Implicit Self-Awareness

Let 'outer awareness' (OA) be the awareness of something extramental, 'inner awareness' (IA) the awareness of one’s own occurent mental states, and 'self-awareness' (SA) the awareness of oneself as a subject of experience. Besides, let us call 'Ubiquity Thesis' the claim that IA and SA are ubiquitous, indeed are always concomitant with OA even in the case of an absent-minded experience. The goal of this paper is to vindicate the Ubiquity Thesis: the key idea is that, before any act of reflection or introspection, IA and SA are implicit in OA, in a sense to be explained. What emerges is a picture of SA (and IA) which departs from some current theories and, especially, from self-representational accounts of SA and IA.