Subjects experiencing thought insertion disown thoughts they are introspectively aware of. According to what I call “the rationality hypothesis”, thought-insertion reports are not merely intelligible, but also express, or potentially express, fully rational judgments in the light of highly disruptive experience. I argue that the hypothesis is ethically and theoretically motivated, and provides two insights into the philosophical significance of reports by subjects with schizophrenia. First, the reports can be seen as evidence that rational judgments of ownership of a thought (...) prioritize agency awareness over introspective awareness of it. This point fits with an integrative account of thought insertion at the personal and mechanistic levels. Second, rational and competent uses of the first person purely based on introspection do not necessarily involve a full-fledged first-person perspective over one’s thoughts. This suggests that agency awareness, and not introspection as such, is primarily involved in determining the reference of the first person featuring in the judgments. (shrink)

Wittgenstein distinguished between two uses of “I”, one “as object” and the other “as subject”, a distinction that Shoemaker elucidated in terms of a notion of immunity to error through misidentification (“IEM”); first-personal claims are IEM in the use “as subject”, but not in the other use. Shoemaker argued that memory judgments based on “personal”, episodic memory are not strictly speaking IEM; Gareth Evans disputed this. Similar issues have been debated regarding self-ascriptions of conscious thoughts based on first-personal awareness, in (...) the light of claims of “thought insertion” in schizophrenic patients. The paper aims to defend a Shoemaker-like line by critically engaging with some compelling recent contributions. Methodologically, the paper argues that to properly address these issues the all-inclusive term “thought” should be avoided, and specific types of thoughts countenanced. (shrink)

Concept-individuating reference rules offer a well-known route for the explanation of immunity to error through misidentification in judgments involving first person or de se thought. However, the ‘outright’ version of this account—one that sanctions a one-to-one correspondence between the reference-fixing rule and immunity—cannot do justice to the unassailable ground-relativity of the target phenomenon. In this paper, I outline a version of the reference-rule account that circumvents this problem. I state a reference rule for the de se concept that makes space (...) for different non-reference-fixing ways of thinking or perspectives, yielding different grounds for judgment. The proposal and its ramifications, I argue, shed light on the variety of ways in which this kind of immunity has been proved to be present—and indeed absent—in de se thought. (shrink)

It is easy to imagine being someone else from the first-person point of view. Such imaginings give rise to a puzzle. In this paper I explain what the puzzle is and then consider several existing attempts of solving the puzzle. I argue that these attempts are unsuccessful. I propose a Lewisian account of first-person imagination and make the case that this account has the potential to solve the puzzle.

This paper presents a view on bodily IEM by describing, first, the structure that grounds need to have in order to yield IEM judgments, and then arguing that somatosensation has this structure. I make my case by presenting an analysis of the sense of bodily ownership. According to this analysis, there is a substantive explanatory relationship between bodily self-consciousness and psychological self-consciousness. I argue that one central virtue of this approach to bodily self-consciousness is that, not only does it help (...) explain bodily IEM, but it also sheds some light on the fact that both psychological and bodily self-ascriptions are subject to analysis in IEM terms, despite their differences. (shrink)

A traditional view holds that the self-concept is essentially indexical. In a highly influential article, Ruth Millikan famously held that the self-concept should be understood as a Millian name with a sui generis functional role. This article presents a novel explanatory argument against the Millian view and in favor of the indexical view. The argument starts from a characterization of the self-concept as a device of information integration. It then shows that the indexical view yields a better explanation of the (...) integration function than the Millian view. The resulting account can rebut Millikan’s objections and it has broader implications for the debate on the essential indexical. (shrink)

This introduction offers a brief overview of the significance of (immunity) to error through misidentification for debates about first-person thought. The introduction also presents the special issue’s contents.

Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued that, among singular thoughts in general, thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’—first-personal thoughts, which Lewis aptly called de se—have a distinctive character that traditional views of contents cannot characterize. Drawing on Anscombe, Annalisa Coliva has argued that a feature she calls Real Guarantee marks apart de se thoughts—as opposed to others including Immunity to Error through Misidentification that have been proposed for that role. I'll argue that, while her work points to a truly distinguishing feature of (...) the de se, we need an account of the notion other than hers and Echeverri's recent development of it. I'll offer an alternative, drawing on Léa Salje's work. Finally, I'll briefly outline how, thus understood, the Real Guarantee feature could be adequately explained by theories of de se thoughts like the one I favour, even if it is an open option to just explain it away. (shrink)

We argue that there are names with de se contents and that they are theoretically fruitful. De se names serve to challenge intuitive and otherwise plausible orthodoxies such as Stalnaker's view of communication and Bayesian views of belief update. These implications are also significant for those already sympathetic to the irreducibility of de se content.