Reflective Consciousness

Abstract

Natsoulas (1985) distinguishes five different “conceptions” of reflective awareness: the inner sense — the self intimational — the behaviorist — the inferential — and the perceptual kind. He notes, however, that the inferential theory is difficult to formulate in a consistent way, and that, when supplemented with additional assumptions that would make it consistent, it tends to merge with a perceptual conception. In the following presentation, therefore, I shall leave out the inferential approach. And I shall include a theory that resembles the behaviorist approach in certain respects, but which is not (necessarily) a materialist position, namely Rosenthal’s theory of higher order thoughts (cf. Natsoulas, 1988, 1989).