Abstract

O’Shaughnessy advocates an account of inner awareness that I would categorize as a remembrance theory. Accordingly, as the consciousness stream is proceeding, one is normally acquiring without any occurrent conceptual awareness of one’s experiences, thus silently and automatically, a latent knowledge of these experiences that can subsequently provide experiential remembrances of them. It is these remembrances that are proposed to be one’s inner awareness of one’s experiences: occurrent non-inferential conceptual awarenesses of the latter. Although O’Shaughnessy argues contra one’s having intrinsic occurrent conceptual inner awareness of one’s experiences, he maintains that every experience is its own “extensional object” . This non-conceptual reflexive relation of an experience to itself — “one’s experiential awareness of one’s experiences” — is claimed by O’Shaughnessy to be a case of awareness in exactly the same sense that any basic perceptual experience is awareness of its extensional object. The present article and the next one in the present series comprise an attempt to explicate O’Shaughnessy’s conception of inner awareness, in particular, aspects of the conception that may contribute to the positive case for intrinsic theory.