RESUMEN Una atribución de agencia mental es definida como el acto de asignar el inicio o autoría de un pensamiento en primera persona a un agente específico, esto, con el fin de generar grados suficientes de control sobre nuestra vida cognitiva. Si bien esta estrategia es fundamental para distinguir diferentes tipos de estados cognitivos - tales como deliberaciones, razonamientos, juicios, entre otros -, muchos autores han indicado que también es clave para entender experiencias cognitivas psicopatológicas en psicosis. Este artículo revisa (...) la forma en que la estructura subjetiva de los delirios de inserción de pensamiento puede ser utilizada como una estrategia para evaluar los méritos argumentativos de las teorías que intentan explicar la arquitectura y naturaleza de las atribuciones de agencia mental. Luego de evaluar algunos aspectos fundamentales de las dos teorías dominantes en la literatura actual, se sugiere que, a pesar de sus importantes aportes al desarrollo de la discusión, tales enfoques no poseen los recursos explicativos suficientes para lidiar con el desafío propuesto. ABSTRACT An attribution of mental agency is defined as the act of assigning the initiation or authorship of a first personal thought to a specific agent in order to generate sufficient degrees of control over our own cognitive life. Although this strategy is crucial to distinguish different types of cognitive states - such as deliberations, reasonings, judgements, among others -, a number of authors have suggested that it is also crucial to understand psychopathological cognitive experiences in psychosis. This paper explores the way in which the subjective structure of thought insertion can be used as a strategy to evaluate the merits of theories aiming at explaining the nature and architecture of attributions of mental agency. After examining some of the most fundamental aspects of the two dominant theories in current literature, I suggest that, despite the contributions made by such theories to the discussion, none of them is able to face the challenge in a plausible way. (shrink)

Introduction to the special issue "The Bounds of Rationality".

Several theories propose that one of the core functions of inner speech (IS) is to support subjects in the completion of cognitively effortful tasks, especially those involving executive functions (EF). In this paper we focus on two populations who notoriously encounter difficulties in performing EF tasks, namely, people diagnosed with schizophrenia who experience auditory verbal hallucinations (Sz-AVH) and people within the Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). We focus on these two populations because they represent two different ways in which IS can (...) fail to help in EF tasks, which can be illustrative for other mental conditions. First, we review the main components of EF (Section 1). Then we explain the functions that IS is taken to perform in the domain of EF (Section 2) and review the evidence concerning problems about EF in the two populations of our study: Sz-AVH (Section 3) and ASC (Section 4). After this we further detail our account about what a properly functioning IS can do for both populations and how different IS profiles may impact EF performance: in the case of Sz-AVH, the uncontrolled and intrusive character of IS negatively affects EF performance, whereas in ASC, EF is not sufficiently supported by IS, given the tendency in this population to present a diminished use of IS (Section 5). We finally briefly discuss Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Developmental Language Disorders (DLD). (shrink)

A group of philosophers suggests that a sense of mineness intrinsically contained in the phenomenal structure of all conscious experiences is a necessary condition for a subject to become aware of himself as the subject of his experiences i.e. self-awareness. On this view, consciousness necessarily entails phenomenal self-awareness. This paper argues that cases of delusions of thought insertion undermine this claim and that such a phenomenal feature plays little role in accounting for the most minimal type of self-awareness entailed by (...) phenomenal consciousness. First, I clarify the main view endorsing this claim i.e. the Self-Presentational View of Consciousness and formulate the challenge from thought insertion. After, I offer a systematic evaluation of all the strategies used by the advocates of this view to deal with this challenge. Finally, I conclude that most of these strategies are unsatisfactory for they rest in unwarranted premises, imprecisions about the agentive nature of cognitive experiences, and especially, lack of distinction between the different ways in which subjects can become aware of their own thoughts. (shrink)

In this introduction we present the orthodox account of auditory verbal hallucinations, a number of worries for this account, and some potential responses open to its proponents. With some problems still remaining, we then introduce the problems presented by the phenomenon of thought insertion, in particular the question of how different it is supposed to be from AVHs. We then mention two ways in which theorists have adopted different approaches to voices and thoughts in psychosis, and then present the motivation (...) and composition of this special issue. (shrink)