A role for ownership and authorship in the analysis of thought insertion

Abstract

Philosophers are interested in the phenomenon of thought insertion because it challenges the common assumption that one can ascribe to oneself the thoughts that one can access first-personally. In the standard philosophical analysis of thought insertion, the subject owns the 'inserted' thought but lacks a sense of agency towards it. In this paper we want to provide an alternative analysis of the condition, according to which subjects typically lack both ownership and authorship of the 'inserted' thoughts. We argue that by appealing to a failure of ownership and authorship we can describe more accurately the phenomenology of thought insertion, and distinguish it from that of non-delusional beliefs that have not been deliberated about, and of other delusions of passivity. We can also start developing a more psychologically realistic account of the relation between intentionality, rationality and self knowledge in normal and abnormal cognition.

The paradoxical self: Awareness, solipsism and first-rank symptoms in schizophrenia

“…Therefore, the awareness (or the lack thereof) in alien thoughts, or even voices, is a duplex phenomenon consisting of a generative experience which often (but not always) leads to a delusional explanation. I do not agree that because the inserted thoughts occur within a mind they will have to be owned by the mind in which they are found (my argument is in line with that by Bortolotti & Broome, 2009), especially when the entire ipseity is engulfed by solipsism and there is in essence no boundary between the mind, where the thoughts are found, and the "external origin" from where they appear.…”

“…Gallagher (2014) emphasizes that the concepts of agency and ownership are twofold, with the "sense" of agency/ownership (pre-reflective) separable from the "attribution" of agency/ownership (reflective) which is very similar to the feeling vs. judgment of agency/ownership that Synofzik and colleagues propose: the former refers to feeling and experience, whereas the latter denotes realization and judgment. Gallagher also agrees that spatiality is not a strong prerequisite for ownership, however, and he offers a counterargument to that of Bortolotti and Broome (2009), suggesting that problems with ownership can all be linked back to those of agency.…”

Jaspers’ Dilemma: The Psychopathological Challenge to Subjectivity Theories of Consciousness

“…15 Partly in reaction against the agency accounts of thought insertion, some have recently described the alien feeling associated with thought insertion in terms of a "sense of endorsement." 16 Inserted thoughts, on this account, are thoughts to which the patient does not feel committed, independently of whether she feels like the agent of those thoughts (Fernàndez 2010: 67;Bortolotti and Broome 2009). This lack of sense of endorsement might manifest itself in various ways: inability to provide reasons for endorsing the thought content, failure to act consistently with the thought being true, and so on (Bortolotti and Broome 2009: 210).…”

Can “I” prevent you from entering my mind?

“…16 A widespread distinction proposed by Campbell (1999a; and taken up by Gallagher might lead some to reply that the immunity to error pertains only to "sense of agency," not "sense of ownership." Bortolotti and Broome (2009) have recently adduced reasons for dismissing this gloss, and their criticisms definitely merit attention in their own right (although one might question whether it is truly an advance to swap the spatial analogy of ownership for a "legal" one). But, the present context does not even require that one take a stand on the ownership/agency distinction.…”