Introducing the Self of Self-Consciousness

Abstract

One central goal of Transparency and Reflection is to explain how self-knowledge is possible, while adhering to the principle that knowledge of mental states is ‘transparent’ to knowledge of the world. I argue that the resources that Matthew Boyle brings to that project, viz., ‘consciousness-as-subject’ and ‘modes of presentation’, are inadequate to explain the introduction of the representation of a self as something that has multiple states. Positively, I suggest that Boyle would have been more successful if he had stayed with his earlier Kantian assumption that mastery of the first person representation requires consciousness of the activity of reasoning that enables subjects to answer why questions.