  A third, more technical notion of consciousness, access consciousness, has been introduced by Block (1995) to capture the sense in which mental representations may be poised for use in rational control of action or speech.  This “dispositional” account of access consciousness — the idea that the representational content is available for other systems to use — is amended by Block (2005) to include an occurrent aspect in which the content is “broadcast” in a “global workspace” (Baars 1997) which is then available for higher cognitive processing tasks such as categorization, reasoning, planning, and voluntary direction of attention.  Block believes that many animals possess access consciousness (speech is not a requirement).  Indeed, some of the neurological evidence cited by Block (2005) in support of the global workspace is derived from monkeys. But clearly an author such as Descartes, who, we will see, denied speech, language, and rationality to animals, would also deny access consciousness to them. Those who follow Davidson (1975) in denying intentional states to animals would likely concur.