Schizophrenic Thought Insertion and Self-Experience

Abstract

In contemporary philosophy of mind and psychiatry, schizophrenic thought insertion is often used as a validating or invalidating counterexample in various theories about how we experience ourselves. Recent work has taken cases of thought insertion to provide an invalidating counterexample to the Humean denial of self-experience, arguing that deficiencies of agency in thought insertion suggest that we normally experience ourselves as the agent of our thoughts. In this paper, I argue that appealing to a breakdown in the sense of agency to explain thought insertion is problematic, and that rather than following the prevailing binary approach which holds that certain features of consciousness go missing while others remain wholly intact, a better explanation involves construing thought insertion as a disturbing or disrupting of the subjectivity (for-me-ness) of experience. The result is that experiencing ourselves as the subject of our thoughts is where future research should be directed, given the robust persistence of this form of self-experience across psychopathological and non-psychopathological cases alike.

Thought Insertion without Thought

“…Even though Campbell's model is more than thirty years old, it has continued to be influential, shaping models put forward by Gerrans (2001), Langland-Hassan (2008, and, more recently, predictive processing theorists (e.g., Sterzer et al (2016)). 1 Although agency accounts remain popular, a number of authors argue that the problem is not with sufferers' sense of agency (Bortolloti and Broome (2009), Howell and Thompson (2017), Mathieson (2023)). For example, Howell and Thompson (2017) argue that agency accounts fail to distinguish between thought insertion and uncontrollable, intrusive thoughts.…”

“…A similar style of view is found in the phenomenological literature as well. Mathieson (2023) claims that thought insertion is not "a condition where some features of phenomenal consciousness are present while others are lacking [e.g., a sense of agency or ownership]…." Rather, according to Mathieson, thought insertion involves a disturbance in "for-me-ness," the minimal form of self-awareness we have in thought (see also Henriksen, Parnas, & Zahavi 2019).…”