Beyond the Looking Glass

Standard ways of thinking about self-awareness in animals—the mirror test and the debate over metacognition—assume self-awareness must take an intentional form, where a bodily or psychological facet of an individual is taken as an intentional object of a mental act of that same individual. There are several reasons for supposing that this intentional model of self-awareness is inadequate. These include Wittgenstein’s analysis of the idea of knowing one is in pain, Shoemaker’s arguments that much self-awareness is immune to error through misidentification, and Perry’s argument for the non-eliminability of an indexical component of self-awareness. These cases show that, in self-awareness, what one is aware of is often not independent of the act of awareness, and this is something that cannot be accommodated by the intentional model.