Abstract

I go on here with my endeavor to ascertain intrinsic-theoretical elements that are explicitly or implicitly present in O’Shaughnessy’s remembrance account of inner awareness, or the immediate cognitive awareness that we have of some of our own mental-occurrence instances. According to an intrinsic theory of such awareness, a directly apprehended state of consciousness includes in its own structure inner awareness of itself. I seek to understand those distinct mental-occurrence instances which O’Shaughnessy holds are the cognitive inner awarenesses of our experiences. They are memory experiences, he claims, owed to latent knowledge of one’s experiences that is acquired automatically as a direct effect of their occurrence. These remembrances are more akin to thought experiences than to perceptual experiences that apprehend their objects directly; indeed, they seem to be, strictly, actualizations of conceptual capacities. So, queries regarding their contents revert to queries regarding the latent knowledge that informs them. How does our author propose one directly gains this latent knowledge of experiences? This question leads us back to what the cognitive effects may be of the purely extensional, non-intentional awareness that he posited both in the perceptual and in the reflexive case. It turns out that the latent perceptual beliefs are directly acquired only via perceptions-as, which are occurrent cognitive effects of basic, purely extensional, perceptual experiences. Also, they are conceived of as instances of both outer and inner awareness. Otherwise, the respective acquired perceptual belief would not be able to pick out the outer object that it is about; the corresponding perception-as concretely singles out its outer object as what is being perceptually experienced. Similarly, and after all, O’Shaughnessy allows a spontaneous thought experience is often inner awareness of itself; he proposes it usually has a single proposition as its whole content and comes to its owner standing to the world in the truth-relation. This would seem to make of most such thoughts, awarenesses with outer objects and themselves as objects of inner awareness. I conclude that O’Shaughnessy has not managed to sustain his denial of cognitive inner awareness that takes place along with directly apprehended experiences as each of these transpires