“Inner Perception Can Never Become Inner Observation”: Brentano on Awareness and Observation
Skip other details (including permanent urls, DOI, citation information)
: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Please contact [email protected] to use this work in a way not covered by the license.
For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy.
Abstract
Self-representational theories of consciousness hold that a mental phenomenon is conscious if, and only if, it presents, among other things, itself. But in conscious perception one may lose oneself in the object perceived and not be aware of one’s perceiving. The paper develops a Brentano-inspired response to this objection. He follows Aristotle in holding that one is aware of one’s perceiving only ‘on the side’: when one perceives something one’s perception neither is nor can become observation of itself. I argue that the arguments Brentano gave for this claim in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint are wanting. However, a promising argument emerges if one takes Brentano’s conception of noticing into account.
