Toomela’s Language-Mediated Structural-Systemic Theory

Psychologist Aaro Toomela’s theory holds that phenomenal consciousness is not an intrinsic property of brain activity or a generic accompaniment of experience, but the developmentally emergent capacity to experience one’s own psychic processes, made possible when speech and linguistic signs reorganize sense-based mental life into a semiotically mediated, socially formed system of reflective self-experience (Toomela, 2016a, 2016b). In other words, in Toomela's structural-systemic theory, consciousness is a language-mediated psychic process whose result is the experiencing of one's own psyche—a capacity that emerges neither in the brain nor from sensory experience alone but with the acquisition of the linguistic sign, because a word is a dual system pointing simultaneously outward to the sensory world and inward to another sign within the mind, such that every use of a word is at once a reference to the world and an experience of one's own mental content, rendering consciousness a socially constituted, developmentally acquired, and (as far as is known) a distinctively human phenomenon (Toomela, 2016a, 2016b).

Toomela works in the Vygotskian tradition (a psychological and educational framework originating from Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky in which cognitive development is inherently a social process, driven by interactions with culture, language, and "More Knowledgeable Others"), and thus situates consciousness within a general theory of semiotically mediated psychic functional systems, adapting the functional-systems framework of Russian neuropsychology (Luria, 1973) and Uexküll's notion of the Umwelt (Uexküll, 1934).

Experiencing one's own experience

Toomela defines consciousness narrowly and deliberately: not creature wakefulness, not the mere possession of sensory images, and not "awareness" in the broad sense cataloged by contemporary consciousness science, but the experience of a psychic experience—"the experience of experiences" (Vygotsky, 1934).

Note, upfront, what Toomela’s theory is not: It is not phenomenal consciousness in the Nagel–Chalmers sense, but rather the experiencing of one's own experience, which is closer to self-consciousness / higher-order or reflective awareness. On his own usage, raw sensory what-it's-likeness is the pre-conscious "sense-based psyche" shared with animals; the felt redness of red is not yet "consciousness" for him. So, arguably, he relocates rather than solves the hard problem.

In Toomela’s usage, raw sensory experience is the pre-conscious sense-based psyche that humans share with other animals; consciousness proper arises only when such experience is itself taken as an object. Because organisms possess no receptor for their own psyche, the central puzzle is how the psyche can be experienced at all when it cannot be sensed.

The mechanism: the dual linguistic sign

The answer turns on Toomela's principle that genuinely new information arises only when the same input is processed by two interrelated mechanisms. Sense-based thinking synthesizes signs according to the rules of the physical world; speech adds a second mechanism structured instead by rules of communication. A linguistic sign is therefore a multipart system: its outward form is always sensory (a heard word, a seen gesture, tactile Braille), yet it is bound to a further sign—an image or another word—within the psyche. Every use of a word thus simultaneously indicates an external event and an internal sign, and so is itself an act of consciousing. Consciousness, on this account, is the emergent attribute of the unity of linguistic (social) and sense-based information processing, appearing precisely when signs governed by the world's rules become signs governed by communication's rules (Toomela, 2016a).

A Vygotskian, "Brainless" Psychology

The lineage is explicit. Peirce held that knowledge of the inner world is inferred from external facts and that all thought is thought in signs (Peirce, 1868); James construed consciousness as a relation among experiences rather than a stuff (James, 1904); and Vygotsky supplied the decisive image—"the word is a microcosm of human consciousness"—binding consciousness, generalization, and social relation together (Vygotsky, 1934). Toomela draws the strong corollary that a psychological theory of consciousness can be brainless: the brain is necessary for consciousness, but the principles governing it are semiotic and social, not biological—which is why, he argues, decades of searching for universal neural correlates have failed.

Selectivity, development, and consciousness of consciousness

Because only what is bound to a linguistic sign can be conscioused, consciousness is intrinsically selective: the results of psychic processes reach introspection, but the processes themselves—and everything unique rather than generalizable—do not, echoing the Würzburg "imageless thought" findings. Consciousness also develops, in structural stages keyed to stages of the word; a further threshold is crossed when speech is used to describe speech, yielding consciousness of consciousness—the reflexive structure Toomela reads in Descartes' cogito (Descartes, 1985) and the precondition of psychology itself.

Scope and distinctiveness

On present evidence, Toomela restricts consciousness to humans: other animals use signs as tools or commands rather than to share information, and lack both a linguistic environment and, apparently, the neural potential for linguistic signs, so the sole—but decisive—human difference is the linguistic sign itself. The position is pointedly non-reductive yet non-dualist: consciousness is neither located in the brain nor a separate substance, but a property of the person–language–environment whole. Far from impoverishing experience, consciousness enriches it, opening the inner Umwelt and, through the same mechanism by which one consciouses self and others alike, a window onto other minds.

[Note: Toomela’s theory was suggested by Thomas Camminga, a developmental psychologist in the Netherlands.]

References

Descartes, R. (1985). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Vol. 1; J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, & D. Murdoch, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1637.)

James, W. (1904). Does "consciousness" exist? The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1(18), 477–491.

Luria, A. R. (1973). The Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology. Basic Books.

Peirce, C. S. (1868). Some consequences of four incapacities. Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2(3), 140–157.

Toomela, A. (2016a). Culture, Speech and My Self. Tallinn.

Toomela, A. (2016b). What are higher psychological functions? Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 50(1), 91–121.

Uexküll, J. von. (1934). A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1934). Thinking and Speech [Myshlenie i rech']. Moscow–Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Sotsial'no-Ekonomicheskoe Izdatel'stvo.