My remarks focus on Kriegel’s “awareness thesis”, which underpins his self-representationalist theory of consciousness. The awareness thesis is that phenomenally conscious states are states the subject is aware of.  I elucidate Kriegel’s case for this thesis, and argue that this case doesn’t rule out an alternative, less radical picture of the relation between consciousness and awareness.  Self-representationalism’s central benefits can be secured without embracing the awareness thesis.

The debate between internalists and externalists about mental content has proven exceptionally intractable; there is little agreement even on the implications of each of these positions. The culprit, I think, is an ambiguity in the terms “externalism” and “internalism”, which they inherit from an ambiguity in the notion of “intrinsic to the thinker” that defines these positions. I argue that this ambiguity is ineliminable. Any way of explicating “intrinsic to the thinker” will clash with the usual taxonomy of leading externalist and internalist views, or construe these positions as involving commitments that are standardly regarded as orthogonal to them—and, in some cases, explicitly rejected by their most prominent exponents. The moral is stark. The sense that there is a substantive, defining commitment of externalism or internalism—even one that is vague or underspecified—is illusory. There is no univocal thesis of externalism or internalism.

Several contemporary philosophers have argued that one can discover whether one believes that p simply by considering whether p; moreover, they claim, use of this “transparency” method explains our privileged access to our beliefs (Byrne, Fernández, Moran). In this paper, I argue against that claim. Use of the transparency method does not yield knowledge of either explicit or implicit dispositional beliefs. And while the self-attributions of occurrent beliefs generated by the transparency method may qualify as knowledge, the possibility that the use of the method generates new beliefs (rather than revealing existing beliefs) means that the availability of that method does not explain our privileged access to our occurrent beliefs.

Stoljar rejects dualism, but defends the use of conceivability arguments. He argues that the appeal of dualism stems from our ignorance about the physical, an ignorance that taints our use of conceivability tests. Stoljar’s central purpose in the book is to show that it is this type of ignorance, and not some other factor, that is principally responsible for the appeal of dualism. The bulk of his arguments target materialists’ competing diagnoses of dualism’s allure. In this study, I sketch Stoljar’s case against rival accounts of how dualist arguments fail. But most of my critical remarks concern his arguments against dualism. For I think the sort of ignorance that Stoljar rightly attributes to us may threaten materialism at least as much as it threatens dualism. Much of this study is devoted to substantiating that claim.

I defend (modified versions of) the more controversial elements of Clark and Chalmers’ argument for the “extended mind” thesis, including the parity principle and the claim that Otto’s notebook records play a role relevantly similar to that played by information stored organically. But, I argue, the extended mind thesis has worrisome consequences. On my diagnosis, the culprit is a widely accepted implicit premise of their argument, namely, that dispositional beliefs are mental states. The true moral of Clark and Chalmers’ argument is that the mind is much narrower than we ordinarily believe: it is constituted exclusively by occurrent attitudes and experiences.