Self-Consciousness

Philosophical work on self-consciousness has mostly focused on the
identification and articulation of specific epistemic and semantic
peculiarities of self-consciousness, peculiarities which distinguish
it from consciousness of things other than oneself. After drawing
certain fundamental distinctions, and considering the conditions for
the very possibility of self-consciousness, this article discusses the
nature of those epistemic and semantic peculiarities.

The relevant epistemic peculiarities are mainly those associated with
the alleged infallibility and self-intimation of self-consciousness.
It has sometimes been thought that our consciousness of ourselves may
be, under certain conditions, infallible, in the sense that it cannot
go wrong: when we believe that some fact about us obtains, it does. It
has also sometimes been thought that some forms of consciousness are
self-intimating: if a certain fact about us obtains, we are
necessarily going to be conscious that it does. These claims have come
under heavy attack in more recent philosophical work, but it remains
unclear whether some restricted forms of infallibility and
self-intimation survive the attack.

The relevant semantic peculiarities have emerged in recent work in
philosophy of language and mind. Two of them stand out: the so-called
immunity to error through misidentification of our consciousness of
ourselves and the special character of self-regarding (or de se)
consciousness that cannot be assimilated to other kinds of
consciousness. Some philosophers have argued that these are not
genuine features of self-consciousness, while others have argued that,
although genuine, they are not peculiar to self-consciousness. Other
philosophers have defended the proposition that these features are
genuine and peculiar to self-consciousness. We will consider the case
for these claims in due course.

1. Introduction

Throughout our waking life, we are conscious of a variety of things.
We are often conscious of other people, of cars, trees, beetles, and
other objects around us. We are conscious of their features: their
colors, their shapes, and the sound they make. We are conscious of
events involving them: car accidents, tree blooming, and so forth.

Sometimes we are also conscious of ourselves, our features, and the
events that take place within us. Thus, we may become conscious, in a
certain situation, of the fact that we are nervous or uncomfortable.
We may become conscious of a rising anxiety, or of a sudden
cheerfulness. Sometimes we are conscious of simpler things: that we
are seeing red, or that we are thinking of tomorrow's errands.

In addition, we sometimes have the sense that we are continuously
conscious of ourselves going about our business in the world. Thus
William James, who was very influential in the early days of
experimental, systematic psychology (in addition to being the brother
of novelist Henry James and a gifted writer himself), remarked once
that "whatever I may be thinking of, I am always at the same time more
or less aware of myself, of my personal existence" (James 1961: 42).

These forms of self-consciousness—consciousness of ourselves and our
personal existence, of our character traits and standing features, and
of the thoughts that occur to us and the feelings that we
experience—are philosophically fascinating, inasmuch as they are at
once quite mysterious and closest to home. Our scientific theories of
astrophysical objects that are incredibly distant from us in both
space and time, or of the smallest particles that make up the
sub-atomic layer of reality, are mature, sophisticated, and
impressive. By contrast, we barely have anything worth the name
"scientific theory" for self-consciousness and its various
manifestations, in spite of self-consciousness' being so much more
familiar a phenomenon—indeed the most familiar phenomenon of all.

Here, as elsewhere, the immaturity of our scientific understanding of
self-consciousness invites philosophical reflection on the topic, and
is anyway partly due precisely to deep philosophical puzzles about the
nature of self-consciousness. Many philosophers have thought that
self-consciousness exhibits certain peculiarities not to be found in
consciousness of things other than ourselves, and indeed possibly not
to be found anywhere else in nature.

Philosophical work on self-consciousness has thus mostly focused on
the identification and articulation of these peculiarities. More
specifically, it has sought some epistemic and semantic peculiarities
of self-consciousness, that is, peculiarities as regards how we know,
and more generally how we represent, ourselves and our internal lives.
(In philosophical jargon, "epistemology" is the theory of knowledge
and "semantics" is—more or less—the theory of representation.) This
entry will accordingly focus on these peculiarities. After drawing
certain fundamental distinctions, and considering the conditions for
the very possibility of self-consciousness, we will discuss first the
nature of the relevant epistemic peculiarities and then (more
extensively) the semantic ones.
2. Self-Consciousness: Some Distinctions

Let us start by drawing some distinctions. (The distinctions I will
draw are meant as conceptual distinctions. Whether they stand for real
differences between the properties putatively picked out by the
relevant concepts is a separate matter.) The first important
distinction is between self-consciousness as a property of whole
individuals and self-consciousness as a property of particular mental
states. Thus, when we say "My thought that p is self-conscious" and "I
am self-conscious," the property we ascribe is in all likelihood
different. My being self-conscious involves my being conscious of my
self. But my thought's being self-conscious does not involve my
thought's being conscious of its self, since (i) it does not have a
self, and (ii) thoughts are not the kind of thing that can be
conscious of anything. We may call the property that I have creature
self-consciousness and the property that my thought has state
self-consciousness.

Another distinction is between consciousness of oneself (one's self)
and consciousness of a particular event or state that occurs within
oneself. Compare "I am self-conscious of myself thinking that p" to "I
am self-conscious of my thought that p." The latter involves awareness
of a particular thought of mine, but need not involve awareness of
self or selfhood. It is a form of self-consciousness in the sense that
it is directed inward, and takes as its object an internal state of
mine. But it is not a form of self-consciousness in the stronger sense
of involving consciousness of self. I will refer to the stronger
variety as strong self-consciousness and the weaker as weak
self-consciousness. State self-consciousness is consciousness of what
happens within oneself, whereas creature self-consciousness is
consciousness of oneself proper. (Note, however, that a mental state
may be both creature- and state-self-conscious. Thus, if I am
conscious of my thought that p as my thought, as a thought of mine,
then I am conscious both of my thought and of myself.)

Another traditional distinction, which dates back to Kant, is between
consciousness of oneself qua object and consciousness of oneself qua
subject. Suppose I am conscious of Budapest (or of Budapest and its
odors). I am the subject of the thought, its object is Budapest. But
suppose now that I am conscious of myself (or of myself and my
feelings). Now I am both the subject and the object of the thought.
But although the subject and the object of the thought happen to be
the same thing, there is still a conceptual distinction to be made
between myself in my capacity as object of thought and myself in my
capacity as subject of thought. That is to say, even though there is
one entity here, there are two separate concepts for this entity, the
self-as-subject concept and the self-as-object concept. To mark this
difference, William James (1890) introduced a technical distinction
between the I and the me. In its technical use, "I" (and its Mentalese
correlate) refers to the self-as-subject, whereas "me" (and its
Mentalese correlate) refers to the self-as-object. By "Mentalese
correlate," I mean the expression that would mean the same as "I" and
"me" in something like the so-called language of thought (Fodor 1975)
or Mentalese.)

Corresponding to these two concepts, or conceptions, of self, there
would presumably be two distinct modes of presentation under which a
person may be conscious of herself. She may be conscious of herself
under the "I" description or under the "me" description. Thus, my
state of self-consciousness may employ either the "I" mode of
presentation or the "me" mode of presentation. (We could capture the
difference, using James' technical terminology, by distinguishing "I
am self-conscious that I think that p" and "I am self-conscious that
methinks that p.") In the latter case, there is a sort of "conceptual
distance" between the thing that does the thinking and the thing being
thought about. Although I am thinking of myself, I am not thinking of
myself as the thing that does the thinking. By contrast, in the former
case, I am thinking of myself precisely as the thing that is therewith
doing the thinking.

Through Kant's influence on Husserl, philosophers in the
phenomenological tradition have long held that something like
consciousness of self-as-subject is a distinct, irreducible, and
central aspect of our mental life. Philosophers in the analytic
tradition have been more suspicious of it (for exceptions to this
rule, see for instance Van Gulick 1988 and Strawson 1997). But the
distinction between consciousness of self-as-subject and consciousness
of self-as-object might be captured using analytic tools, through a
distinction between transitive and intransitive self-consciousness
(Kriegel 2003, 2004a). Compare "I am self-conscious of thinking that
p" and "I am self-consciously thinking that p." In the former,
transitive form, self-consciousness is construed as a relation between
me and my thinking. In the latter, intransitive form, it is construed
as a modification of my thinking. That is, in the latter the
self-consciousness term (if you will) does not denote a state of
standing in a relation to my thought (or my thinking) that p. Rather,
it designates the way I am having my thought (or doing my thinking).
In transitive self-consciousness, the thought and the state of
self-consciousness are treated as two numerically distinct mental
states. By contrast, in intransitive self-consciousness, there is no
numerical distinction between the thought and the state of
self-consciousness: the thought is the state of self-consciousness.
The adverb "self-consciously" denotes a way I am having my thought
that p. No extra act of self-consciousness takes place after the
thought that p occurs. Rather, self-consciously is how the thought
that p occurs.

I have been speaking of the self-as-subject in terms of "the thing
that does the thinking," and correspondingly of consciousness of
oneself as subject in terms of consciousness of oneself as the thing
that does the thinking. But recent work in philosophical
psychopathology counsels caution here. Schizophrenics suffering from
"thought insertion" and "alien voices" delusions report that they are
not in control of their thoughts. Indeed, they often envisage a
particular individual who, they claim, is doing the thinking for them,
or implants thoughts in their mind. Note that although they do not
experience themselves as doing the thinking, they do experience the
thinking as happening, in some sense, in them. To account for the
experiential difference between doing the thinking and merely hosting
the thinking, between authorship of one's thoughts and mere ownership
of them (respectively), some philosophers have drawn a distinction
between consciousness of oneself as agent and consciousness of oneself
as subject (Campbell 1999, Graham and Stephens 2000). The distinction
between self-as-agent and self-as-subject is orthogonal, however, to
the distinction between self-as-object and self-as-subject. To avoid
confusion, let us suggest a different terminology, that of
self-as-author versus self-as-owner, and correspondingly, of
consciousness of oneself as author of one's thoughts and consciousness
of oneself as owner of one's thoughts. To be sure, in the normal go of
things, ownership and authorship are inseparable. But the pathological
cases show that there is daylight between the two notions.

Another important distinction is between propositional
self-consciousness and non-propositional self-consciousness. There is
no doubt that there is such a thing as propositional
self-consciousness: consciousness that some self-related proposition
obtains. Presumably, such self-consciousness has conceptual content.
But a strong case can be made that there is a form of
self-consciousness that is sub-propositional, as it were, and has
non-conceptual content (Bermúdez 1998). When a report of
self-consciousness uses a "that" clause, as we just did, it
necessarily denotes propositional self-consciousness. But when it does
not, as is the case, for instance, with "I am self-conscious of
thinking that p," it is left open whether it is propositional or
non-propositional self-consciousness that is denoted. That is, "I am
self-conscious of thinking that p" is compatible with, but does not
entail, "I am self-conscious that I am thinking that p." In any case,
the terminology leaves it open whether there is a non-propositional or
non-conceptual form of self-consciousness.

Other distinctions can certainly be drawn. I have restricted myself to
those that will play a role in the discussion to follow. They are
five:

(a) State self-consciousness versus creature self-consciousness
(b) Strong versus weak self-consciousness
(c) Transitive versus intransitive self-consciousness
(d) Consciousness of self-as-object versus consciousness of self-as-subject
(e) Consciousness of self-as-author versus consciousness of self-as-owner

As I warned at the opening, these distinctions are meant as conceptual
ones. This is doubly significant. First, the fact that there is a
distinction between two concepts does not entail that there is a
difference between the putative properties picked out by these
concepts. Second, the existence of a concept does not entail the
existence of the property putatively picked out by that concept. In
fact, philosophers have questioned the very existence of
self-consciousness.
3. (How) Is Self-Consciousness Possible?

Perhaps the best known philosophical threat to the very possibility of
self-consciousness hails from Hume's remarks in the Treatise of Human
Nature (I, IV, vi): "For my part, when I enter most intimately into
what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or
other… I never can catch myself without a perception, and never can
observe anything but the perception."

This passage makes two separate claims, of different degrees of
skepticism. The modest claim is:

(MC) Upon "turning into" oneself, one cannot "catch" oneself
without a particular mental state.

MC rules out the possibility of a mental state whose sole object is
the self. But though it disallows catching oneself without a
perception, it does not disallow catching oneself with a perception.
Hume makes the latter, stronger, immodest claim next, however:

(IC) Upon "turning into" oneself, one cannot "catch" anything but
particular mental states.

IC rules out the possibility of any consciousness of one's self. That
is, it rules out the possibility of creature self-consciousness,
allowing only for state self-consciousness.

In assessing Hume's claims, particularly the immodest one, we must
ask, first, what did Hume expect to catch? And second, what sort of
catching did he have in mind?

One way to deny the possibility of consciousness of oneself is to
reject the existence of a self of which one might be conscious. But
the inexistence of a self is not a sufficient condition for the
impossibility of self-consciousness: there could still be thoroughly
and systematically illusory experience of selfhood that gives rise to
a form of (illusory) self-consciousness. Nor is such rejection a
necessary condition for the impossibility of self-consciousness. Hume
himself not only countenanced the self, he offered a theory of it,
namely, the bundle theory. What Hume rejected was the existence of a
substantival self, a self that is more than just a stream of
consciousness and a sum of experiences. What he rejected is the
reifying conception of the self according to which the self is an
object among others in the world, a substrate that supports the
internal goings-on unfolding therein but is distinct from, and somehow
stands above, these proceedings. This rejection is shared today by
several philosophers (see, for example, Dennett 1991).

This suggests an answer to our first question, concerning what Hume
had expected to catch upon turning into himself. What he expected to
catch is a self-substance (if you please). It is unclear, however, why
Hume thought that consciousness of oneself, even non-illusory
consciousness of oneself, required the existence of a substantival
self. Consider how self-consciousness might play out within the
framework of Hume's own bundle theory. Upon turning into herself, a
person might become conscious of a particular mental state, say an
inexplicable cheerfulness, but become conscious of it as belonging to
a larger bundle of mental states, perhaps a bundle that has a certain
internal cohesion to it at and across time. In that case, we would be
well justified to conceive of this person as conscious of her self.

As for the second question, concerning what sort of "catching" Hume
had in mind, it appears that Hume envisioned a quasi-perceptual form
of catching. He expected self-consciousness to involve some sort of
direct encounter with the self. There is no question that one can
believe (or otherwise think purely intellectually) that one is
inexplicably cheerful. One can surely entertain purely intellectually
the proposition "I am inexplicably cheerful." But Hume wanted more
than that. He wanted to be confronted with his self, by turning inward
his mind's eye, as he would with a chair upon directing his outward
gaze in the right direction.

In other words, Hume was working with an introspective model of
self-consciousness, according to which self-consciousness involves the
employment of an inner sense: an internal mechanism whose operation is
analogous in essential respects to the operation of the external
senses. This inner sense conception was clearly articulated in Locke:
"The other fountain [of] ideas, is the perception of the operations of
our own minds within us… And though it be not sense, as having nothing
to do with external objects; yet it is very like it, and might
properly enough be called internal sense" (Essay Concerning Human
Understanding II, i, 4).

The plausibility of the introspective model is very much in
contention. Thus, Rosenthal (1986) claims that for self-consciousness
to be genuinely analogous with perceptual consciousness, the former
would have to exhibit the sort of qualitative character the latter
does; but since it does not, it is essentially non-perceptual. On this
basis, Rosenthal (2004) proceeds to develop an account of
self-consciousness in terms of purely intellectual thoughts about
oneself (more specifically, thoughts that are entertained in the
presence of their object or referent).

On the other hand, self-consciousness can sometimes have a quality of
immediacy about it (and its way of putting us in contact with its
objects) that seems to parallel perceptual consciousness. At the same
time, philosophers have sometimes charged that self-consciousness is
in fact too immediate, indeed unmediated, to be thought of as
quasi-perceptual. Thus, Shoemaker (1996) argues that the
quasi-perceptual model falters in construing self-consciousness along
the lines of the act-object analysis that befits perceptual
consciousness. When one is perceptually conscious of a butterfly's
meandering, a distinction is always called for between the act of
perceptual consciousness and the meandering butterfly it takes as an
object. But when one is conscious of one's cheerfulness, a parallel
distinction between the act of self-consciousness and one's
cheerfulness, supposedly thereby taken as object, is misleading,
according to Shoemaker.

One way to interpret Shoemaker's claim here is that while Hume's
argument may be effective against transitive self-consciousness, it is
not against intransitive self-consciousness. Recall that transitive
self-consciousness requires a duality of mental states, the state of
self-consciousness and the state of (for example) cheerfulness. But in
intransitive self-consciousness there is no such duality: there is not
a distinction between an act of self-consciousness and a separate
object taken by it. On this interpretation, Shoemaker's claim is that
being self-conscious of being cheerful may well be impossible, but it
is nonetheless possible to be self-consciously cheerful. We might
combine Rosenthal's and Shoemaker's perspectives and suggest the view
that self-consciousness can come in two varieties: intellectual
transitive self-consciousness and intransitive self-consciousness.
Both varieties escape the clutches of Hume's threat: one can catch
oneself (with a particular mental state) if the catching is
intellectual rather than quasi-perceptual, or if the catching is
somehow fused into the particular mental state thereby caught. What
Hume showed is that quasi-perceptual transitive self-consciousness is
impossible; but this leaves untouched the possibility of intellectual
transitive self-consciousness and of intransitive self-consciousness.

In summary, it is quite likely that self-consciousness is indeed
possible. But reflecting on the conditions of its possibility puts
non-trivial constraints on our conception of self-consciousness. In
this respect, contending with Hume's challenge still proves immensely
fruitful. If anything, it wakes us from our dogmatic slumber about
self-consciousness and brings up the question of the nature of
self-consciousness.

One question regarding the nature of self-consciousness that arises
immediately is what is to count as having self-consciousness. Many
contemporary cognitive scientists have operationalized the notion of
self-consciousness in terms of experiments on mirror self-recognition
and the so-called "mark test." In these experiments, a creature's
forehead is marked with a visible stain. When placed in front of a
mirror, some creatures try to wipe off the stain, which suggests that
they recognize themselves in the mirror, while others do not (see
mainly Gallup 1970, 1977). Successes with the mark test are few and
far between. Among primates, it is passed with any consistency only by
humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans, but not by gorillas or gibbons
(Suarez and Gallup 1981); and even humans do not typically pass it
before the age of a year and a half (Amsterdam 1972) and chimpanzees
not before three years of age nor after sixteen years of age
(Povinelli et al. 1993). Outside the group of primates, it is passed
only by bottlenose dolphins (Reiss and Marino 2001) and Asian
elephants (Plotnik et al. 2006). However, this operational treatment
of self-consciousness is problematic at a number of levels. Most
importantly, it is not entirely clear what the true relationship
between mirror self-recognition and self-consciousness is. One would
need a principled account of the latter in order to clarify that
matter. Mirror self-recognition experiments thus cannot take
precedence over the search for an independent understanding of
self-consciousness.

To that end, let us consider the ways in which self-consciousness has
been claimed to be different, special, and sometimes privileged,
relative to consciousness of things other than oneself. Early modern
philosophers, from Descartes on, have often claimed certain epistemic
privileges on behalf of self-consciousness. More recently, twentieth
century analytic philosophers have attempted to identify certain
semantic peculiarities of self-consciousness. We take those up in
turns.
4. Epistemic Peculiarities of Self-Consciousness

In what follows, we will consider, somewhat hastily, about a dozen
epistemic peculiarities sometimes attributed to self-consciousness.
Traditionally, the most discussed special feature claimed on behalf of
self-consciousness is infallibility. According to the doctrine of
infallibility, one's consciousness of oneself is always veridical and
accurate. We may say that whenever I am self-conscious of thinking
that p, I am indeed thinking that p. It is important to note, however,
that to the extent that "self-conscious of" is a success verb, this
claim would be trivially true, whereas the point of the doctrine under
consideration is that it is true even if "self-conscious of" is not a
success verb (or also for any non-success uses of the verb). To bypass
this technicality, let us insert parenthetically the qualifier
"seemingly" into our formulation of the claim. We may formulate the
doctrine of infallibility as follows:

(DIF) If I am (seemingly) self-conscious of thinking that p, then
I am thinking that p.

Thus, whenever I believe something about myself and my mental life,
the belief is true: things are in fact the way I believe them to be.

The doctrine of infallibility ensures that my beliefs about my mental
life are true. A parallel doctrine ensures that such beliefs are
(epistemically) justified. We may, without too much injustice to
traditional terminology, call this the doctrine of incorrigibility.
The traditional notion of incorrigibility is the notion that the
subject cannot possibly be corrected by anyone else, which suggests
that the subject is in possession of (and makes correct use of) all
the relevant evidence. We may thus formulate the doctrine of
incorrigibility as follows:

(DIC) If I am (seemingly) self-conscious of thinking that p, then
I am justifiably (seemingly) self-conscious of thinking that p.

Whereas according to DIF, whenever I believe something about my mental
life, my belief is true, according to DIC, whenever I believe
something about my mental life, my belief is justified.

Against the background of the tripartite analysis of knowledge, the
conjunction of DIC and DIF would entail a doctrine about
self-knowledge in general, namely:

(DIK) If I am (seemingly) self-conscious that I am thinking that
p, then I know that I am thinking that p.

That is, if I am in a state of self-consciousness whose content is "I
am thinking that p", then my state of self-consciousness will
necessarily qualify as knowledge. Note, however, that the thesis is
entailed by DIF and DIC only against the background of the tripartite
analysis—though it may be independently true. (If the tripartite
analysis is incorrect, as it probably is, then the thesis does not
follow from the conjunction of DIC and DIF. But it can still be
formulated.)

The three doctrines we have considered claim strong privileges on
behalf of self-consciousness. But there are stronger ones. Consider
the converse of the doctrine of infallibility. DIF ensures that when I
am (seemingly) self-conscious of thinking that p, then I am in fact
thinking that p. Its converse is a stronger thesis: whenever I think
that p, I am self-conscious of doing so. That is, nothing can pass
through the mind without the mind taking notice of it. Having a
thought entails being self-conscious of having it. Thoughts are, in
this sense, self-intimating. We may formulate the doctrine of
self-intimation as follows:

(DSI) If I am thinking that p, then I am self-conscious of thinking that p.

Thus, whenever I think something, I inevitably come to believe (or be
aware) that I am. Note that DSI entails DIF, because if I am indeed
thinking that p, then my self-consciousness of thinking that p must be
true or veridical.

A distinction is sometimes made between weak self-intimation and
strong self-intimation (Shoemaker 1996). What we have just considered
is the weak variety. The strong variety ensures not only that when I
think something, I am aware that I think it, but also that when I do
not think something, I am aware that I do not think it. Let us
formulate the doctrine of strong self-intimation as follows:

(DSSI) If I am thinking that p, then I am self-conscious of
thinking that p; and if I am not thinking that p, then I am
self-conscious of not thinking that p.

Strong self-intimation renders the mind in some traditional sense
transparent to itself. But the term "transparency" has had such wide
currency in recent philosophy of mind that it would be better not to
use it in the present context.

Consider now the converse of the doctrine of incorrigibility. It is
the thesis that if I think that p, then I am justifiably
self-conscious of thinking that p. It also entails DIF, as well as
DSI. Again, a strong version can be formulated: If I think that p,
then I am justifiably self-conscious of thinking that p; and if I do
not think that p, then I am justifiably self-conscious of not thinking
that p.

Finally, a parallel thesis could be formulated regarding knowledge: If
I think that p, then I know that I think that p. The strong version
would be:

(OSC) If I think that p, then I know that I think that p, and if I
do not think that p, then I know that I do not think that p.

This last feature is probably the strongest epistemic privilege that
could be claimed on behalf of self-consciousness. We may call the
associated doctrine the Omniscience of Self-Consciousness. For it is
the thesis that one knows everything that happens within one's mind,
and everything that does not.

Freud's work on the unconscious has all but refuted the above
doctrines (see especially Freud 1915). Thus few if any philosophers
would defend them today. But many may consider restricted versions of
them. The above doctrines are formulated in terms of thoughts,
understood as mental states in general. But some theses can be
formulated that would restrict the epistemic privileges to a special
subset of mental states, such as sensations and feelings, or
phenomenally conscious states, or some such. A thus restricted
self-intimation thesis might read: if I have a sensation S, then I am
self-conscious of having S; or, if I have a phenomenally conscious
state S, then I am self-conscious of having S.

Counter-examples to even such appropriately restricted theses have
been offered in the literature. Staying with self-intimation, it has
been suggested that there are sensations and conscious states that
occur without their subject's awareness. Arguably, I may have a
sensation—indeed, a phenomenally conscious sensation—of the
refrigerator's hum without becoming self-conscious of it, let alone of
myself hearing it.

Consider now a restricted version of the infallibility doctrine: If I
am (seemingly) self-conscious of having sensation S, then I do have
sensation S. An alleged counter-example is the fraternity initiation
story. Suppose that, blindfolded, I am told that a particular spot on
my neck is about to be cut with a razor (this is part of my fraternity
initiation); then an ice cube is placed on that spot. At the very
first instant, I am likely to be under the impression that I am having
a pain sensation, while in reality I am having a coldness sensation.
That is, at that instant, I am (seemingly) self-conscious of having a
pain sensation but do not in fact have a pain sensation, or so the
argument goes (see Horgan and Kriegel 2007).

Another way to restrict the above doctrines is by making their claims
weaker. Consider the following variation on self-intimation: If I am
thinking that p, then I am self-conscious of thinking. Whereas DSI
claims that when I have the thought that p, I am self-conscious not
just of having a thought, but of having specifically the thought that
p, this variation claims only that I am self-conscious of having a
thought—some thought.

We can apply strictures of this type to any of the above doctrines,
and some of the resulting theses may be quite plausible. Thus,
consider the following thesis:

If I am (seemingly) self-conscious of being in a phenomenally
conscious state S, then I am in some phenomenally conscious state.

It is difficult to conceive of a situation in which one is aware of
oneself as being in some conscious state when in fact one is in no
conscious state (and hence is unconscious). In particular, the
fraternity initiation tale does not tell against this thesis: although
in the story I am not in fact in a pain state, I am nonetheless in
some conscious state.

Such nuanced theses may thus survive modern critiques of the
traditional doctrines of epistemic privilege. Their exploration in the
literature is, in any case, far from complete. But let us move on to
the semantic privileges sometimes imputed on self-consciousness.
5. Semantic Peculiarities of Self-Consciousness
a. Immunities to Error through Misidentification

On the two extremes, the first-person pronoun "I" has been claimed by
some to be entirely non-referential (Anscombe 1975) and by others to
be the only true form of reference (Chisholm 1976 Ch. 3, and in a more
nuanced way, Lewis 1979). Presumably, analogous statements could be
made about the concept we use in thought in order to think about
ourselves in the first person. For convenience, I will call the
relevant concept the Mentalese first-person pronoun, or just the
Mentalese "I". Plausibly, the special features of linguistic
self-reference (the way "I" refers) derive from, or at least parallel,
corresponding features of self-consciousness, and more specifically
mental self-reference (the way the Mentalese "I" refers). In the
present context, it is the latter that interest us. Our discussion
will focus on two main features. In the next section, we will consider
the alleged essential indexicality of self-consciousness (Perry 1979)
and irreducibility of de se thoughts (Castañeda 1966, 1967, 1968,
1969). (These terms will be explicated in due course.) The present
section considers a semantic peculiarity pointed out by Sydney
Shoemaker (1968) under the name "immunity to error through
misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun" and related
peculiarities discussed by Anscombe (1975), Evans (1982), and others.

When I think about things other than myself, there are two ways in
which my thoughts may turn out to be false. Suppose I think that my
next-door neighbor is a nice person. I may be wrong about either (i)
whether he is a nice person or (ii) who my next-door neighbor is. The
first error is one of mispredication, if you will, whereas the second
is one of misidentification. Thus, if I mistake my neighbor's tendency
to smile for kindness, when in fact it serves a cynical ploy to lure
me into signing an unjust petition against the superintendent, then I
make a mistake of the first kind. By contrast, if I mistake the
mailman for my next-door neighbor, and think that it is my next-door
neighbor who is a nice person, when in fact it is the mailman who is,
then I make a mistake of the second kind.

In this sense, my thought that my next-door neighbor is a nice person
displays a composite structure, involving identification and
predication. We may represent this by saying that my thought has the
internal structure "my next-door neighbor is the person smiling at me
every morning & the person smiling at me every morning is a nice
person", or more generally "my next-door neighbor is the φ & the φ is
a nice person". This is not to say that when I think that my next-door
neighbor is a nice person I am thinking this as a conjunction, or that
my thought takes a conjunctive proposition as its object. The above
conjunctive representation of my thought is meant just as a device to
bring out the fact that my thought has a composite structure. The
point is just that my thought has two separable components, an
identificational component and a predicational component.

Correspondingly, we can envisage three sorts of semantic peculiarity
or privilege. (1) There could be a kind of thought K1, such that if a
thought T is of that kind, then T can only be false due to
misidentification; thoughts of kind K1 are thus immune to error
through misidentification. (2) There could be a kind of thought K2,
such that if T is of that kind, then T can only be false due to
mispredication; thoughts of kind K2 are thus immune to error through
mispredication. (3) There could be a kind of thought K3, such that if
T is of that kind, then T can be false due to neither mispredication
nor misidentification; thoughts of kind K3 are thus immune to error
tout court. The above are just definitions of privileges. It remains
to be seen whether any of these definitions is actually satisfied.
Shoemaker's claim is that the first definition is indeed satisfied by
a certain subset of thoughts about oneself.

Note that the third peculiarity, immunity to error tout court, is
basically infallibility. This way of conceiving of immunity to error
through misidentification brings out its relation to the more
traditional doctrine of infallibility. Unlike the latter, the doctrine
of immunity to error through misidentification does not claim blanket
immunity. But it does restrict in a principled manner the ways in
which the relevant thoughts may turn out to be false. If I think that
I feel angry, then I can be wrong about whether that is a feeling I
really have, but I cannot be wrong about whom it is that is allegedly
angry.

We said that according to Shoemaker, a certain subset of thoughts
about oneself is immune to error through misidentification. What
subset? One can think about oneself under any number of descriptions.
And some descriptions one may not be aware of as applying to one.
Thus, I may think that my mother's nieceless brother's only nephew is
brown-eyed, without being aware that I am my mother's nieceless
brother's only nephew. In that case, I think about myself, but not as
myself. We might say that I have a thought about myself, but not a
self-aware thought about myself. Let us call self-aware thoughts about
oneself I-thoughts. According to Shoemaker, some I-thoughts are immune
to error through misidentification, namely, those I-thoughts that are
directed to one's mind and mental life, as opposed to one's body and
corporeal life. (To take an example from Wittgenstein, suppose I see
in the mirror a tangle of arms and I mistakenly take the nicest one to
be mine. I may think to myself "I have a nice arm." In that case, I
may not only be wrong about whether my arm is nice, but also about
whom it is that has a nice arm. Such an I-thought, being about my
body, is not immune to error through misidentification. But my
thoughts about my mind are so immune, claims Shoemaker.) More
accurately, as we will see later on, Shoemaker holds that absolute, as
opposed to circumstantial, immunity to error through misidentification
applies only to mental I-thoughts.

We should distinguish two versions of the doctrine of immunity.
According to the first, the relevant I-thoughts cannot be false
through misidentification because the identifications they involve are
always and necessarily correct; call this the infallible
identification (II) version of the doctrine of immunity. According to
the second version, the relevant I-thoughts cannot be false through
misidentification because they do not involve identification in the
first place; call this the identificationless reference (IR) version
of the doctrine of immunity. (Brook [2001] speaks of ascriptionless
reference, which may also be a good label for the specific feature
under consideration.) Both versions claim a certain distinction on
behalf of the relevant I-thoughts, but the distinction is very
different. The first version claims the distinction of infallible
identification, whereas the second one claims the distinction of
dispensable identification.

Shoemaker appears to hold the IR version (see, for example, Shoemaker
1968: 558). In some respects this is the more radical version. On the
II version, I-thoughts have the same composite structure as other
thoughts. When I think that I am amused, the content of my thought has
the structure "I am the φ & the φ is amused". It is just that there is
something special about the identificational component in the relevant
I-thoughts that makes it impervious to error. Whenever I think that I
am the φ, I am. The IR version is more radical. It claims that the
relevant I-thoughts do not have the same composite structure as other
thoughts—that they are structurally different. More specifically, they
lack any identificational component. My thought that I am amused hooks
onto me in some direct, identification-free way.

The distinction between these two versions is important, because the
burden of argument is very different in each case. To make the case
for II, one would have to argue that the relevant self-identifications
are infallible. To make the case for IR, by contrast, one would have
to argue that the relevant I-thoughts are identification-free. There
is also a corresponding difference in explanatory burden. II must
explain how is it that certain acts of identification are impervious
to error, whereas IR must explain how is it that some acts of
reference can dispense with identification altogether (How do they
hook onto the right referent without identifying it?).

Shoemaker's (1968) argument for IR, in its barest outlines, proceeds
as follows. Suppose (for reductio) that every self-reference required
self-identification. Then every thought with a content "I am F" would
have the internal structure "I am the φ & the φ is F". That is,
ascertaining that one is F would require that one identify oneself as
the φ and then establish that the φ is F. But this would entail that
the same would apply to "I am the φ": it would have to have the
internal structure "I am the ψ & the ψ is the φ". That is, in order to
ascertain that one is the φ, one would have to first identify oneself
as the ψ and then establish that the ψ is the φ. And so on ad
infinitum. To avert infinite regress, at least some self-reference
must be identification-free.

To claim that immunity to error through misidentification is a
peculiarity of self-consciousness is to claim that it is a feature
peculiar to self-consciousness. One can deny this claim in two ways:
(i) by arguing that it is not a feature of self-consciousness, and
(ii) by arguing that it is not peculiar to self-consciousness (that
is, although it is a feature of self-consciousness, it is also a
feature of other forms of consciousness).

Several philosophers have pursued (i). Perhaps the most widely
discussed argument is the following, due to Gareth Evans (1982: 108).
On the basis of seeing in a mirror a large number of hands, one of
which is touching a piece of cloth, and a certain feeling I have in my
hand, as of touching a piece of cloth, I come to think that I am
feeling a piece of cloth. But this is false, and false due to
misidentification: I am not the one who is feeling the piece of cloth.
Therefore, there are states of self-consciousness that are not immune
to error through misidentification; so such immunity is not a feature
of self-consciousness as such.

Arguably, however, this is not a pure case of self-consciousness. The
thought in question involves self-consciousness, but it is also partly
consciousness of something external, and it is the latter part of it
that leads to the error. Consider the difference between the thought
"I am feeling a piece of cloth" and the thought "I am having a feeling
as of a piece of cloth," or even more perspicuously, "I am having a
cloth-ish feeling." It is clear that if it turns out to be erroneous
that I am having a cloth-ish feeling, it is not because I have
misidentified myself in the mirror. Indeed, what I see in the mirror
is entirely irrelevant to the truth of my thought that I am having a
cloth-ish feeling.

More often, philosophers have pursued (ii), arguing that immunity to
error through misidentification is not peculiar to self-consciousness.
Evans (1982) himself, for instance, argued that thoughts about one's
body, and even certain perceptions and perception-based judgments, can
be equally immune to error through misidentification, indeed be
identification-free. When I think that my legs are crossed, my thought
seems to be immune to error through misidentification: it cannot turn
out that someone's legs are indeed crossed, but not mine.

One response would be to claim that thoughts about one's own body are
a genuine form of self-consciousness, albeit bodily
self-consciousness. But another would be to draw finer distinctions
between kinds of immunity and attach a specific sort of immunity to
self-consciousness. Shoemaker (1968) distinguished between absolute
and circumstantial immunity to error through misidentification,
claiming that only the relevant I-thoughts exhibit the absolute
variety. In the same vein, McGinn (1983) distinguishes between
derivative and non-derivative immunity to error through
misidentification, and Pryor (1999) between de re misidentification
and which-object misidentification, both claiming that only the
relevant I-thoughts exhibit the latter. However, Stanley (1998) erects
a considerable challenge to all these attempts. The issue of whether
some kind of immunity to error through misidentification is a
peculiarity of self-consciousness is still very much debated.

Let us end this section with a few general points. First, immunity to
error through misidentification is at bottom a semantic, not an
epistemic, peculiarity. It concerns the special way the Mentalese "I"
hooks onto its referent. Thus, immunity to error through
misidentification is not to be confused with immunity to error through
unjustified identification, immunity to unjustifiedness through
misidentification, or immunity to unjustifiedness through unjustified
identification—all of which would be epistemic peculiarities.

Second, immunity to error through misidentification is a semantic
peculiarity of strong self-consciousness, not weak self-consciousness,
since it involves essentially consciousness of oneself, not just
consciousness of a particular thought of one. So, if I am (seemingly)
self-conscious of thinking that p, it may be that I am not thinking
that p, but only because it is not thinking that p that I am doing—not
because it is not I who is doing the thinking.

Third, Shoemaker's "discovery" of immunity preceded the Kripkean
revolution in philosophy of language and more generally the theory of
reference. A question therefore arises concerning the relation between
his claim that self-reference is identification-free and Kripke's
claim that many kinds of reference are direct or rigid. Direct
reference—which is commonly thought to characterize proper names,
natural kind terms, and indexicals—is reference that is sense-free, if
you will: it does not employ a sense, or mode of presentation, in
hooking onto the referent. What is the relation, then, between
sense-free reference and identification-free reference?

A natural thought is that some (perhaps all) senses are
identifications, and so identification-freedom is simply one special
case of sense-freedom. If so, Shoemaker's "discovery" may be just a
foreshadowing of the Kripkean revolution: it is the discovery of the
possibility of sense-free reference, but with an overly restrictive
assessment of its scope (where Kripke claimed that all sorts of
representational devices are sense-free, Shoemaker thought that only
"I" is).

But there is also another view of the matter. Kripke's directly
referential terms do not employ senses, but they do employ
reference-fixers. When I think that Tom is generous, there is
something that fixes the reference of my Mentalese concept for Tom—for
example, the fact that Tom is the salient person called "Tom." This
reference-fixing fact is not necessarily something I am aware of,
which is why it does not qualify as a sense. But it is nonetheless
operative in the reference-fixing. When thinking that Tom is generous,
I am performing an identification of Tom, albeit an implicit
identification, one of which I am not explicitly aware. One way to
interpret Shoemaker's claim is that self-reference does not even
employ a reference-fixer. It is not only sense-free, but also
reference-fixer-free. It is not only that the relevant I-thoughts hook
onto oneself without the subject performing an explicit
identification, but they hook onto oneself without the subject
performing any identification, explicit or implicit. If so,
Shoemaker's claim is more radical than Kripkean direct reference:
identification-free reference is not just direct, it is entirely
unmediated.

A similar point can be made with respect to Elizabeth Anscombe's claim
that, unlike all other expressions, "I" cannot fail to refer. So
I-thoughts are "secure from reference-failure" (Anscombe 1975: 149).
That is, such I-thoughts as "I am feeling hungry" are, in effect,
immune to error through reference-failure. What is the relation
between immunity to error through misidentification and immunity to
error through reference-failure? One view would be that there is no
difference—the two are the same. But this would make Shoemaker's
ultimate claim that the relevant I-thoughts enjoy
identification-freedom the same as Anscombe's ultimate claim that they
enjoy reference-freedom. Shoemaker states explicitly that "I" does
refer, though in some identification-free manner. One way to make
sense of this is by appeal, again, to freedom from reference-fixing.
Here identification-free reference is construed as
reference-fixer-free reference. On this view, the Mentalese "I" is
referential, but it has the peculiarity that its reference is
unmediated by any reference-fixing mechanism.

A crucial issue that remains unaddressed is how reference-fixer-free
reference is possible. How can a representational item "find" its
referent without any mechanism ensuring a connection between them? Any
general theory of self-consciousness that embraces Shoemaker's IR
version of the doctrine of immunity must explain the possibility of
reference unfixed. To my knowledge, this challenge remains to be
broached in the literature.
b. Essential Indexicals and De Se Thoughts

In the last section we saw that, when one employs the Mentalese "I" in
thought, one's thought probably acquires certain unusual features. In
this section, we will see that in certain thoughts one cannot avoid
employing the Mentalese "I." This, too, is a semantic peculiarity,
albeit of a different order.

In a well-known story, John Perry tells of his experience following a
trail of sugar in a supermarket and thinking to himself "The shopper
with the torn bag of sugar is making a mess." Upon realizing that he
is the person with the torn bag, he forms a new thought, "I am making
a mess." This thought is new: its functional role is different from
the one of the original thought. Perry's subsequent actions can be
explained by ascribing to him this I-thought in a way they cannot by
ascribing to him the "I"-free thought. Perry calls beliefs such as "I
am making a mess" locating beliefs, and argues that such beliefs
cannot avoid employing Mentalese indexicals. There is no way to think
the same thought without employing the Mentalese "I." Such a thought
thus contains an essential indexical, or more accurately, essentially
contains an indexical reference. In this sense, these thoughts are
irreducible to any other, non-indexical kind of thought.

It should be emphasized that the point here is not that such
I-thoughts cannot be reported by anyone other than the subject, or
that such first-person reports cannot be matched by third-person
reports. In direct speech (oratio recta), one might report Perry's
I-thought as follows:

(1) Perry thinks "I am making a mess".

The same report could be made more naturally in indirect speech
(oratio obliqua). In order to do so, however, one would need to employ
what linguists call an indirect reflexive. Some languages apparently
contain unique words for the indirect reflexives. English does not.
But fortunately, the English indirect reflexives were discerned in the
late 1960s by Hector-Neri Castañeda (curiously perhaps, not himself a
native speaker). Castañeda showed that (1) is equivalent to:

(2) Perry thinks that he himself is making a mess.

At least this is so for paradigmatic uses of "he himself." (There are
also uses of "he" that function in this way, but these are more rare.
And there are probably—somewhat unusual—uses of "he himself" that do
not function this way. Castañeda introduced the term "he*" as a term
that behaves as an indirect reflexive in all its uses.) Castañeda
called reports of this sort de se (that is, of oneself) and claimed
that de se reports cannot be paraphrased into any de dicto or de re
reports, and are thus semantically unique and irreducible.
Correlatively, the mental states reported in de se reports, to which
we may refer as de se thoughts, are irreducible to mental states
reported in de dicto and de re reports. In a "material mode of
speech," this means that states of self-consciousness form an
irreducible class of mental states.

Note, in any case, that Castañeda's thesis is a generalization from
Perry's thesis about reports of one's own self-conscious states (that
is, first-person reports) to all reports of self-conscious states,
including reports of others' self-conscious states (third-person
reports). According to Castañeda's thesis, self-reference is
irreducible to either de dicto or de re reference to what is in fact
oneself. Castañeda argues for this by showing that the indirect
reflexives "he himself," "she herself," and so forth, have special
logical features. Thus (2) cannot be paraphrased into any
(indirect-speech) report that does not employ "he himself." Consider
the following de dicto report:

(3) Perry thinks that the author of "The Essential Indexical" is
making a mess.

The truth conditions of (3) and (2) are different, since the latter
does not entail the former: Perry may be unaware that it is he who is
the author of "The Essential Indexical" (that is, that he himself is
the author of "The Essential Indexical"). So (3) and (2) are not
equivalent. Presumably, the same goes for any other description "the
φ" that picks out Perry uniquely—it could always be that Perry is
unaware that he himself is the φ.

Consider next a de dicto report with a proper name instead of a
definite description:

(4) Perry thinks that Perry is making a mess.

Again, Perry may be unaware that it is he who is Perry. Therefore, the
truth conditions of (2) and (4) are different, and the two are not
equivalent. What about the de re versions of (3) and (4)? These can be
obtained, in fact, by reading "the author of 'The Essential
Indexical'" and "Perry" in (3) and (4) as used, in Donnellan's (1966)
terms, referentially rather than attributively. But the de re versions
are more perspicuously put as follows:

(5) Perry thinks, of the author of "The Essential Indexical," that
he is making a mess.

(6) Perry thinks, of Perry, that he is making a mess.

Boër and Lycan (1980), for instance, claim that (2) is equivalent to
(6). But Castañeda argued that it is not. The argument proceeded as
follows. The conjunction of (4) and "Perry exists" entails (6), and
likewise, the conjunction of (3) and "The author of 'The Essential
Indexical' exists" entails (5). But neither the conjunction of (4) and
"Perry exists," nor the conjunction of (3) and "The author of 'The
Essential Indexical' exists," entails (2). Thus, "Perry thinks that
Perry is making a mess" and "Perry exists" do not entail "Perry thinks
that he himself is making a mess." Therefore, (2) has a different
logical force from, and is thus not equivalent to, either (6) or (5).
There is perhaps only one approach that may plausibly succeed in
reducing de se reports to de dicto ones. It is the approach Eddy
Zemach (1985) refers to as neo-Cartesian, and according to which the
thought "I am making a mess" is equivalent to:

(7) The thinker of this very thought is making a mess.

On this approach, (2) is equivalent to:

(8) Perry thinks that the thinker of that very thought is making a mess.

In terms of the distinction drawn in §1, the idea here is that
self-consciousness is essentially indexical and irreducibly de se
inasmuch as it is consciousness of self-as-subject. On this approach,
one's self-conscious thought refers to oneself by referring to itself.
In other words, one's self-reference is mediated by the self-reference
of one's thought.

The emerging view is quite natural. Just as an utterance of the word
"I" refers to whoever betokened that very utterance, so a deployment
of the Mentalese "I" refers to whoever betokened that very deployment,
that is, the thinker of that very I-thought. It may be that "I" is not
synonymous with "the utterer of this very word," but surely the latter
functions as the reference-fixer of the former. Likewise, even if the
Mentalese "I" is not synonymous with a Mentalese "the thinker of this
very thought," the latter still functions as the reference-fixer of
the former.

One problem with the neo-Cartesian approach, however, is that it
replaces one sort of indexical self-reference with another. It
replaces the thinker's self-reference with the self-reference of his
or her thought. We are thus left with an unexplained essential and
irreducible indexical self-reference.

Castañeda actually discussed the neo-Cartesian approach before it was
expounded by Zemach, and found a different fault in it. According to
Castañeda, what dooms the approach is "the fact, which philosophers
(especially Hume and Kant) have known all along, that there is no
object of experience that one could perceive as the self that is doing
the perceiving" (Castañeda 1966: 64). Whether or not it reflects
Hume's or Kant's thinking on self-consciousness, the idea is that the
subject of thought cannot be thought about as such. Castañeda is
effectively denying here the possibility of consciousness of
oneself-as-subject. When I think about myself and my mental life, what
I am thinking of thereby becomes the object of my thought. I cannot
think of myself qua the subject of thought, that is, the thing that
does the thinking. The self-as-subject is in this way elusive. As Ryle
(1949) put it, trying to think of the self-as-subject is like trying
to hop on one's own shadow: every time you take a step back in order
to observe your self-as-subject, your self-as-subject takes a step
back with you, as it were.

This objection may apply with more force to what we called in §1
transitive self-consciousness than to what we called intransitive
self-consciousness. Even if I cannot become self-conscious of thinking
that the thinker of this very thought is cheerful, it does not follow
that I cannot self-consciously think that the thinker of this very
thought is cheerful. This is because, as pointed out in §1,
self-consciously thinking that p, unlike being self-conscious of
thinking that p, does not involve two separate states, such that the
second one takes the first one as its object. That is, intransitive
self-consciousness does not involve "taking a step back," which is
required for Ryle's regress to get going.

We cannot pursue this issue here with any seriousness. It seems clear,
however, that if de se thoughts are not irreducible to de dicto
thoughts, it would probably be because the Mentalese "I" can be
somehow understood in terms of reference to the subject of the very
act of referring. Either way, there is almost certainly some semantic
peculiarity to be reckoned with here. The question is merely how best
to characterize that peculiarity.
6. Conclusion: A General Theory of Self-Consciousness?

Discussions of the peculiarities of self-consciousness, both epistemic
and semantic, mostly focus on whether a given alleged peculiarity in
fact obtains or is merely alleged. But as Brook (2001) stresses, these
peculiarities must also be explained, or accounted for, in the context
of a general theory of self-consciousness. With a handful of
exceptions (for example, Bermúdez 1998) current work on
self-consciousness does not appear to address the need for a general
theory thereof. Instead, it rests content with a piecemeal treatment
of each alleged peculiarity in separation from the rest. Sooner or
later, however, this will have to be rectified by a reorientation or
reorganization of research in this area.

The alleged peculiarities of self-consciousness will then come in
handy. For they are useful in providing explananda for any putative
theory of self-consciousness, or data against which to "test" such a
theory (this is indeed how Bermúdez 1998 proceeds). This is not to say
that they must be the only explananda. Such empirical data as are
gleaned from mirror self-recognition experiments and other studies of
animal metacognition should also be accommodated by a philosophical
theory of self-consciousness.

My suggestion is that a general theory of self-consciousness could be
configured in two steps. The first would be to determine which of the
alleged epistemic and semantic peculiarities of self-consciousness in
fact obtain. The second would be to devise an account of the
metaphysical structure, as well as of the cognitive mechanisms
underlying the formation, of states of self-consciousness, such that
the relevant account would explain, by predicting or "retrodicting"
(as C. S. Peirce puts it), the obtaining of just those peculiarities.

The peculiarities discerned in the second half of the last century are
so subtle that we should be open to the idea that there may be further
peculiarities which have yet to be "discovered." There may also be
familiar peculiarities that have not been recognized as such. Thus,
some recent authors have drawn a new connection between
self-consciousness and Moore's paradox, which presents the challenge
of understanding the logical impropriety of beliefs or thoughts of the
form "p & I do not believe that p" (see Moran 2001, Kriegel 2004b, and
Fernández 2006). Thus it may well be that Moore's Paradox is at bottom
another peculiarity of self-consciousness.

All this suggests that, as far as philosophical research on
self-consciousness is concerned, the hardest, but in a way the most
interesting, challenges are yet to be faced. At present, the
philosophical literature on self-consciousness is quite disparate in
the respects mentioned above. But it invites unification under a
systematic framework for a general theory of self-consciousness. The
most philosophically rewarding work on self-consciousness is still
ahead of us.
7. References and Further Reading

* Alston, W. 1971. "Varieties of Privileged Access." American
Philosophical Quarterly 8: 223-241.
* Amsterdam, B. 1972. "Mirror self-image reactions before age
two." Development Psychobiology 5: 297–305.
* Anscombe, G. E. M. 1975. "The First Person." In S. Guttenplan
(ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprinted in Cassam 1994.
* Bayne, T. 2004. "Self-Consciousness and the Unity of
Consciousness." The Monist 87: 219-236.
* Bealer, G. 1996. "Functionalism and Self-Consciousness."
Philosophical Review 106: 69-117.
* Bermúdez, J. L. 1998. The Paradox of Self-Consciousness.
Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
* Boër, S. and W. G. Lycan. 1980. "Who, Me?" Philosophical Review
89: 427-466.
* Boër, S. and W. G. Lycan. 1986. Knowing Who. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
* BonJour, L. 1999. "The Dialectic of Foundationalism and
Coherentism." In J. Greco and E. Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to
Epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
* BonJour, L. 2001. "Towards a Defense of Foundationalism." In M.
DePaul (ed.), Resurrecting Old-Fashioned Foundationalism. Lanham, MD:
Roiwman and Littlefield.
* Brook, A. 2001. "Kant, Self-Awareness and Self-Reference." In
Brook and DeVidi 2001.
* Brook, A. and R. DeVidi (eds.) 2001. Self-Reference and
Self-Awareness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
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