First-Person Belief, Consciousness, and Eroom´s Paradox

Abstract

This paper aims to show that there exists a necessary, non-contingent, relation between having a first-person belief and believing consciously: a first-person belief is necessarily conscious. From this, two major consequences can be drawn. First, a theory of consciousness claiming that a mental state is conscious when it is accompanied by a higher-order thought or belief about the state itself should be discarded. Second, an account can be given of Eroom’s paradox —the nonsense of asserting or believing something of the form “p and I believe unconsciously that p”—.