Philos Stud (2012) 159:447–455

DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9763-9

Conscious states as objects of awareness:

on Uriah Kriegel, Subjective consciousness:
a self-representational theory

Brie Gertler

Published online: 24 June 2011

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

1 Introduction

It is a real pleasure to discuss this book, which makes a significant contribution to

consciousness studies. Self-Representationalism is a bold and promising new
theory. While the theory builds on some key insights of familiar theories of
consciousness, especially higher-order theories, it goes far beyond existing theories
in its development of these insights. A particular strength of the book is its sustained
focus on phenomenology. Kriegel never loses sight of the real explananda of his
theory, and he tirelessly tests the metaphysical and ontological details of the account
against the phenomenological data. The combination of technical sophistication and
phenomenological sensitivity makes for an exceptionally compelling, nuanced
position.
My critical remarks will focus on a thesis that underpins Self-Representation-
alism: namely, that phenomenally conscious states are states the subject is aware of.
This thesis is crucial to Kriegel’s defense of his theory, since the idea that we are
aware of our conscious states is what motivates the claim that conscious states are
represented. That claim forms a central premise in the argument to show that
conscious states are self-represented.
Here is Kriegel’s formulation of this thesis, which he calls the awareness thesis
(or ‘‘AT’’).

(AT) Necessarily, for any mental state M of a subject S, M is phenomenally

conscious (at a time t) only if S is aware of M (at t). (p. 300)1

1
All page references are to Kriegel (2009).

B. Gertler (&)
Corcoran Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA
e-mail: gertler@virginia.edu

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Kriegel supports this thesis throughout the book, using a variety of arguments.
Some of these arguments are conceptual; some are phenomenological; and some are
abductive.
I will first elucidate the AT, by considering Kriegel’s conceptual case for it. I will
argue that the conceptual case for the AT does not rule out an alternative, less
radical picture of the relation between consciousness and awareness. After sketching
this alternative, I will examine a few of Kriegel’s empirical arguments for the AT,
showing how my alternative accommodates or explains the relevant data at least as
well as the AT. My goal is not to present a competing theory of consciousness, but
rather to suggest that Self-Representationalism’s central benefits can be secured
without embracing the AT.

2 The conceptual argument for the AT

Crucially, the AT does not function in Kriegel’s argument as a stipulation, intended

to fix what is meant by ‘‘phenomenally conscious’’. Rather, he defines phenomenal
consciousness as that phenomenon that generates the explanatory gap. The truth of
the AT thus depends on whether the states that generate the explanatory gap—that
is, those responsible for the ‘‘hard problem’’ of consciousness—are states of which
the subject is aware.
Kriegel makes the following conceptual case for the AT.2
Conscious experiences are not states which we may host, as it were, unawares.
Freudian suppressed states, sub-personal states, and a variety of other
unconscious states may occur within us completely unbeknownst to us, but the
intuition is that conscious experiences are different. … Conscious states are
not states that just happen to take place in us, whether or not we are aware of
their taking place; they are also for us, precisely in the sense that there is
something it is like for us to have those states. Mental states that merely occur
in us, but of which we are completely unaware, are not conscious experiences.
(p. 16)
This conceptual case for the AT consists of two main steps. The first is explicit:
conscious states are ‘‘for us’’, in that ‘‘there is something it is like for us to have
those states’’. This first step seems unproblematic, since it is relatively uncontro-
versial that what poses the hard problem is that there is ‘‘something it is like’’ to be
in a conscious state.
My doubts concern the second step, which is implicit. According to this step, if
there is something it is like for one to have a state, then one is aware of that state. To
appreciate what is involved in being aware of something, look at an object in your
environment and consider your awareness of that object. Insofar as you are aware of
that object—a water glass on a table before you, say—it is an object of your

2
This passage is directly concerned with subjective character. But since subjective character is what
makes a state phenomenally conscious, on his view, these remarks support the AT.

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awareness. Similarly, on Kriegel’s view every conscious state is an object of

awareness. So when you eat a forkful of blueberry pie, your conscious gustatory
experience is a state of which you are aware—an object of your awareness—just as
the water glass is an object of your (perceptual) awareness.
Of course, there are important differences between your awareness of the water
glass and the type of awareness that, on Kriegel’s view, is implicated in phenomenal
consciousness. When you visually attend to the glass, it is an object of your focal
awareness, whereas Kriegel claims that phenomenal consciousness requires only
peripheral awareness. And in perceiving the glass your state of awareness, which is
mental, is distinct from its object, the glass itself. By contrast, on Kriegel’s view
phenomenal consciousness involves a state of awareness that is one and the same as
its object. This is why he says that a phenomenally conscious experience, such as
the experience of eating blueberry pie, is self-representing: an experience
constitutes awareness of itself (that very experience).
But while the ‘‘awareness’’ relation at issue in the AT differs from ordinary perceptual
awareness, there are also crucial points of similarity. Perhaps most striking is that both
types of awareness are epistemically salient. According to Self-Representationalism, a
state’s being phenomenally conscious is (at least partly) a matter of the subject’s bearing
a particular epistemic relation to that state, one broadly similar to the epistemic relation
I bear to the water glass when I am even peripherally aware of it. Kriegel explicitly
characterizes the ‘‘awareness of’’ relation in epistemic terms.
Since this awareness is awareness-of, it involves an of-ness relation to the
experience. …[I]t involves essentially the subject bearing an epistemic
relation to her experience. (p. 104)
So Self-Representationalism portrays phenomenally conscious states as playing
two roles. First, they are states (or vehicles) of awareness: that is, they constitute
awareness of something. Second, they are objects of awareness: that is, they are
states of which the subject is aware.

3 An alternative to the AT

Kriegel provides a range of arguments to show that conscious states must be both states
of awareness and objects of awareness. I will present some reasons to doubt that
phenomenally conscious states must play the latter role. I will suggest that a proper
construal of the first role, being a state of awareness, will accommodate the conceptual
and empirical data marshaled in favor of Self-Representationalism. If I am correct, a
suitable understanding of what is involved in being a state of awareness will obviate
the perceived need for supposing that conscious states are also objects of awareness.
Imagine eating a slice of blueberry pie. If you were to attend to the taste of
blueberry, your experience would be an object of your awareness: you would be
(introspectively) aware of it.3 But suppose that you are not, in fact, paying any

3
Some philosophers moved by the ‘‘transparency of experience’’ doubt whether we are ever aware of
experiences as such; but it seems to me clear that we do achieve such awareness. This claim is modest,

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attention to the taste of the pie. Instead, you are absent-mindedly eating while your
attention is entirely occupied by a byzantine tax form you are desperately trying to
complete.
Even in this case, there is something it is like (for you) to taste blueberry; the
taste is part of your overall phenomenology. Self-Representationalism accommo-
dates this fact by saying that you are aware of your blueberry-pie-eating experience;
the fact that you are not attending to the experience means that your awareness is
peripheral rather than focal. But an alternative is to say that your experience
contributes to your phenomenology simply in virtue of being a state of awareness.
The experience need not also be an object of awareness.
For the purpose of explicating this alternative, let’s assume that mental states are
property instantiations. (Kriegel mentions this as one of two plausible ontologies of
mental states—the other is that mental states are bare particulars.) When you absent-
mindedly munch a forkful of blueberry pie, you have a ‘‘qualitative blueberryness’’
experience. This experience is, we are supposing, an instantiation of qualitative
blueberryness: it is a concrete tokening of a qualitative property. On the alternative
I have in mind, to have a phenomenally conscious experience of qualitative
blueberryness is to be in a particular state of awareness, namely, a state that
constitutes awareness of qualitative blueberryness. What is crucial here is that the
object of this awareness is not the state itself—for you are not aware of your
instantiation of that property. Rather, in instantiating qualitative blueberryness you
are aware of the property qualitative blueberryness.
Now a natural view is that, in your phenomenally conscious qualitative
blueberryness experience, the object of your awareness is the pie, which has the
property represented by the qualitative character of your experience. (This claim
might be supplemented with Kriegel’s construal of qualitative character as
representing response-dependent properties.) I prefer to think of the object of your
awareness as the property qualitative blueberryness itself. But the crucial point is
that your experience, which is an instantiation of the relevant qualitative property,
does not represent itself. It instead represents something else: perhaps the pie
(an external object) or qualitative blueberryness (a property rather than an
instantiation thereof).
This is not to say that instantiating a qualitative property simply consists in an
awareness of that property. There are various ways to think about qualitative
properties, and hence to be aware of them, without instantiating them: e.g., I may
think of qualitative blueberryness just as the property that I would instantiate were
I to eat blueberry pie. So perhaps instantiating a qualitative property involves a
particularly direct type of awareness, one that could enable demonstrative reference
to the property.4 My point is only this. We can grant that phenomenal consciousness
is conceptually linked with awareness without insisting that phenomenally

Footnote 3 continued
relative to the current dialectic, since Kriegel thinks that we are at least peripherally aware of all of our
conscious experiences.
4
This is connected to Kriegel’s claim that subjective consciousness requires essential self-reference.

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conscious states must play two roles, as both states of awareness and objects of
awareness. The first role seems to do justice to this conceptual link on its own.
I propose, then, that we replace AT with a necessary condition along the
following lines.

(AT*) Necessarily, for any mental state M of a subject S, M is phenomenally

conscious (at a time t) only if there is a qualitative property Q such that M
constitutes S’s awareness of Q (at t).

Depending on how we construe qualitative properties, S’s awareness of Q may

consist in her awareness of an external object (such as the pie), her awareness of Q’s
instantiation in an external object, or her awareness of a property (such as
qualitative blueberryness). There are other possibilities as well.
This proposal will not accommodate all of the intuitions Kriegel cites in support
of Self-Representationalism. Perhaps most significant is that, in allowing that a
subject may be in a phenomenally conscious state of which she is unaware, the
proposal conflicts with one of the principal motivations for Self-Representation-
alism, namely:
Mental states that merely occur in us, but of which we are completely
unaware, are not conscious experiences. (p. 16)
But the proposal preserves intuitions closely related to this. It implies that
phenomenal consciousness is conceptually linked with awareness. And as I will
argue in a moment, it is compatible with the idea that we are generally able to
become aware of our phenomenally conscious experiences—and, hence, that a
state’s being phenomenally conscious implies that it bears an epistemic, accessi-
bility relation to the subject.
Kriegel’s original awareness thesis, AT, is much stronger than my proposed
alternative, AT*. But the appeal of AT may largely derive from the intuition that
consciousness is conceptually tied to epistemic awareness. And AT* accommodates
that intuition.
Let us now turn to the empirical arguments for AT.

4 Empirical arguments for the AT

To soften resistance to the idea that we are aware of all of our phenomenally
conscious states, Kriegel offers a variety of empirical arguments to show that
peripheral awareness of our own states—what he calls ‘‘peripheral inner
awareness’’—is ubiquitous in our experience. Some of these arguments are
phenomenological; some are abductive. If successful, they show that AT not only
accommodates the phenomenological evidence but is the best explanation of a wide
range of empirical data.
I will consider a few of Kriegel’s arguments and argue that my proposed
alternative, (AT*), fares as well as AT as regards them.

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452 B. Gertler

4.1 The Argument from Introspection

Kriegel recognizes that we engage in introspection only rarely. To explain how

introspective awareness differs from the relatively ubiquitous awareness required
for phenomenal consciousness, he adopts the ‘‘attention-shifting’’ model of
introspection. On this model, introspection involves focusing one’s attention onto
a particular state, and thereby transforming one’s awareness of that state from
merely peripheral awareness (which is ubiquitous) to the much rarer focal
awareness.
Whereas Kriegel’s view construes introspection as a shift in the focus of
awareness, on the alternative I’ve outlined introspection involves a shift in the
object of awareness. This alternative would say that, as I absent-mindedly munch
blueberry pie, my instantiation of qualitative blueberryness is not an object of my
awareness at all. I become aware of this mental state only when I introspect my
blueberry-pie-eating experience. When this occurs, the object of my awareness
shifts from the qualitative property (or, perhaps, the pie) to my mental state, which
is the instantiation of that property.
Kriegel argues that the phenomenology of introspection favors his ‘‘attention-
shifting’’ model over alternatives that, like my proposal, take introspection to
introduce a new object of awareness.
[The attention-shifting model] has the added advantage of illuminating the fact
that introspecting does not feel, phenomenologically, like performing a
‘‘dramatic’’ mental act, an act that creates an altogether new representation (as,
say, visualizing a cat does). Instead, it feels more like shifting around one’s
attention, and attending more carefully to contents that were already
previously there. (p. 183)
To test this phenomenological claim, I invite you to reflect on how your feet feel
in your shoes just now. In doing this, you are shifting your attention to an aspect of
your current phenomenology. And there is a definite sense of familiarity—it seems
to me, at least, that this feet-in-shoes feeling has been present for a while, though
until this moment I hadn’t attended to it. So we can agree with Kriegel that
introspection involves a shift of attention, and that the introspected experience
typically appears familiar.
But these observations do not show that the shift of attention simply relocates
your experience from the periphery to the focus of attention. For they are
compatible with my alternative, which says that the shift of attention makes what
was previously merely a state of awareness—the phenomenal ‘‘feet in shoes’’
experience—into an object of awareness. My alternative explains why the new
representation will seem familiar. When you were merely having the feet-in-shoes
experience, without attending to it, you were aware of the qualitative property. (The
object of your awareness may have been the qualitative feet-in-shoes property itself;
or it may have been the relation between your feet and your shoes; etc.) This is why
attending to your experience ‘‘does not feel, phenomenologically, like performing a
‘dramatic’ mental act’’: you were aware of its characteristic qualitative property all

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along, though until you turned your attention to your experience you were not aware
of your experience.5
My proposal accommodates another argument of Kriegel’s, the ‘‘Memorability
Argument’’, in a similar way. The Memorability Argument is straightforward.
Kriegel notes that he can remember how his morning orange juice tasted, and argues
that this means he was aware of his experience of the orange juice when he had it.
On my alternative, his ability to remember the experience is explained by the fact
that, when drinking the orange juice, he was aware of the relevant qualitative
property. He can therefore ‘‘call up’’ this property and replay the experience, so to
speak, in episodic memory. Attending to the current episodic reliving of the original
experience, he can make the orange-juice-drinking experience (the instantiation of
qualitative orange-juiciness) an object of awareness even if the original experience
was only a state of awareness.
A different issue arises in Kriegel’s ‘‘Sophisticated Argument from Blindsight’’.
Kriegel argues that the AT provides ‘‘the simplest explanation’’ of why a normally
sighted individual has a conscious state when confronted with a particular visual
stimulus, while a blindsighter presented with the same stimulus has an unconscious
state. The explanation is simply that the normally sighted person is aware of his
visual state, while the blindsighter is not. Kriegel adds an extra step to this argument
(this is what renders it ‘‘sophisticated’’), drawing on research suggesting that
blindsighters are susceptible to the same priming effects as the normally sighted.
Since it seems likely that qualitative properties are responsible for priming effects,
this result implies that blindsighters instantiate the relevant qualitative properties.
Kriegel concludes that we should allow that their visual states have these qualitative
properties, while attributing their lack of phenomenal consciousness to the fact that
they are unaware of these qualitative properties. According to the AT, this means
that their visual states are not phenomenally conscious.
Interestingly, my alternative allows for an interpretation of the blindsight case
that is very similar to this Self-Representationalist interpretation. I agree that what is
lacking is awareness of the qualitative properties of experience; but on my view, this
does not entail that the experience was not phenomenally conscious. It simply
means that the experience is one the blindsighter cannot introspect. I am operating
with Kriegel’s definition of phenomenal consciousness as the phenomenon that
makes consciousness seem mysterious. So the issue here is whether the blindsigh-
ter’s experience exhibits the phenomenon that makes consciousness seem myste-
rious. It seems to me that a particular state, such as the blindsighter’s visual state,
could exhibit that phenomenon even if the subject himself cannot introspect that
state—and, hence, cannot appreciate the mystery through reflection on it.
This brings me to the source of my concerns about Kriegel’s Self-Representa-
tionalism. At bottom, my concerns are epistemic. It seems to me that one may have
a phenomenally conscious state, in Kriegel’s sense, without standing in the sort of
robust, actualized epistemic relation to that state required for awareness of it. This is
not to say that phenomenal consciousness is epistemically inert. On my view, the

5
Kriegel uses this point about familiarity in his ‘‘Argument from Surprise’’, to which my response
directly applies.

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epistemic significance of phenomenal consciousness is that phenomenally conscious

states are a type of state that can be known with an especially high degree of
certainty (though not every subject, in every circumstance, can achieve this degree
of certainty as regards each of her phenomenally conscious states). They have this
feature because, as it is sometimes said, there is no gap between appearance and
reality as regards phenomenally conscious states. More precisely: phenomenal states
are as they epistemically appear to doxastically cautious, careful subjects.6 This
means that subjects can sometimes achieve especially certain knowledge of their
phenomenal states. But it does not mean that one is aware of all of one’s
phenomenal states.
Like Kriegel, I believe that phenomenal consciousness is epistemically signif-
icant. But my construal of this significance, unlike Kriegel’s, allows that someone
could have a particular phenomenally conscious state that doesn’t epistemically
appear to her at all. Since this possibility seems to me to be perfectly coherent,
I regard compatibility with it as an advantage of my view.
Kriegel makes a provocative suggestion that bears on these epistemic issues. He
suggests that a state’s subjective character, which partially consists in the subject’s
awareness of the state, is the categorical basis for the dispositional property of
access consciousness.
[S]ubjective character seems to play the right explanatory role vis-à-vis access
consciousness. The reason why a mental state is poised for the subject’s free
use in personal-level reasoning and action control, it is reasonable to suppose,
is that the subject is already aware of it.
This approach to access consciousness is, I think, very promising. It distinguishes
phenomenal from access consciousness while doing justice to the intimate relations
between them. Most importantly, it enables consciousness to play a robust
explanatory role: I can access my experience of blueberryness, and use it to guide
reasoning and action (deciding to have another slice of pie, say), because it is
phenomenally conscious. This is a major benefit of Self-Representationalism. It
avoids a serious pitfall of theories that reduce consciousness to functional or
dispositional properties: such theories deny, implausibly, that consciousness
explains the functional or dispositional properties at issue.
But while the suggestion that phenomenal consciousness is the categorical basis
of access consciousness is promising, I think that its promise would be better
realized by adopting the sort of alternative I have proposed. As a candidate for the
categorical basis of access consciousness, awareness of a qualitative property is
more fitting than awareness of my experience—that is, my instantiation of that
property. Taking the categorical basis of access consciousness to be a state of
awareness that is not an object of awareness provides a more natural explanation of
our use of mental states in reasoning and action. For instance, my disposition to
6
This is not to say that every aspect of their phenomenal reality is reflected in their epistemic
appearance. As the speckled hen case has taught us, the epistemic appearance of a phenomenal state does
not always exhaust its phenomenal reality. My point here is only that, for careful, doxastically cautious
subjects, judgments about phenomenal states based on how those states epistemically appear can achieve
an especially high degree of certainty. (I develop this view in Gertler forthcoming.)

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infer that I may safely press the accelerator is explained by my awareness of the
green light, not by my awareness of my experience of the green light. What secures
this key benefit of the Self-Representationalist view is not the AT but, rather, the
fact that conscious states are states of awareness. So my weaker alternative, AT*,
suffices for this purpose.

5 Conclusion

I have raised some doubts about the plausibility of, and need for, the claim that
phenomenally conscious states must be objects of awareness. Of course, space
constraints have forced me to ignore some of Kriegel’s arguments for this claim.
One in particular deserves mention. Kriegel argues (in the Appendix) that the AT is
needed to explain cognitive phenomenology, since such phenomenology is not a
matter of, say, imagery. He would presumably argue, on similar grounds, that a
difference in the qualitative properties of which one is aware will not secure the
relevant difference in cognitive phenomenology. The resolution of this question will
depend on how one construes qualitative properties, and I have not addressed that
issue here.
I’m grateful to Kriegel for inspiring me to think about these challenging
questions, by addressing them with such clarity and rigor. I now have more doubts
about these issues than I did when I first opened his book—and that is a clear mark
of his achievement.

References

Gertler, B. (forthcoming). Renewed acquaintance. In D. Smithies & D. Stoljar (Eds.), Introspection and
consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kriegel, U. (2009). Subjective consciousness: A self-representational theory. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

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