Abstract
Debates about bodily ownership and psychological ownership have typically proceeded independently of each other. This paper explores the relation between them, with particular reference to how each is illuminated by psychopathology. I propose a general framework for studying ownership that is applicable both to bodily ownership (φ-ownership) and psychological ownership (ψ-ownership). The framework proposes studying ownership by starting with explicit judgments of ownership and then exploring the bases for those judgments. Section 3 discusses John Campbell’s account of ψ-ownership in the light of that general framework, emphasizing in particular his fractionation (inspired by schizophrenic delusions) of ψ-ownership into two dissociable components. Section 4 briefly presents an account of φ-ownership that I have developed in more detail elsewhere. Section 5 explores the suggestion, originating with Alexandre Billon, that there needs to be an integrated account of φ-ownership and ψ-ownership because depersonalization disorders typically involve breakdowns of both φ-ownership and ψ-ownership. The argument from depersonalization is not compelling, but Section 6 proposes a different way of reaching the same conclusion. Section 7 shows how reflecting on agency and practical reasoning offers a common thread between the models of φ-ownership and ψ-ownership discussed earlier in the paper.
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Notes
See the Critique of Pure Reason at B13. I have discussed different ways of looking at Kant’s unity of apperception in Bermúdez 1994.
For a broadly similar distinction see Graham and Stephens 1994.
Frith himself now makes more modest claims for the comparator theory. See Frith 2012.
Compare Martin 1995, who writes “in having bodily sensations, it appears to one as if whatever one is aware of through having such sensations is a part of one’s body” (1995, p. 269). He describes this as a “sense of ownership”, but for reasons indicated above I find this terminology unhappy.
It is true that visual perception is inherently relational, in that the field of view is centered on the viewer’s eyes. But this is not really an analog of Connectedness, because the body is not experienced from a single origin. When we say, for example, that one thing looks nearer than another, this incorporates an implicit self-reference reflecting the origin of the visual point of view. Bodily experience, in contrast, does not allow such spatial comparisons. There is no privileged body-part that counts as “me” for the purposes of describing, say, a pain as further away than an itch.
I am assuming that the general map corresponds to the experienced body, rather than the real body. In this sense it corresponds to what O’Shaughnessy termed the long-term body-image (O'Shaugnessy 1995).
See Tsakiris 2011 §6 for a review and further references.
Mayer-Gross 2011, 114
For a different perspective see Rusconi et al. 2010, who offer a positive account of Gerstmann’s syndrome. It is not clear to me, however, that they are clearly distinguishing between a syndrome in the sense of a cluster of symptoms that typically accompany each other, and the richer sense of syndrome in which the cluster of symptoms implicates the breakdown of a single, personal-level cognitive capacity. In fact, the Rusconi et al. hypothesis is that the cortical substrate for Gerstmann’s syndrome is a white matter lesion, that disrupts connections between intra-parietal and angular cortex.
This dependence of φ-ownership upon ψ-ownership certainly emerges clearly in the model of φ-ownership sketched out in §4, but it seems likely to be implicated in any alternative account. To take just one example, the hypothetical (and to my mind illusory) “feeling of mineness” that some authors have postulated is an occurrent mental state that the subject would need to φ-own. The same point applies, of course, if one thinks (with Zahavi and Kriegel 2015 that the “feeling of mineness” (which they term “for-me-ness”) is not an experience itself, but rather an aspect of a core type of experience.
To be clear, the claim is that ψ-ownership presupposes φ-ownership for embodied subjects. Peacocke has argued, in effect, that there is no logical reason why disembodied subjects should not be capable of ψ-ownership (Peacocke 2014). This issue is orthogonal to that considered here, however. There is no reason to think that an account of φ-ownership for embodied subjects would carry over to disembodied subjects, or vice versa.
Ayers 1991, 186–7
Tye 2003, 76.
The claim here is about the normal case. It is an interesting question (raised by Alexandre Billon) how ψ-ownership would work for someone in a sensory deprivation tank, as envisaged by Anscombe. My hunch (and prediction) is that a lack of ongoing sensory feedback would not change the dependence of ψ-ownership upon φ-ownership. No doubt, things would be very different for someone who had existed for their entire life in a sensory deprivation tank (which, in effect, is the thought experiment proposed by Avicenna – the so-called flying or floating man argument). But since this scenario is so far from the normal case, and since it is unlikely that any prediction made about that case will ever be tested, I am not sure that it helps to speculate about it.
For a different approach to the role of agency in self-awareness see O'Brien 2007.
This is also, broadly speaking, compatible with the account of thought insertion proposed by Graham and Stephens (1994), who suggest that schizophrenic patients deny the authorship of thoughts when those thoughts are inexplicable in terms of rest of their beliefs and desires. Their idea is that delusions of thought insertion can sometimes be the best way for the patient to make sense of profoundly anomalous experiences.
See further the essays in O'Brien and Soteriou 2009.
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (AT VII, p. 81), translated by John Cottingham.
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I am grateful for comments from Alexandre Billon and an anonymous referee.
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Bermúdez, J.L. Bodily Ownership, Psychological Ownership, and Psychopathology. Rev.Phil.Psych. 10, 263–280 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0406-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0406-3