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The objects of bodily awareness

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Abstract

Is it possible to misidentify the object of an episode of bodily awareness? I argue that it is, on the grounds that a person can reasonably be unsure or mistaken as to which part of her body he or she is aware of at a given moment. This requires discussing the phenomenon of body ownership, and defending the claim that the proper parts of one’s body are at least no less ‘principal’ among the objects of bodily awareness than is the body as a whole. I conclude with some reasons why this should lead us to think that bodily awareness, unlike introspection, is a form of perception.

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Notes

  1. E.g. Ayers (1991, vol. 2, pp. 287–288), Martin (1997), and Bermúdez (2003).

  2. In what follows I will usually leave out this qualification, but it should be assumed wherever appropriate.

  3. How might this last thing be done? In my (2011) I suggest that we can understand the ‘non-observational’ character of the awareness of one’s intentional actions not in terms of its independence from sense-perception (for of course we very often are sense-perceptually aware of what we do), but rather in terms of the role that the awareness of one’s intentional actions plays in guiding the actions themselves: in being aware of one’s action one does not simply ‘sit back’ and ‘take in’ what one does, but rather brings one’s awareness to bear in keeping one’s actions on course. (In this I essentially follow the lead of O’Shaughnessy (1962).) Importantly, however, this possibility is as much a characteristic of the ‘ordinary’ modes of sense perception as it is of the awareness of one’s body. But while this alone is not enough to explain what makes bodily awareness distinctive as a form of perception, nevertheless it does seem to show that many instances of bodily awareness (i.e., those of intentional bodily movements) are quite different from most instances of awareness through ‘outer sense’ (which of course is usually of things independent of oneself). No doubt there is much more that could be said about these points.

  4. I say ‘usually’ because there are cases in which one’s body is presented to oneself ‘from the outside’ in ways that leave no room for the question whose body one is aware of: for example, as I look down right now and see my hands at the keyboard. But this is not essential to the visual or haptic awareness of one’s body as it is to the awareness of one’s body through proprioception and kinesthesis.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to an anonymous referee with this journal for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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  1. Mount St. Mary’s University, 303 Bradley Hall, Emmitsburg, MD, USA

    John Schwenkler

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Schwenkler, J. The objects of bodily awareness. Philos Stud 162, 465–472 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9777-3

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