D.W. Smith’s Three-Facet Ontological Phenomenology

David Woodruff Smith’s theory of consciousness is an ontological phenomenology in which phenomenal consciousness is understood through three inseparable but distinguishable facets: intentional form, phenomenal appearance, and natural substrate. Consciousness is not reducible to neural or computational mechanisms, yet neither is it beyond nature; it is a structured phenomenon whose subjectivity, intentionality, qualitative appearance, embodiment, and basis in biological-cultural life require an ontology broad enough to hold them together (Smith, 2004). Smith’s approach develops Husserlian phenomenology in dialogue with analytic philosophy of mind, semantics, ontology, and cognitive science, treating consciousness as both first-personally manifest and world-involving. Smith’s contribution is to specify how phenomenality fits within a wider structure of intentionality and being.

Three Facets Of Consciousness

Smith’s most distinctive formulation is his three-facet ontology of consciousness. He distinguishes the form of consciousness, which is its intentionality; the appearance of consciousness, which is how it is experienced, including qualia; and the substrate of consciousness, which includes its physical, biological, and cultural basis (D.W. Smith, 2004). Cambridge’s abstract for “Three Facets of Consciousness” states this explicitly: intentionality is consciousness’s form, phenomenal appearance includes qualia, and substrate includes the physical, biological, and cultural bases of consciousness. This is meant to avoid two familiar errors: physicalism that discusses only substrate, and cultural or linguistic constructivism that discusses only discourse while neglecting consciousness itself.

The Semantic Structure Of Intentionality

Smith's account rests on a semantic theory of intentionality developed with Ronald McIntyre, on which Husserl's noema functions as an ideal meaning-content that prescribes the object of an act rather than being that object (Smith & McIntyre, 1982). Consciousness is directed toward things by virtue of meaning, within a horizon of further implicated meaning, yielding what Smith calls a constitutive realism: our consciousness takes its place in the world beyond our consciousness, yet we experience things in the world by virtue of noema and horizon (D.W. Smith, 2023). The basic structure—subject, act, content, object—supplies the framework within which inner awareness is then located.

Inner Awareness As Modal Character

The signature thesis addresses what makes an act conscious at all. According to D.W. Smith, a mental act is conscious if it includes a certain self-consciousness, whereby the subject is aware of its transpiring; where many philosophers propose that this involves higher-order monitoring, Smith holds instead that inner awareness consists in a modal character of the experience—part of the way one is conscious of this or that object (Smith, 2005). The reflexivity is thus working more as an adverb rather than as a direct object: it modifies how the act is executed rather than introducing a second act or a second object. This modal character carries a reflexive content, and the model shows how consciousness can include awareness of itself without a higher-order activity riding along with the basic act. Smith further factors the modality into distinct characters — phenomenality, reflexivity, egocentricity, and temporal and spatial sensibility — so that inner awareness is analyzed rather than posited as primitive.

Phenomenality Beyond Sensory Qualia

Because inner awareness belongs to the modality of any conscious act, phenomenal character on this view is not confined to sensation. Consciously thinking has its own phenomenality—an "appearing" in consciousness with a character of what it is like to so think—alongside its intentionality and its accompanying inner awareness. Smith thereby aligns with proponents of cognitive phenomenology against those who restrict phenomenal consciousness to sensory qualia, treating the felt quality of thought, judgment, and perception as continuous phenomena analyzable by the same model.

Three Facets Of Consciousness

Smith's ontological claim is that any entity admits a fundamental distinction among its form, appearance, and substrate; applied to consciousness, this distinguishes intentionality (form), the way we experience consciousness including so-called qualia (appearance), and the physical, biological, and cultural basis of consciousness (substrate) (Smith, 2001, 2004). These are facets of one activity, not three entities, on an analogy with a computer's program, interface, and hardware. The motivation is diagnostic: what makes consciousness "hard" for contemporary philosophy of mind is understanding how intentionality and subjectivity fit into the structure of the world — how phenomenology fits with ontology. The framework accordingly aims to preserve the reality of phenomenal appearance without any dualism and without reductive elimination.

Position And Significance

Smith's work is central to the analytic reception of phenomenology, and his modal model occupies distinctive ground in current debate: it shares with Sartre's non-positional self-awareness and with contemporary defenses of pre-reflective "for-me-ness" the rejection of higher-order accounts (Zahavi, 2005), while formulating that rejection in explicitly semantic and ontological terms, adjacent to but not identical with self-representational approaches (Kriegel & Williford, 2006). He has more recently extended the modal model to accounts of pure or nibbanic consciousness in meditative traditions, treating a form of pure consciousness as underlying and embracing further content in various forms of consciousness. The enduring contribution is a proposal that consciousness is self-intimating by its very manner of occurring — a claim advanced with formal precision, and one that locates phenomenal character within, rather than outside, a naturalistically grounded ontology.

References

Kriegel, U., & Williford, K. (Eds.). (2006). Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness. MIT Press.

Smith, D. W. (2001). Three facets of consciousness. Axiomathes, 12(1), 55–85.

Smith, D. W. (2004). Mind World: Essays in Phenomenology and Ontology. Cambridge University Press.

Smith, D. W. (2005). Consciousness with reflexive content. In D. W. Smith & A. L. Thomasson (Eds.), Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind (pp. 93–114). Clarendon Press.

Smith, D. W. (2021). Phenomenal intentionality, inner awareness, and the given. Synthese, 199(3–4), 10059–10076.

Smith, D. W. (2023). Constitution through noema and horizon: Husserl's theory of intentionality. In P. Londen, J. Yoshimi, & P. Walsh (Eds.), Horizons of Phenomenology (pp. 63–80). Springer.

Smith, D. W., & McIntyre, R. (1982). Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language. D. Reidel.

Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. MIT Press.