Colchester, Essex, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
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    Consciousness and false HOTs
    Philosophical Psychology 23 (5): 617-638. 2010.
    In this paper I aim to defend David Rosenthal's higher-order thought theory of consciousness against a prominent objection. The central claim of HOT theory is that a mental state is conscious only if one has the HOT that one is in that state. In broad outline, the objection is that HOT theory is unable to account for cases where the relevant HOTs are false. I consider two variants of the objection, corresponding to two kinds of false HOT: those that merely misrepresent their targets, and those w…Read more