Up until recently, the prevalent construal of ‘inner awareness’, a subject’s special awareness of their own mental states which renders these states conscious, was representationalist. According to Rosenthal (2005), for example, one’s mental state is conscious due to one’s having a suitable higher-order thought (HOT) that represents it; according to Kriegel’s (2009) self-representationalist account, on the other hand, mental states are conscious due to representing themselves. If, however, inner awareness of our mental states is a matter of representing these states, it would seem that we are kept ‘cognitively apart’ from our own conscious mental contents, which seems implausible. Since the representational states that constitute inner awareness – and thus determine the what-it’s-likeness of experience, according to the representationalists – could misrepresent the mental states that this awareness makes conscious, one could, for example, experience a green bus while being in a ‘red-bus-ish’ conscious perceptual state, or in no conscious perceptual state at all (see Coleman 2015).

This unwelcome ‘cognitive distance’ between ourselves and our conscious states that representationalism brings about (see, however, Kriegel 2009), has led some proponents of inner awareness (e.g. Williford 2015, Duncan 2018, Levine 2019; Giustina (forthcoming)) to suggest that inner awareness is best understood in terms of Russell’s notion of acquaintance. For Russell (1910–11), acquaintance is a direct, non-conceptual cognitive relation between a subject and an intentional object, where the object is (immediately) presented to the subject. An acquaintance-based model of inner awareness would arguably cancel any cognitive distance between a subject and her conscious states as these would be directly presented to her, instead of represented, overcoming the described misrepresentation problem. Such a model, however, may seem to face a challenge concerning the naturalisability of consciousness since acquaintance – unlike representation – is often viewed as naturalistically suspect, or even mysterious.

While some proponents of acquaintance have bitten the bullet and endorsed a non-naturalistic conception thereof (Levine 2019), others have argued that acquaintance is compatible with naturalism. I shall investigate arguably the best developed naturalistic model of acquaintance, suggested by Coleman (2019), who models acquaintance in terms of a special, non-representationalist version of the HOT theory. For Coleman, then, our inner awareness of our mental states is a matter of having HOTs about these states, where these HOTs do not represent our mental states, but rather ‘quote’ them, due to the target mental states’ being embedded within the HOTs (see Coleman 2015, 2018). Coleman’s quotational-HOT (or simply QHOT) model, if viable, would thus avoid the misrepresentation problem and would accommodate our sense that in being phenomenally conscious, we are in direct, substantial and near infallible cognitive contact with our mental (for example, sensory) states, that the notion of acquaintance aims to capture.

After exploring the key features of Coleman’s conception, I shall attempt to raise a challenge for it that is inspired by Levine’s (2007) critique of Balog’s related ‘quotational account’ of phenomenal concepts. Balog’s approach, according to Levine, fails to explain the specific ‘cognitive presence’ of phenomenal states which our direct phenomenal concepts (those concepts we acquire by directly attending to what it is like to be in various phenomenal states, Chalmers 2003) seem to afford us. According to Levine (2007, p. 159), a phenomenal state is cognitively present for an organism just in case the organism enjoys an especially immediate and intimate cognitive access to this state. I’ll argue that a related objection applies to Coleman’s model of acquaintance, despite significant differences between his and Balog’s accounts.

I’ll first explain that acquaintance with a mental state makes it cognitively present for a subject in Levine’s special sense. Then I’ll argue that Coleman’s QHOT account, despite plausibly avoiding the pitfalls of representationalism, falls short of explaining this cognitive presence. While our QHOTs plausibly cognitively relate us to the target mental states in being intentionally ‘about’ these states, I shall explain that this intentional relation cannot, on its own, fully account for cognitive presence, in Levine's intimacy-involving sense, since standard representing HOTs are intentionally ‘about’ their target states too, without rendering these states cognitively present in this sense.

At this point, the proponents of the QHOT account are likely to appeal to the physical presence of the target mental state within the QHOT, but I shall argue that it’s unclear why this physical presence should result in the state’s cognitive presence for the organism that acquaintance seems to involve. Mere physical presence, after all, seems compatible with the mental state’s not having any physical impact on the QHOT frame, which strongly suggests that it has no cognitive impact, that would go beyond an intentional relation, on the organism either. But, as explained above, merely being intentionally related to the target state seems insufficient for cognitive presence of the state for the organism, hence for acquaintance. If my critique is plausible, the QHOT account faces fatal problems, which should motivate us to search for theoretical alternatives.

References:
Balog, K. (2012). Acquaintance and the mind-body problem. In S. Gozzano & C. S. Hill (Eds.), New Perspectives on type identity: The mental and the physical. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coleman, S. (2015). Quotational higher-order thought theory. Philosophical Studies, 172(10), 2705–2733.
Coleman, S. (2018). The merits of high-order thought theories. Trans/Form/Ação 41, pp. 31– 48.
Coleman, S. (2019). Natural acquaintance. In J. Knowles & T. Raleigh (Eds.), Acquaintance: New essays (pp. 49–74). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Duncan, M. (2018). Subjectivity as self-acquaintance. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25 (3– 4), pp. 88–111.
Giustina, A. (forthcoming). Inner Acquaintance Theories of Consciousness. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind 4.
Kriegel, U. (2009). Subjective consciousness: A self-representational theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levine, J. (2007). Phenomenal concepts and the materialist constraint. In T. Alter & S. Walter (Eds.), Phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge: New essays on consciousness and physicalism (pp. 145–166). New York: Oxford University Press.
Levine, J. (2019). Acquaintance is consciousness and consciousness is acquaintance. In J. Knowles & T. Raleigh (Eds.), Acquaintance: New Essays (pp. 33–48). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rosenthal, D. M. (2005). Consciousness and mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Russell, B. (1910–11) Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 11 (1910 - 1911), pp. 108-128

Williford, K. (2015). Representationalisms, subjective character, and self-acquaintance. In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 39(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570054