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Thought insertion: Abnormal sense of thought agency or thought endorsement?

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Abstract

The standard approach to the core phenomenology of thought insertion characterizes it in terms of a normal sense of thought ownership coupled with an abnormal sense of thought agency. Recently, Fernández (2010) has argued that there are crucial problems with this approach and has proposed instead that what goes wrong fundamentally in such a phenomenology is a sense of thought commitment, characterized in terms of thought endorsement. In this paper, we argue that even though Fernández raises new issues that enrich the topic, his proposal cannot rival the version of the standard approach we shall defend.

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Notes

  1. We shall assume that delusions are belief-like attitudes (see DSM-IV; Bayne & Pacherie 2005; for a different position, see Currie 2000).

  2. We use the terms “sense,” “experience”, and “phenomenology” with the broader meaning that subsumes both feelings and judgments (Synofzik et al. 2008).

  3. Some of these authors use the term “ownership” with a superordinate meaning that subsumes both senses to be characterized here (e.g., Campbell, Carruthers), and some use the term “authorship” to refer to the sense of agency (e.g., Gerrans, Young).

  4. Some authors have criticized this sense of ownership on the grounds that it uses a misleading spatial metaphor (e.g., Bortolotti and Broome 2009; Thornton 2002). However, metaphors may sound misleading if they are understood too literally. For us, the important question is whether the notion of occurrence within limits can be given a plausible psychological interpretation, when the theoretical aim is one of a phenomenological description concerning the experience with thoughts. Since plausibility in this respect has to do with being faithful to how people experience thoughts, and since people do seem to regard occurrent thoughts as happening within internal mind-personal limits (“inner space”, “stream of consciousness”), we do not see any fundamental problem with the spatial metaphor, properly interpreted.

  5. In this article, we shall assume that introspection exists for at least some types of thoughts (see Carruthers 2009a for a discussion on the extent to which there in fact exists introspective access to our mental life or this is just a false assumption built in our folk psychology).

  6. It is important to emphasize that our discussion here concerns the sense of agency for thought, not whether there are in fact mental actions or intentional actions. For discussions focusing more, though not exclusively, on the extent to which actions or intentional actions are part of our mental life, see Buckareff 2005; Carruthers 2009b; Mele 2009; Peacocke 2007; Strawson 2003. For a more complete analysis of the superordinate folk concept of action involved in our sense of thought agency, see Jackendoff, 1990, ch. 7. For a more complete discussion of components that may be involved in the sense of thought intentional guidance, see Gallagher in press; Pacherie 2008.

  7. The expression “my mind working” in this passage of R1 uses “mind” differently from the usage of “mind” in the expression “into my mind” described earlier in relation to the sense of thought ownership—my mind-working is a system whose activities produce my thoughts instead of a phenomenological space where my thoughts occur. We take this notion of mind production to be roughly equivalent to the notion of agent production.

  8. This report is given by a subject without a diagnosis of schizophrenia, but whose religious experiences involved delusions and hallucinations as defined by the Present State Examination (Wing et al 1974)—see Jackson and Fulford, 1997, p. 43.

  9. Note that the language of ownership when applied to the mind (“Thoughts come in my mind”) instead of to specific thoughts, as in the thought-myness part (“Thoughts are not mine”), seems to mean simply a part-whole relation between the mind and the I (Thoughts come in the mind that is a constitutive part of me).

  10. Authors that suppose such a face-value meaning do not provide any clear independent evidence for it. Often, their specific characterization of the content of the face value meaning is informed simply by their own theoretical assumptions. For example, Billon (2011) supposes that the thought-myness part of reports is meant to convey literally that the patients do not have a sense of subjectivity (characterized in terms of phenomenal consciousness) for the “inserted” thought, but does not provide any clear independent evidence for this interpretation other than his theoretical assumption that the core phenomenology of thought insertion is to be characterized in terms of an abnormal sense of subjectivity.

  11. For a general discussion of different models of self-knowledge, including Fernández’s, see Gertler 2008.

  12. Compare this position with authors, like Nichols and Stich (2003), who understand introspection of beliefs as involving a monitoring mechanism that takes as input a belief P and delivers as output the belief I believe that P, thereby necessarily providing self-knowledge of beliefs. In Fernández’s model, introspection cannot have as output a representation with the content I believe that P but only a meta-representation of P in the abstract (that is, not embedded in I believe that…).

  13. Remember that the there are two sides of the thought-myness part of reports (thoughts are not mine and thoughts belong to another agent). Fernández’s second clause incorporates only one of these sides because his approach is intended to capture first and foremost what he takes to be the feeling component of the phenomenology of thought insertion (i.e., the patient’s feeling of non-endorsement of the content of the “inserted” thought) and it is the claim that a thought is not mine that is related to this feeling. This qualification does not affect in any respect our following criticisms.

  14. It is worth noticing that it is misleading for Fernández to phrase his first clause in terms of the patient claiming to have a belief, or, as in other parts of the article, in terms of the patient making a claim like “I believe that such-and-such” (2010, p. 71). What Fernández has in mind, as is suggested by his naming his first clause in terms of awareness, is simply that the patients claim to have become aware of their beliefs in the way that we characterized his model above—i.e., aware of their beliefs but not qua their beliefs.

  15. There are a variety of positions in the literature regarding the types of thoughts that might be considered to be inserted, though none shares Fernandez’s position. Some exclude thoughts in imagery format (e.g., inner speech) but beyond that allow that all propositional thoughts, beliefs or not, could be “inserted” thoughts (Vosgerau and Newen 2007). Others restrict cases of thought insertion to alienated inner speech (Langland-Hassan 2008). Still others talk primarily but not exclusively about inner speech (Graham and Stephens 2000). This issue is also important in deciding the degree to which thought insertion and auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) share a common phenomenology. We think that the current evidence does not indicate that “inserted” thoughts are restricted to specific types of thoughts and we are sympathetic to the idea that one should not make a radical distinction between thought insertion and AVHs.

  16. We would like to acknowledge that it is plausible to suppose that the thought-myness part of reports may be used to convey a non-endorsement meaning when the content of the “inserted” thought is not endorsed—in particular, when the patient disagrees with it. But this is not incompatible with our position, for linguistic expressions may be used to convey more than one meaning. By saying that the “inserted” thoughts are not theirs, the patients may intend to convey both that they are not the producers of and that they do not endorse the ‘inserted’ thoughts, but the former meaning constitutes what they want to say explicitly while the latter would constitute what they want to implicate (see Carston 2002; cf. Grice 1991).

  17. The hesitation and contradiction in these reports concerning who is the producer of the thoughts does not count against the standard approach. It simply reflects the fact that different patients have different levels of confidence about their delusional beliefs of thought insertion.

  18. Although, we should point out that some authors in the literature seem to occasionally invoke a notion of sense of agency that is closer to our notion of agent causation—e.g., Campbell, 2002, p. 36.

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Correspondence to Paulo Sousa or Lauren Swiney.

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Sousa, P., Swiney, L. Thought insertion: Abnormal sense of thought agency or thought endorsement?. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 637–654 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9225-z

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