Much traditional philosophical discussion of self-awareness has focused on introspective psychological self-knowledge,
i.e., conceptual or propositional awareness of one's psychological properties. For example, Shoemaker's has famously argued that one'sintrospective self-knowledge is immune to certain kinds of errors of perceptual self-identification and that what he calls "self-blindness" is a conceptual impossibility. Such claims must, I think, be understood as restricted to conceptual or propositional knowledge of one's own psychological properties. Much recent work in cognitive neuroscience, however, has focused on two different kinds of self-awareness:
(i) self-awareness of one's own non-psychological or bodily properties (e.g., the sense of ownership of one's own bodily parts, to which, I take it, Shoemaker's thesis that self-knowledge is immune to errors of self-identification does not properly apply) and
(ii) non-conceptual (or non-propositional) awareness of one's psychological properties such as the sense of agency, i.e., the sense of one's being the agent of one's own actions. In my paper, I shall examine recent contributions from cognitive neuroscience (such as "internal models of actions") that shed light on the neural bases of the sense of agency and provide some scientific understanding of one's awareness of one's own intention to act. I shall examine the scope and limits of the explanatory power of internal models to account for one's awareness of one's intentions.