Implicit Awareness

This paper defends a Brentanian account of the subject’s awareness of her own experiences—or inner awareness for short. The proposed account expands on Brentano’s claim that inner awareness, like outer awareness, comes in two forms, implicit and explicit. This distinction, it is argued, makes the account far more objection-resistant than usually believed. Especially, it makes the latter compatible with (i) the existence of unnoticed mental phenomena, (ii) the non-objectifying character of pre-reflective inner awareness, and (iii) the possibility of improving or correcting one’s descriptions of one’s own experiences. Section 1 argues that compatibility with (i)-(iii) is a desideratum that should be met by any satisfying theory of inner awareness. Section 2 introduces the notion of implicit awareness, argues for its existence, and gives many examples thereof. Section 3 addresses the question as to how to make implicit awareness explicit and argues that the explicitness of inner awareness does not result from any inward-looking process but goes hand-in-hand with the explicitness of outer awareness. Eventually, Section 4 shows that the resulting picture is compatible with (i)-(iii) and offers a promising alternative to so-called inner-sense theories.