involve the direct apprehension of verbal, imaginal, or other symbols and does not involve sensory awareness as DES defines that term. The apprehension of an unsymbolized thought may involve the apprehension of some sensory bits, so long as those sensory bits are not organized into a coherent, central, thematized sensory awareness. Thus, I believe that unsymbolized thinking is a perceptual event, just as are inner speech, visual imagery, and feelings; it is therefore not purely propositional

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... is therefore not a threat to the mindreadingis-prior view. Access to propositional attitudes is interpretative. Far from being neutral, DES lends empirical support to the main thrust of Carruthers' analysis that propositional attitudes are interpreted, not observed. The DES procedure trains subjects carefully, repeatedly, and iteratively (Hurlburt & Akhter 2006; Hurlburt & Heavey 2006; Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel 2007) to distinguish between directly observed (Carruthers' "perceptual") events and all else; that training typically requires several days. DES tries, moment by moment, to cleave to the directly observed and to bracket all that is inferred, supposed, presupposed. There is no a priori assumption about what is or is not directly observable. Attitudes are not singled out; if an attitude is directly observed at the moment of some beep, then that attitude is the proper target of DES. If not, then it isn't. As a result of 30 years of carefully questioning subjects about their momentary experiences, my sense is that trained DES subjects who wear a beeper and inspect what is directly before the footlights of consciousness at the moment of the beeps almost never directly apprehend an attitude. Inadequately trained subjects, particularly on their first sampling day, occasionally report that they are experiencing some attitude. But when those reports are scrutinized in the usual DES way, querying carefully about any perceptual aspects, those subjects retreat from the attitude-was-directly-observed position, apparently coming to recognize that their attitude had been merely "background" or "context." That seems entirely consonant with the view that these subjects had initially inferred their own attitudes in the same way they infer the attitudes of others. (I note that subjects do not similarly retreat from their initial reports about unsymbolized thinking; they continue to maintain that the unsymbolized thought had been directly observed.) What monkeys can tell us about metacognition and mindreading Abstract: Thinkers in related fields such as philosophy, psychology, and education define metacognition in a variety of different ways. Based on an emerging standard definition in psychology, we present evidence for metacognition in animals, and argue that mindreading and metacognition are largely orthogonal.