 Self-intimating mental states are those such that, if a person (or at least a person with the right background capacities) has them, she necessarily believes or judges or knows that she does. Conscious states are often held to be in some sense self-intimating, in that the mere having of them involves, requires, or implies some sort of representation or awareness of those states. Brentano argues that consciousness, for example, of an outward stimulus like a sound, “clearly occurs together with consciousness of this consciousness”, that is, the consciousness is “of the whole mental act in which the sound is presented and in which the consciousness itself exists concomitantly” (1874 [1995, 129]; see also  phenomenological approaches to self-consciousness).  “Higher order” and “same order” theories of consciousness (Armstrong 1968; Rosenthal 1990, 2005; Gennaro 1996; Lycan 1996; Carruthers 2005; Kriegel 2009; see also  higher-order theories of consciousness)  explain consciousness in terms of some thought, perception, or representation of the mental state that is conscious—the presence of that thought, perception, or representation being what makes the target state conscious. (On same order theories, the target mental state, or an aspect of it, represents itself, with no need for a distinct higher order state.) Thus, Horgan, Kriegel, and others have described consciousness as “self-presenting” (Horgan, Tienson, and Graham 2005; Horgan and Kriegel 2007; the usage appears to follow Chisholm 1981, but Chisholm actually has an indubitability rather than a self-intimation thesis in mind). Shoemaker (1995, 2012) argues that beliefs—as long as they are “available” (i.e., readily deployed in inference, assent, practical reasoning, etc.), which needn’t require that they are occurrently conscious—are self-intimating for individuals with sufficient cognitive capacity. Shoemaker’s idea is that if the belief that P is available in the relevant sense, then one is disposed to do things like say “I believe P”, and such dispositions are themselves constitutive of believing that one believes that P.