Online research in philosophy

Abstract:  How it is that one's own thoughts can seem to be someone else's? After noting some common missteps of other approaches to this puzzle, I develop a novel cognitive solution, drawing on and critiquing theories that understand inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia as stemming from mismatches between predicted and actual sensory feedback. Considerable attention is paid to forging links between the first-person phenomenology of thought insertion and the posits (e.g. efference copy, corollary discharge) of current cognitive theories. I show how deficits in the subconscious mechanisms regulating inner speech may lead to a 'fractured phenomenology' responsible for schizophrenic patients' reports of inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations. Supporting work on virtual environments is discussed, and lessons concerning the fixity of delusional belief are drawn.

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 different and independent notions of ownership of a thought, call it O1 and O2, corresponding to (1) and (2) respectively. For brevity, I will refer only to the first interpretation. But what I will be saying will apply, mutatis mutandis, to both. On this view, thought insertion would be a case in which someone thinks that (1) is satisfied, while (2) isn't and, therefore, denies that the thought she is introspectively aware of is her own.3 Campbell's explanation of thought insertion is quite clear: the subject has prima facie reasons to think that she is not the person who formed that token thought – maybe because she does not experience that thought as formed by herself – and, therefore, has prima facie reasons to deny that she is its owner, but she is mistaken in identifying the producer of the thought and what she says is false, yet reasonable.4 Notice, however, an important consequence of Campbell's model. If (1) and (2) are independent conditions then the one could obtain without the other. Hence, it must be conceivable that one is introspectively aware of a thought that one has not produced. Indeed, cases of multiple personality, if taken literally, might be taken as examples of this kind of situation: person A and person B inhabit the same body, A can have access to B’s thoughts, yet B remains their producer. So A could actually say something like “I’m thinking (i.e. I am immediately aware) that p, but this is not my thought (it is not the thought I produced), it’s B’s (the thought that B produced)” and what she would be saying would in fact be true. Yet, a simple-minded reaction one may have towards this line of explanation is this..

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 are discussed, in connection with the causal-explanatory role of the phenomenological features of the experience and with the view that thinking is a variety of acting.

Philosophers have often noted that science displays an uncommon degree of consensus on beliefs among its practitioners. Yet consensus in the sciences is not a goal in itself. I consider cases of consensus on beliefs as concrete events. Consensus on beliefs is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for presuming that these beliefs constitute knowledge. A concrete consensus on a set of beliefs by a group of people at a given historical period may be explained by different factors according to various hypotheses. A particularly interesting hypothesis from an epistemic perspective is the knowledge hypothesis: shared knowledge explains a consensus on beliefs. If all the alternative hypotheses to the knowledge hypotheses are false or are not as good in explaining a concrete consensus on beliefs, the knowledge hypothesis is the best explanation of the consensus. If the knowledge hypothesis is best, a consensus becomes a plausible, though fallible, indicator of knowledge. I argue that if a consensus on beliefs is uncoerced, uniquely heterogeneous and large, the gap between the likelihood of the consensus given the knowledge hypothesis and its likelihoods given competing hypotheses tends to increase significantly. Consensus is a better indicator of knowledge than "success" or "human flourishing".

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 experiences have to be explained in terms of a withdrawal, on the part of the patients themselves, from certain forms of active engagement in reasoning. I conclude with a discussion of the relationship between this view and the idea that patients’ reports of thought insertion reflect a situation in which the boundaries between the self and the world have become uncertain.

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 still employing a Kantian approach, I speculate over possible mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of thought insertion.

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 is right, it would not be true that when the subject makes a mental self-ascription on the basis of introspective awareness of a given mental state, there is no possible world in which she could be wrong as to whether it is really she who has that mental state. Notice the interesting interdisciplinary implications of Campbell’s project: on the one hand, a fairly precise notion elaborated in philosophy such as IEM (and the related notion of error through misidentification, EM hereafter) is used to describe a characteristic symptom of schizophrenia.1 On the other hand, such a phenomenon, described in the way proposed, is taken to be a possible counterexample to a sort of “philosophical dogma” such as IEM of introspection-based non-inferential mental self-ascriptions. In the first section of the paper I will point out the characteristic features of EM and explain logical immunity to error through misidentification of introspection-based mental self-ascriptions; in the second section I will consider the case of thought insertion in more detail and show why, after all, it is not a counterexample to the view that introspectionbased mental self-ascriptions are logically IEM. Finally, I will offer a re-description of the phenomenon of thought insertion.

“There is a thought in me which is not mine”. This is, roughly, the complaint of patients suffering from thought insertion. This first-rank symptom of schizophrenia is particularly puzzling for it seems to challenge a very well entrenched principle to the effect that our conscious thoughts are necessarily subjective, that we necessarily have a sense of ownership for them (Cartesian principle). Despite their wide disagreement, classical accounts of the symptom save the Cartesian principle by interpreting thought insertion as a problem of the sense of agency for thought rather than as a problem of subjectivity. I argue that those accounts fail and that thought insertion really is a problem of subjectivity. We can nevertheless save the Cartesian principle if we realize that the presupposition, shared by classical accounts, to the effect that inserted thoughts are unequivocally conscious, is ill-grounded. Distinguishing between reflexive awareness and phenomenal consciousness, and relying on a careful comparison between thought insertion and other pathologies of agency, I propose a novel account of the symptom which is compatible with the Cartesian principle and which allows to take the patient’s reports seriously. This account, I conclude, opens up novel perspectives on the comprehension of schizophrenia, and reveals a common confusion between two different dimensions of the mind.

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.