Self-reflection implies observing and putting an interpretation on one’s own actions, for instance,
considering one’s own intentions and motives as objects of thought.
Often a mental state is taken to exist in terms of a correlation between the cognitive act (the process) and its
semantic content. In cognitivism self-reflection is then taken to mean that individuals are able to make their
own mental states the object of reflection. Furthermore, it has also been frequently argued that individuals
can reflect upon the act of a mental state and the content of a mental state separately.
My argument will now
be that we are
not
able to make the act-aspect of a mental state the object of our reflection.
Can We Be Aware of the Way We Are Conscious of Something?
Defining self-consciousness as
awareness of one’s own consciousness, we may now ask if it is possible to be aware of one’s own act of
consciousness?
In other words, can we be aware of that specific cognitive process in virtue of which we are
aware of something?
We have previously accepted that we may be aware of ourselves and that we may be aware of something
external or internal, i.e. that we can be aware of what we are conscious of. Thus, when we think about what
it
is that we are aware of, in being aware of something, we think of the content aspect of our experience, not
the act aspect of our experience.
Therefore, when we are aware of something (e.g. when we see a car in the street,
hear a bird singing,
when we are happy or sad), we are not aware of the very act through which we experience this something as
something, rather we are aware of this content and its constitutive properties. In experiencing, there
certainly is an object of experience. In addition we experience something
as
something, i.e. the experienced
content in conceiving having specific features constituting the very content. But it
is hard to see what it would
be like to be aware of the cognitive act through which the content of an experience is experienced.
Then, when we have an experience (e.g. that we saw a red car in the street, when we reflect on being
happy), the same constellation seems to be true; we have difficulties in directing our attention to the act-
aspect of the original experience.
In the literature on what metacognition is supposed to be, it is difficult
to avoid the impression that
metacognition often seems to refer to the learner’s awareness of his way of studying, i.e. the learner’s
reflection on what they are doing in order to learn. Thus, metacognitive activity often seems to be about
thinking about
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