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- Lisa Bortolotti & Matthew Broome (2009). A Role for Ownership and Authorship in the Analysis of Thought Insertion. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (2):205-224.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.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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Phenomenally, we can distinguish between ownership of thought (introspective awareness) and authorship of thought (an awareness of the activity of thinking), a distinction prompted by the phenomenon of thought insertion. Does this require the independence of ownership and authorship at the structural level? By employing a Kantian approach to the question of ownership of thought, I argue that a thought being my thought is necessarily the outcome of the interdependence of these two component parts (ownership and authorship). In addition, whilst (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: taylorandfrancis.metapress.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: taylorandfrancis.metapress.com | Scholar | More.. I offer an account of thought insertion based on a certain model of self-knowledge. I propose that subjects with thought insertion do not experience being committed to some of their own beliefs. A hypothesis about self-knowledge explains why. According to it, we form beliefs about our own beliefs on the basis of our evidence for them. First, I will argue that this hypothesis explains the fact that we feel committed to those beliefs which we are aware of. Then, I will (...)
John Campbell’s reply to my paper aims at re-establishing the point that there are two strands to our notion of ownership of a thought. There are two ways of cashing out this idea.1 First, one could say that A is the owner of a thought iff both the following two independent conditions obtain:2 (1) X is introspectively aware of a token thought and (2) X is the person who formed that token thought. Secondly, one may hold that there are two (...)
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In this paper, I investigate in detail one theoretical approach to the symptom of thought insertion. This approach suggests that patients are lead to disown certain thoughts they are subjected to because they lack a sense of active participation in the occurrence of those thoughts. I examine one reading of this claim, according to which the patients’ anomalous experiences arise from a breakdown of cognitive mechanisms tracking the production of occurrent thoughts, before sketching an alternative reading, according to which their (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: muse.jhu.edu | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: muse.jhu.edu | Scholar | More.. John Campbell (1999) has recently maintained that the phenomenon of thought insertion as it is manifested in schizophrenic patients should be described as a case in which the subject is introspectively aware of a certain thought and yet she is wrong in identifying whose thought it is. Hence, according to Campbell, the phenomenon of thought insertion might be taken as a counterexample to the view that introspection-based mental selfascriptions are logically immune to error through misidentification (IEM, hereafter). Thus, if Campbell (...)
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| | Other links: muse.jhu.edu | Scholar | More.. This book deals with the experience of externality, i.e. an experience, common in schizophrenia, present both in verbal hallucination and in thought insertion. The view defended is that thought insertion is a case of failed agency, experienced by the agent at the personal level as an intelligible thought with which she cannot identify. Such a case in which sense of agency and sense of subjectivity come apart reveals the existence of two dimensions in self-consciousness. Several difficulties of the solution offered (...)
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Introduction. Whatever its underlying causes, even the description of the phenomenon of thought insertion, of the content of the delusion, presents difficulty. It may seem that the best hope of a description comes from a broadly cognitivist approach to the mind which construes content-laden mental states as internal mental representations within what is literally an inner space: the space of the brain or nervous system. Such an approach objectifies thoughts in a way which might seem to hold out the prospect (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: books.google.com ncbi.nlm.nih.gov taylorandfrancis.metapress.com informaworld.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: books.google.com ncbi.nlm.nih.gov taylorandfrancis.metapress.com informaworld.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More.. Authorship and ownership exist in a curious relation in U.S. copyright law. In theory and common sense, authorship underwrites and is the condition of ownership, but in practice ownership can establish authorship retroactively. Distinctions between proprietary and non-proprietary creative cultural workers, in this view, turn in no essential way on evidence of creativity or the investment of personality in cultural creation. This paper examines a legislative struggle between recording artists and the recording industry over the status of their stock-in-trade, sound (...)
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The comparator-model, originally developed to explain motor action, has recently been invoked to explain several aspects of the self. However, in the first place it may not be used to explain a basic self-world distinction because it presupposes one. Our alternative account is based on specific systematic covariation between action and perception. Secondly, the comparator model cannot explain the feeling of ownership of thoughts. We argue—contra Frith and Campbell—that thoughts are not motor processes and therefore cannot be described by the (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: interscience.wiley.com | Scholar | More..
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