Consciousness, content, and metacognitive judgments

Because metacognition consists in our having mental access to our cognitive states and mental states are conscious only when we are conscious of them in some suitable way, metacognition and consciousness shed important theoretical light on one another. Thus, our having metacognitive access to information carried by states that are not conscious helps confirm the hypothesis that a mental state's being conscious consists in having a noninferential higher-order thought about that state. This higher-order-thought hypothesis readily explains the appearance to consciousness of confabulatory mental states-states that do not actually occur. This fits well with, and helps refine, the No-Magic Hypothesis'' advanced by Nelson and Narens (1990). (C) 2000 Academic Press.