his own rigorous theory of the physical world, start out with introspection, that is, start out with the idea that he could survey what's going on inside of his mind, and be sure that he caught everything that he was looking for. Whereas, if Freud's right, some processes are not open to introspection. Other processes are very difficult to find by means of introspection. What is perhaps more shocking especially for the late Victorian audience that he was speaking to is that those processes are very much about sexuality and violence. The idea being that without necessarily being aware of it, many of us have these powerful urges towards rapacious sexual activity, towards unfettered violence that left to their own devices would probably express themselves in our behavior, but somehow for most of us manage not to do so, and it will require some explaining as to how that goes. So, let me just go back to the notion of the unconscious to make sure that we're clear about what it is. There's a difference between something's being nonconscious and something's being unconscious. There are all kinds of phenomena that happen inside me that are nonconscious and not in any sense unconscious. The growth of my fingernails, my metabolism, the processing that happens to produce a visual image, for example, are all processes within me that our nonconscious, but that does not make them unconscious. What would be required to make a process inside of me, unconscious is I would have to be a mental phenomenon. As we've seen before, mental phenomena divided to three primary types. Cognitive, things like beliefs, expectations, information processing essentially. Affective, and that's going to include cases of emotions and moods where emotions are mental states that come with a feeling, but that also have an object. There'll be things like fear and hope. There's always an answer to the question what you're afraid of or what you're hopeful about. Then, other types of affective states are going to be moods such as anxiety, exuberance that might or might not have an object. There may not be an answer to the question, what are you anxious about, for example; as well as experiential states such as experiencing the smell of vanilla or taste of a lemon. So, those three primary types of mental states: cognitive, affective, experiential are going to be the core constituents of the mind. To claim that there's an unconscious phenomenon is therefore going to be to claim that there is a phenomenon that's occurring inside of me that is not conscious, but it's nevertheless a cognitive, affective or experiential state. Now, the question is, what sorts of things could those be? What would they be like? How could we possibly be convinced that any of those things is actually occurring inside of us.
