Consciousness as Intransitive Self-Consciousness: Two Views and an Argument

Abstract

The word ‘consciousness’ is notoriously ambiguous. This is mainly because it is not a term of art, but a mundane word we all use quite frequently, for different purposes and in different everyday contexts. In this paper, I am going to discuss consciousness in one specific sense of the word. To avoid the ambiguities of the word ‘consciousness,’ I will introduce a term of art: intransitive self-consciousness. As the term suggests, the phenomenon I have in mind is a kind of self-consciousness, or self-awareness.