 Another approach that makes consciousness central (but without appeal to an original/derived contrast) is that of Declan Smithies 2019. For him, crucially, beliefs are essentially rationally assessable states, capable of justifying and being justified. And we can properly account for their epistemic status, he argues, only by understanding them in terms of consciousness—as dispositions to conscious judgments. For only this will yield the intuitively right verdicts regarding when someone is favorably or unfavorably assessable with respect to epistemic norms. And only this will properly cohere with a general epistemology that correctly links justification to introspectability, and introspection to consciousness. Thus, while we may conceive of beings behaviorally similar to us, but bereft of subjective experience (“zombies” of a sort), we should not suppose they would literally have person-level, rationally assessable attitudes, even if they harbored internal representations playing casual roles with respect to their behavior. Without the right sort of consciousness, they couldn’t have the introspective self-knowledge they need to be properly subject to epistemic norms, and so couldn’t literally have attitudes like beliefs.