Abstract

The conception of first‐person knowledge of thought and experience was present in antiquity. It played a major role in Western philosophy in the early modern era as an integral part of the Cartesian and Lockean conceptions of the mind. If inner sense is a form of introspective self‐observation yielding knowledge, as it seemed to be, then awareness of the contents of the mind appears to be analogous to what we take to be awareness or consciousness of objects by the exercise of a perceptual faculty. Descartes thought that the impossibility of doubt implied the presence of complete certainty. Consequently, he cast what he called 'thoughts' in the role of the certain foundations of empirical knowledge. Both Locke and Descartes supposed that one is conscious of what passes in the mind, and that what one is conscious of one knows to exist or obtain.