Inner Acquaintance Theories of Consciousness
September 17, 2024 Anna Giustina 15 citations
Most philosophical theories of consciousness explain it through representation, debating whether representing something is sufficient (first-order representationalism) or requires further meta-representation (higher-order and self-representationalism). This chapter presents an alternative, the Inner Acquaintance Theory (IAT), which explains consciousness not by representation but by a direct epistemic and metaphysical relation of acquaintance. On IAT, a mental state is conscious when its subject is acquainted with it. The chapter develops IAT's details, illustrates its explanatory power, and proposes it as a plausible alternative to representational theories.