1 This article appeared in Consciousness: New Essays, eds. Q. Smith and A. Jokic. Oxford University Press, 2003. How to Read Your Own Mind: A Cognitive Theory of Self-Consciousness Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich 1. Introduction The topic of self-awareness has an impressive philosophical pedigree, and sustained discussion of the topic goes back at least to Descartes. More recently, self- awareness has become a lively issue in the cognitive sciences, thanks largely to the emerging body of work on “mindreading”, the process of attributing mental states to people (and other organisms). During the last 15 years, the processes underlying mindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states to other people. However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states to oneself. This process of reading one’s own mind or becoming self- aware will be our primary concern in this paper. We’ll start by examining what is probably the most widely held account of self- awareness, the “Theory Theory” (TT). The basic idea of the TT of self-awareness is that one’s access to one’s own mind depends on the same cluster of cognitive mechanisms that plays a central role in attributing mental states to others. Those mechanisms includes a body of information about psychology, a Theory of Mind (ToM). Though many authors have endorsed the Theory Theory of self-awareness (Gopnik 1993, Gopnik & Wellman 1994, Gopnik & Meltzoff 1994, Perner 1991, Wimmer & Hartl 1991, Carruthers 1996, C.D. Frith 1994, U. Frith & Happé 1999), it is our contention that advocates of this account of self-awareness have left their theory seriously under- described. In the next section, we’ll suggest three different ways in which the TT account might be elaborated, all of which have significant shortcomings. In section 3, we’ll present our own theory of self-awareness, the Monitoring Mechanism Theory, and compare its merits to those of the TT. Theory Theorists argue that the TT is supported by evidence about psychological development and psychopathologies. In section 4 we will review the arguments from psychopathologies and we will argue that none of the evidence favors the TT over our Monitoring Mechanism Theory. 1 Indeed, in the fifth 1 Elsewhere, we consider the evidence from development (Nichols & Stich forthcoming a, b). Nichols & Stich (forthcoming b) is intended as a companion piece to this article. In that article, we argue that a closer inspection of the developmental evidence shows that the developmental argument for Theory Theory is unworkable and that the evidence actually poses a problem for the Theory Theory. Of necessity, there is considerable overlap between the present paper and Nichols & Stich (forthcoming b). In both papers, we consider whether the evidence favors the Theory Theory or the Monitoring