 Driven by a variety of allegedly counter-intuitive consequences of first-order theories of consciousness, including skepticism about the range of organisms it spans, a number of philosophers have offered a variety of higher-order accounts of phenomenal consciousness. Such accounts invoke mental states directed towards other mental states to explain phenomenal consciousness.  Carruthers' “higher order thought” (HOT) theory is that a mental state is phenomenally conscious for a subject just in case it is available to be thought about directly by that subject (Carruthers 1998a,b, 2000). The term “available” here makes this a “dispositionalist” account. The contrast is an “actualist” account, which requires the actual occurrence of the 2nd order thought for subject to be conscious in the relevant sense. According to Carruthers, such higher-order thoughts are not possible unless a creature has a “theory of mind” to provide it with the concepts necessary for thought about mental states. Carruthers' view is of particular interest in the current context because he has used it explicitly to deny phenomenal consciousness to (almost) all nonhuman animals. 