Pre-Reflective vs. Reflexive Self-Awareness

Abstract

In this paper I propose an account pre-reflective self-awareness, both vis-à-vis onself and vis-à-vis one’s own phenomenally conscious mental states and processes. I argue that pre-reflective self-awareness is a form of acquaintance with oneself and with one’s phenomenal states that is distinctively direct in this sense: it is not mediated by mental representations of those states or of oneself. I also argue that there is an important kind of reflective self-awareness that is reflexive, in this sense: it involves mental representations of one’s phenomenally conscious states, and of oneself, in which pre-reflective self-awareness plays a distinctive contributory role—a role I call ‘direct self-presentation’.