Immunity to error through misidentification and non-attributive self-reference

Recent empirical literature (Jeannerod & Pacherie, 2004; Mizumoto & Ishikawa, 2005) purports to challenge the thesis that certain forms of self-awareness are immune to errors of misidentification with respect to the first-person (IEM). I argue, first, that these studies do not present a challenge to the IEM thesis, and furthermore that IEM is indicative of a fundamental distinction between two ways of being selfaware—a distinction that has real consequences for empirical studies of self-awareness. In the final section of the paper I suggest that the non-attributive self-reference (NSR) thesis better explains what is special about the distinction than IEM does by itself.