Maik Niemeck

It is widely believed that the phenomenal character of conscious mental states is composed of two different components: its qualitative character and its subjective character, with the latter also being referred to as ‘mineness’, ‘for-me-ness’ or ‘me-ishness’. While many researchers agree that the subjective character is an essential part of conscious life, there is great disagreement about what the metaphysical nature of this component of experience has to be like. One answer to this question, originally presented in Smith (1986), conceptualizes the subjective character as being part of the modality of experience rather than as a constituent of its representational content. I call the branch of theories developed along these lines ‘the self-mode approach to the subjective character of experience’. This self-mode approach to the metaphysics underlying the subjective character appears to be promising, yet it can still be developed in a number of different ways – some of which are fraught with problems, while others less so. Here I will introduce three different approaches to the idea that the subjective character is grounded in the modality of experience. I name these distinct accounts ‘evaluatism’ (Musholt 2015; Pereira 2018; Recanati 2007, 2012), ‘adverbialism’ (Thomasson 2000), and ‘relationalism’. I am going to argue for relationalism, and explore how this position relates to a general representational theory of consciousness and different views about the metaphysics of the subjects of experiences, i.e. the entities in relation to which experiences are instantiated. Relationalism consists of the very simple idea that the subjective character is grounded in a sui generis mental relation that holds between a conscious mental state and the subject of experience having this state. In contrast to most of the existing accounts of subjective character, relationalism aims to account for the subjective character not by introducing something additional to our ontology of the mind and consciousness (such as a self-representational content or a higher-order state), but by adopting a different view on the grounding or basing relation holding between the representational structure of a conscious mental state and its phenomenal character.

There is widespread agreement among many contemporary philosophers of mind that, in addition to their qualitative character, phenomenally conscious states contain some kind of subjective character. The subjective character of experience is most commonly characterized as a subject’s awareness that it is currently undergoing a specific experience. This idea is nothing new, of course, and something similar has been proposed quite some time ago by Franz Brentano, among others, under the name of “secondary consciousness”. That fact hasn’t remained unnoticed. Indeed, a number of competing contemporary accounts of subjective character refer to Brentano as an early proponent of their particular view. This article pursues two objectives. First, it argues that the so-called self-mode account of subjective character is, for systematical reasons, superior to self-representational and pre-reflective accounts. Second, the article briefly suggests a novel interpretation of Brentano’s concept of secondary consciousness that sets it in relation to the previously introduced self-mode account and bears some similarities with Thomasson’s adverbial interpretation of Brentano’s concept of secondary consciousness.

The book offers new answers to two central questions that have been heavily debated, especially in recent years, in the debate on so-called de se skepticism: Is there something special about first-person thinking? And how does it relate to other forms of self-consciousness? The answer to the first question is a resounding "yes." This assertion is justified by the double-reflexive structure, motivational force, and specific concern that first-personal thinking involves. Regarding the second question, the book concludes that there are non-linguistic forms of self-consciousness. However, these should not be understood as representational contents or non-relational properties, but as mental relations that, without themselves being represented, can contribute to the phenomenal character of conscious states. In this respect, the book also provides a justification for the rarely considered impure intentionalism.

With his now famous regress argument, Sydney Shoemaker (1968) aimed to provide justification for the assumption that at least some cases of self-awareness cannot be based on identification. The overall goal of this paper is to discuss two possible worries one may have about Shoemaker’s argument. I will show that these problems have far-reaching consequences that may diminish the argument’s importance for an adequate theory of self-awareness and that another conclusion Shoemaker and other philosophers draw may be unwarranted.

A widely shared view in the literature on first-person thought is that the ability to entertain first-person thoughts requires prior non-conceptual forms of self-consciousness. Many philosophers maintain that the distinctive awareness which accompanies the use of the first person already presupposes a non-conceptual consciousness of the fact that oneself is the owner of a first-person thought. I call this argument The Argument for Non-Conceptual Self-Consciousness based on the Meaning of “I” and will demonstrate that most proponents of the presented argument fail to establish their conclusion, even though I believe that the conclusion is actually true. The argument only justifies the claim that contextual information is needed in order to recognize oneself as the referent of an occurrence of the first person. However, it does not justify the thesis that this information needs to be given consciously and thus the existence of any non-conceptual self-consciousness. Finally, I shall present an argument for the assumption that some form of self-consciousness is needed to reflexively think about oneself via the first-person concept. In order to do so, I will draw on the general discussion about the functional role of consciousness. In particular, I will rely on results recently proposed by Frith and Metzinger (2016), Frith (Pragmatics & Cognition 18:497–551, 2010, Cognitive Neuroscience 2:117–118, 2011), Graziano (2013, Frontiers in Robotics and AI 4:article 60, 2017), and Graziano and Kastner (Cognitive Neuroscience 2:98–113, 2011), which suggest that one of the central functions of consciousness is to provide information about mental states for communication.