Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Thought Insertion Clarified

Ratcliffe, M.; Wilkinson, S.

Thought Insertion Clarified Thumbnail


Authors

M. Ratcliffe

S. Wilkinson



Abstract

'Thought insertion' in schizophrenia involves somehow experiencing one's own thoughts as someone else's. Some philos-ophers try to make sense of this by distinguishing between ownership and agency: one still experiences oneself as the owner of an inserted thought but attributes it to another agency. In this paper, we propose that thought insertion involves experiencing thought contents as alien, rather than episodes of thinking. To make our case, we compare thought insertion to certain experiences of 'verbal hallucination' and show that they amount to different descriptions of the same phenom-enon: a quasi-perceptual experience of thought content. We add that the agency/ownership distinction is unhelpful here. What requires explanation is not why a person experiences a type of intentional state without the usual sense of agency, but why she experiences herself as the agent of one type of intentional state rather than another. We con-clude by sketching an account of how this might happen.

Citation

Ratcliffe, M., & Wilkinson, S. (2015). Thought Insertion Clarified. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22(11-12), 246-269

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Jan 1, 2015
Deposit Date Jan 20, 2016
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Journal of Consciousness Studies
Print ISSN 1355-8250
Publisher Imprint Academic
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 22
Issue 11-12
Pages 246-269
Publisher URL http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2015/00000022/F0020011/art00012

Files




You might also like



Downloadable Citations