Abstract

There appears to be a bewildering variety of phenomena that the study of the mind classifies as unconscious, but does anything unite all these phenomena? Does the unconscious have an essence? Can there be a general theoretical account of unconscious mentality? We proceed in this chapter with three aims. The first is to dispute the standard view of the relationship between conscious and unconscious mentality, and with it, the standard view of the relationship between consciousness and intentionality. The second is to lay out several options for replacing the standard view, ones that allow for substantive differences between conscious and unconscious mentality. The third is to sketch the foundations of a unifying conception of the unconscious across the various disciplines that study the mind. Along the way, we apply these conjectures to examples of implicit cognition.