I offer a philosophically well-motivated work-around for a problem that Geo
rge Bealer ('Self-consciousness', Philosophical Review v. 106, 1997) has id
entified, which he claims is fatal to functionalism. The problem concerns h
ow to generate a satisfactory Ramsey sentence of a psychological theory in
which mental predicates occur within the scopes of other mental predicates.
My central claim is that the functional roles in terms of which a creature
capable of self-consciousness identifies her own mental states must be rol
es that items could play within creatures whose psychology is less complex
than her own.