Abstract

According to most philosophy of mind and cognitive science literature, consciousness has nothing to do with society and little to do with language; it is centred in the individual, conceived as an autonomous rational agent, and it is often reduced to the physics of the brain. Such impoverished reductionist settings exclude nearly everything of any real interest, including most of what is discussed in this paper; in particular, phrases like ‘consciousness raising’, ‘global consciousness of the environment’, and ‘class consciousness’ can at best be seen as bad metaphors. But a deeper understanding of consciousness supports a very different conclusion