Online research in philosophy

In the past dozen years a number of theoretical models of schizophrenic symptoms have been proposed, often inspired by advances in the cognitive sciences, and especially cognitive neuroscience. Perhaps the most widely cited and influential of these is the neurocognitive model proposed by Christopher Frith (1992). Frith's influence reaches into psychiatry, neuroscience, and even philosophy. The philosopher John Campbell (1999a), for example, has called Frith's model the most parsimonious explanation of how self-ascriptions of thoughts are subject to errors of identification. "On reflection, it also seems that this is not just one possible theory; it is the simplest theory which has any prospect of explaining the sense of agency, and we ought to work from it, introducing complications only as necessary" (1999a, p. 612). Not everyone agrees. In their recent analysis of alien voices and inserted thoughts in schizophrenia, Stephens and Graham (2000) offer a critique of Frith. Their criticism, however, although serious, is neither deep nor extensive. They outline three points. First, Frith fails to provide an adequate account of why a subject who experiences thought insertion would misattribute that thought to some other agent. Second, Frith does not clarify the distinction between thought insertion and thought influence. And third, Frith fails to explain how a subject can claim both that he is thinking the thought and that the thought is someone else's thought (Stephens and Graham..

“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.

© 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.