Self-Experience Despite Self-Elusiveness

Gottlieb, Joseph

doi:10.1007/s13164-022-00654-w

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…It is often said that introspection reveals various features or properties of the self (e.g., thoughts) that we can identify and (metaphorically) point to, but that the self is not similarly available as an object of consciousness. We cannot, in other words, find the self to whom experiences manifest, which has led to the widespread thesis that the self is elusive (Cassam 1997;Chisholm 1969;Duncan 2019;Hume 1739Hume /1975Gottlieb 2022;Zahavi 2014). As one prominent source of this sceptical view, consider Hume's (1739Hume's ( /1975 oft-cited denial:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Schizophrenic Thought Insertion and Self-Experience

Mathieson

2023

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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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.

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