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Relations Between Agency and Ownership in the Case of Schizophrenic Thought Insertion and Delusions of Control

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Abstract

This article addresses questions about the sense of agency and its distinction from the sense of ownership in the context of understanding schizophrenic thought insertion. In contrast to “standard” approaches that identify problems with the sense of agency as central to thought insertion, two recent proposals argue that it is more correct to think that the problem concerns the subject’s sense of ownership. This view involves a “more demanding” concept of the sense of ownership that, I will argue, ultimately depends on the sense of agency. In this regard, the sense of agency still appears to be the originating problem.

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Notes

  1. I acknowledge that, as indicated by one of the reviewers for this journal, ongoing discussions (especially philosophical discussions) of these issues sometimes lack clinical rootedness or first-hand contact with patients. Clinical experience would make it clear that delusions of control or thought insertion are not manifested in clear definition, nor isolated from the rest of the patient’s experiential-psychological life. Discussions that I’ve had with clinical psychiatrists have been helpful in confirming and clarifying some points of the philosophical discussion. Clearly more intensive contact with patients in the clinical phenomena would be of some benefit to get a clear sense of the limitations or the clinical validity of these explanatory accounts.

  2. An account of this intrinsic structure of experience and its relation to SO and SA, requires an analysis of the intrinsic temporality that applies to all experience, including not only overt action but also thought (Gallagher 2011). Such an account is beyond the scope of this paper.

  3. As one reviewer points out, reports of experiences by patients manifesting schizophrenic symptoms can be somewhat metaphorical. How scientists conceive of such experiences may be very different from how the patients describe them. There are good reasons not to take such descriptions as incomprehensible (as Jaspers [1913] suggested), however, but to take them, if not at face value then as expressing something that requires interpretation rather than dismissal. See Billon and Kriegel (2014) for discussion of this point.

  4. One should also take into account the extensive literature on self-deception, confabulation and denial of illness in psychopathology. Retrospective attribution and introspective narratives may succumb to some of these effects. See, e.g., Startup (1996); McKay et al. (2005).

  5. See Lane (2014) for a critique of Billon and Kriegel’s proposal (and see the discussion of Billon, below). Lane objects to the ad hoc nature of their solution (which adds an extra phenomenon of a repressed first-order state), and to its neuroscientific implausibility. He also points out that in focusing on repression, they lose track of what they set out to explain, namely, the feeling of alienation. Even in regard to cases of depersonalization, where a loss of SO might seem a better description, Lane suggests that what the patient actually describes is a loss of SA.

  6. Frith (1992) and Campbell (1999) explain these in terms of a comparator model; Langland-Hassan (2008) explains them in terms of filtering models.

  7. A “strong” efferent or afferent component does not rule out a more complex story (see below). SA may also be partially generated or reinforced by visual and proprioceptive afferent feedback (Balslev et al. 2007).

  8. In some cases, however, the inserted thought is not inconsistent with the person’s own thoughts. The inserted thought may be as innocuous as “That’s a good idea.” It still feels inserted and alien, however. In such cases the lack of SA or SO cannot be explained simply by semantic incoherency at the reflective level.

  9. Roessler (2013), likewise, defines the distinction as one between ‘introspective ownership’ and ‘agentive ownership’, both of these on the reflective level.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks the Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Award for supporting this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, 38152, USA

    Shaun Gallagher

  2. School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, UK

    Shaun Gallagher

  3. Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia

    Shaun Gallagher

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Gallagher, S. Relations Between Agency and Ownership in the Case of Schizophrenic Thought Insertion and Delusions of Control. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 865–879 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0222-3

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