The claim that consciousness constitutively involves self-consciousness has a long philosophical history, and has received renewed support in recent years. My aim in this paper is to argue that this surprisingly enduring idea is misleading at best, and insufficiently supported at worst. I start by offering an elucidatory account of consciousness, and outlining a number of foundational claims that plausibly follow from it. I subsequently distinguish two notions of self-consciousness: consciousness of oneself and consciousness of one’s experience. While “self-consciousness” is (...) often taken to refer to the former notion, the most common variant of the constitutive claim, on which I focus here, targets the latter. This claim can be further interpreted in two ways: on a deflationary reading, it falls within the scope of foundational claims about consciousness, while on an inflationary reading, it points to determinate aspects of phenomenology that are not acknowledged by the foundational claims as being aspects of all conscious mental states. I argue that the deflationary reading of the constitutive claim is plausible, but should be formulated without using a term as polysemous and suggestive as “self-consciousness”; by contrast, the inflationary reading is not adequately supported, and ultimately rests on contentious intuitions about phenomenology. I conclude that we should abandon the idea that self-consciousness is constitutive of consciousness. (shrink)

Is a subject who undergoes an experience necessarily aware of undergoing the experience? According to the view here developed, a positive answer to this question should be accepted if ‘awareness’ is understood in a specific way, - in the sense of what will be called ‘primitive awareness’. Primitive awareness of being experientially presented with something involves, furthermore, being pre-reflectively aware of oneself as an experiencing subject. An argument is developed for the claims that pre-reflective self-awareness is the basis of our (...) understanding of what it is to be an experiencing subject and that that understanding reveals what being an experiencing subject consists in and what it is for experiences to belong to one single experiencer. Claim is used in an argument in favor of the so-called simple view with respect to synchronic and diachronic unity of consciousness. (shrink)

The ubiquity of inner awareness thesis states that all conscious states of normal adult humans are characterised by an inner awareness of that very state. UIA-Backers support this thesis while UIA-Skeptics reject it. At the heart of their dispute is a recalcitrant phenomenological disagreement. UIA-Backers claim that phenomenological investigation reveals ‘peripheral inner awareness’ to be a constant presence in their non-introspective experiences. UIA-Skeptics deny that their non-introspective experiences are characterised by inner awareness, and maintain that inner awareness is only gained (...) when they explicitly introspect. Each camp has put forward a range of arguments designed to resolve this dispute, but I argue that none of these arguments has genuine dialectical purchase. This leads me to develop a compromise position that trades on the contribution that affordances can make to our phenomenology. According to the Affordance Model of inner awareness, all conscious states of normal adult humans are characterised by an affordance of introspectability. In line with the UIA-Skeptic, non-introspective experiences are not characterised by inner awareness. But against the traditional UIASkeptic, non-introspective experiences are characterised by an awareness of the opportunity for introspection. On this view, our capacity to gain inner awareness of our current experience is a ubiquitous feature of our phenomenology. I show how the Affordance Model respects the driving phenomenological intuitions of both the UIA-Backers and the traditional UIA-Skeptics, and suggest that it is able to explain why neither camp achieves an accurate description of how inner awareness figures in their phenomenology. (shrink)

We are each aware of our own experiences as they occur, but in this inner awareness our experiences do not seem to be presented to us as objects in the way that they typically are when we reflect on them. A number of philosophers, principally in the phenomenological tradition, have characterised this in terms of inner awareness being a non-objectifying mode of awareness. This claim has faced persistent objections that the notion of non-objectifying awareness is obscure or merely negatively characterised. (...) In this paper I shall outline a positive conception of a non-objectifying mode of awareness, feature-encountering awareness. I shall apply this conception to our awareness of our experiences, characterising it as an awareness of instantiations of phenomenal properties in a temporal dimension. Inner awareness thus characterised clearly differs from standard modes of objectifying awareness. (shrink)

According to the experience property framework qualia are properties of experiences the subject undergoing the experience is aware of. A phenomenological argument against this framework is developed and a few mistakes invited by the framework are described. An alternative to the framework, the framework of experiential properties is presented and defended as preferable. It is argued that the choice between these two frameworks makes a substantial difference for theoretical purposes.