Abstract
I introduce and defend the notion of a cognitive account of the sense of ownership. A cognitive account of the sense of ownership holds that one experiences something as one's own only if one thinks of something as one's own. By contrast, a phenomenal account of the sense of ownership holds that one can experience something as one's own without thinking about anything as one's own. I argue that we have no reason to favour phenomenal accounts over cognitive accounts, that cognitive accounts are plausible given that much of our mental activity has unnoticed effects on our mental life, and that certain illusory experiences of body ownership sometimes described as thought-independent may be best explained as imaginative perceptual experiences.
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Notes
Although many of the issues here are parallel to those concerning the existence of a sense of agency (cf. the discussion of non-doxastic agentive self-awareness in Bayne and Pacherie (2007)), my focus here will be on the sense of ownership.
Hence the purpose of the distinction between the senses of agency and ownership here is to delineate the sense of agency (rather than ownership) as a distinctive experiential phenomenon and highlight the methodological difficulties in studying it (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008, pp. 158–169). But it is perhaps due to the association (or rather the contrast) with bodily action, that Gallagher’s distinction has been influential in areas where the more specific notion of body ownership would be more appropriate (see e.g. Haggard et al. 2006; Tsakiris, 2010; Tsakiris & Haggard, 2005a).
As my intentions here is to state the commitments of a cognitive account in highly general manner, I do not further specify the structure of self-attributive thought. However, one account that I find attractive postulates for any self-attributive thought a contrast set of things that are not attributed. Thus thinking about something as one’s own is singling out something as one’s own, by being in a frame of mind in which one distinguishes that which is one’s own from some set of things that are someone else’s or no-one’s at all.
I leave aside the issue of whether the participants’ experience is properly described as bodily experience. One might worry on this count that the illusion results at the very least from a combination of somatosensory input and visual input. But this is not something that should concern us too much here. For the purposes of this discussion, we can stipulate that both cognitive and phenomenal accounts assume a multimodal conception of bodily experiences according to which certain visual experiences of the body from a head-centred perspective are partially constitutive of certain bodily experience (for discussion, see de Vignemont, forthcoming).
In order to minimise controversy, I use the term activity to pick out a kind of process that need not be identical to action. Often when one speaks of something being done, what is done is (perhaps only implicitly) thought of as intentional, or as the product or an instance of someone’s trying (see e.g., Hornsby (2012, 2013)). Certainly, we do things when we act; to act is in part to engage in some form of activity. But we need not consider all activities to be actions – consider that of volcanoes; and indeed, not all human activities are actions of the kind that philosophers of action are most directly concerned with – consider that of the human digestive system. Hence, I reserve the term action to a narrow usage, though nothing turns on whether some of the events that are a part of what I would refer to as an activity can also be described as actions in a broader usage (see, e.g., Mele, 2009, p. 20).
Walton actually uses the term ‘non-occurent imagining’ for imagining that is not the focus of attention; ‘spontaneous imagining’ is the term he uses for cases of imagining passively. However, the distinction between cases in which one passively imagines attentively and cases in which one passively imagines non-attentively is not necessary for my purposes. Thus I use the label spontaneous imagining in a manner that is slightly different from Walton, but I draw on those of his observations concerning spontaneous imagining that serve to elucidate the character of passively imagining non-attentively.
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Alsmith, A. Mental Activity & the Sense of Ownership. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 881–896 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0208-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0208-1