Michel Bitbol and Claire Petitmengin On Pure Reflection A Reply to Dan Zahavi In his reply to our article ‘The validity of first-person descriptions as authenticity and coherence’ (Petitmengin & Bitbol, 2009), published in the special issue of JCS 10 years of Viewing from Within: the Leg- acy of Francisco Varela, Dan Zahavi (2011, hereafter DZ) formulates interesting objections to our line of arguments on three crucial points: the definition of ‘reflection’ and ‘reflective consciousness’, the role of language in reports of first-person experience, and the canonical dif- ference between phenomenology and introspection. We will address these issues in turn, yet concentrating on the first two points since the last objection is more specifically aimed at Pierre Vermersch’s contri- bution ‘Describing the practice of introspection’. An important premise concerns the negative use of the term ‘reflec- tion’(non-reflective, pre-reflective). We fully agree with DZ about his delineation of prereflective experience: prereflective experience is unnoticed, but not unconscious. When we wrote that ‘we are unaware of our (lived) experience’, we only meant the following: in the process of experiencing, our attention is so narrowly focused, so quick in changing its focus from one relevant object to another, that it simply leaves aside a large amount of the overall experienced content (which is nevertheless retained in a form of ‘passive memory’, as opposed to the active memory of attended episodes). This unattended rather than unconscious status accounts for the relatively easy retrospective accessibility of the prereflective material of experience during the explicitation interviews (Vermersch, 1999), and it explains the feeling expressed by many interviewees of merely realizing the richness of Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18, No. 2, 2011, pp. 24–37 Correspondence: Michel Bitbol, Claire Petitmengin, Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée, 32 boulevard Victor, 75015 Paris, France. michel.bitbol@polytechnique.edu, claire.petitmengin@polytechnique.edu