•  79
    Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness are Empirically False
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (11-12): 30-54. 2020.
    Higher-order theories of consciousness come in many varieties, but all adopt the 'transitivity principle' as a central, explanatory premise. The transitivity principle states that a mental state of a subject is conscious if and only if the subject is aware of it. This higher-order awareness is realized in different ways in different forms of higher-order theory. I argue that empirical studies of metacognition have falsified the transitivity principle by showing that there can be awareness of a m…Read more
  •  47
    Epistemic feelings, metacognition, and the Lima problem
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 6803-6825. 2021.
    Epistemic feelings like tip-of-the-tongue experiences, feelings of knowing, and feelings of confidence tell us when a memory can be recalled and when a judgment was correct. Thus, they appear to be a form of metacognition, but a curious one: they tell us about content we cannot access, and the information is supplied by a feeling. Evaluativism is the claim that epistemic feelings are components of a distinct, primitive metacognitive mechanism that operates on its own set of inputs. These inputs …Read more