It is widely acknowledged that there is a connection between consciousness and awareness. One way to cash out this connection is by understanding conscious states to be those states we are conscious with, i.e., states which give us awareness of the world around us (Dretske 1993). But acknowledging this doesn't seem to exhaust the connection between consciousness and awareness. As well as external awareness, there seems to be some sort of inner awareness connected with consciousness. Exactly what this inner awareness amounts to, what it is of, how and when it is connected with consciousness, and how it works, are topics considered in the papers in this special issue.What is this inner awareness? One way to begin is by asking how inner awareness is related to introspection where this is understood as the act of reflectively becoming aware of aspects of one's mental life. On one conception, inner awareness is something we achieve only through introspection: to become aware of our experience of the sunset, or of ourselves as the subject of this experience, we must explicitly reflect on these things. Many, however, have suggested that inner awareness can also characterise our non-reflective experiences. On this conception, we have a kind of implicit inner awareness even when we are not explicitly introspecting. Such a view of inner awareness encourages us to understand introspection not so much as an act that gives rise to inner awareness but as an act that emphasises or makes explicit an inner awareness that was already present in experience prior to introspection.A second foundational question concerns what inner awareness is awareness of. On one understanding of inner awareness, what we are aware of is our experience. On a Rev

Ambitious higher-order theories of consciousness aim to account for conscious states when these are understood in terms of what-it-is-like-ness. This paper considers two arguments concerning this aim, and concludes that ambitious theories fail. The misrepresentation argument against HO theories aims to show that the possibility of radical misrepresentation—there being a HO state about a state the subject is not in—leads to a contradiction. In contrast, the awareness argument aims to bolster HO theories by showing that subjects are aware of all their conscious states. Both arguments hinge on how we understand two related notions which are ubiquitous in discussions of consciousness: those of what-it-is-like-ness and there being something it is like for a subject to be in a mental state. This paper examines how HO theorists must understand the two crucial notions if they are to reject the misrepresentation argument but assert the awareness argument. It shows that HO theorists can and do adopt an understanding—the HO reading—which seems to give them what they want. But adopting the HO reading changes the two arguments. On this reading, the awareness argument tells us nothing about those states there is something it is like to be in, and so offers no support to ambitious HO theories. And to respond to the misrepresentation understood according to the HO reading is to simply ignore the argument presented, and so to give no response at all. As things stand, we should deny that HO theories can account for what-it-is-like-ness.

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