Schizophrenic Thought Insertion and Self-Experience

Review of Philosophy and Psychology 15 (2):523-539 (2024)
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Abstract

In contemporary philosophy of mind and psychiatry, schizophrenic thought insertion is often used as a validating or invalidating counterexample in various theories about how we experience ourselves. Recent work has taken cases of thought insertion to provide an invalidating counterexample to the Humean denial of self-experience, arguing that deficiencies of agency in thought insertion suggest that we normally experience ourselves as the agent of our thoughts. In this paper, I argue that appealing to a breakdown in the sense of agency to explain thought insertion is problematic, and that rather than following the prevailing binary approach which holds that certain features of consciousness go missing while others remain wholly intact, a better explanation involves construing thought insertion as a disturbing or disrupting of the subjectivity (for-me-ness) of experience. The result is that experiencing ourselves as the subject of our thoughts is where future research should be directed, given the robust persistence of this form of self-experience across psychopathological and non-psychopathological cases alike.

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Darryl Mathieson
Australian National University

Citations of this work

Thought insertion without thought.Shivam Patel - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 15 (3):955-973.
Against the Pathology Argument for Self-Acquaintance.Adam Bradley - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (3):641-657.

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References found in this work

Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs.Lisa Bortolotti - 2009 - Oxford University Press. Edited by K. W. M. Fulford, John Sadler, Stanghellini Z., Morris Giovanni, Bortolotti Katherine, Broome Lisa & Matthew.
Self-Knowledge.Brie Gertler - 2010 - New York: Routledge.

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