ABSTRACT
Whether or not one wholeheartedly adopts a representational theory of consciousness, there is at least one zone of mentality where it must be essentially correct: conscious thought. The core of conscious thinking is awareness of content. It is not a special sort of phenomenal or qualitative consciousness; it seems quite distinct from the consciousness of colours, sounds and other sensory qualities (on the other side of the coin, it is this difference that is supposed to give the problem of qualia its special bite). So conscious thought puts an inescapable burden on the externalist theories of representation and mental content. I argue that conscious thought in fact shows that externalist views of mental content cannot be correct. Perhaps this only indicates that the ambitions of these externalist views must be moderated, and there may be various ways to retreat from radical externalism. Perhaps it reveals that there is some sort of very deep misunderstanding about the nature of consciousness lurking within almost all our thinking about it. Or it may simply show that some kind of internalist theory of mental content or representation is needed to account for conscious thought. The details of such a theory, or even whether a non-trivial one can be coherently formulated, are unfortunately far from clear.
