Subjective Measures of Consciousness

Abstract This chapter critically investigates the two main types of subjective measures of consciousness, Confidence Ratings and the Perceptual Awareness Scale. The aim is to show that these measures are best understood to draw on introspective access in delivering subjective reports, but that the conception of such access is seriously underdeveloped. Instead, proponents mostly rely on a shared and unarticulated common-sense understanding of introspection. This makes contemporary subjective measures more vulnerable than they should be to the problem of response bias, and hence, to radically negative assessments. Attempts to provide a more detailed conception of subjective access by appeal to the scientifically-informed notion of metacognitive access is also not promising, given the current wide application of the notion of metacognition. The imprecision at the heart of these modern introspective methods also renders standard arguments for the necessity of introspection in consciousness science toothless in the overall debate.