Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS    Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS

Krisztina Orbán
Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest

Inserted Thoughts, the Comparator Model and the Immunity of the ‘I’

        In this paper, I examine John Campbell’s (1999) account of how the possibility of the phenomena of ‘inserted thoughts’ in schizophrenics requires us to modify our account of the immunity of I-judgements. In particular, I argue against his claim that the comparator model due to Frith (1992) of the underlying cognitive neuroscience provides enabling conditions for immunity as such. My disagreement with Campbell is on two fronts:  whilst we agree that the comparator functions as an enabling condition for the immunity of I-judgements, (1) I deny that the immunity phenomena is restricted to judgements (in this case, I-judgements) and, thus, (2) I deny that the comparator provides enabling conditions for immunity as such. I begin by discussing the phenomena of immunity to error through misidentification generally, turning to discuss the sole object view of bodily awareness (Martin 1995) and how it might provide a model for understanding why some I-judgements are immune. Finally I turn to discuss Campbell’s account and argue that the comparator model cannot provide enabling conditions for the immunity phenomena.

Certain I-judgements, such as ‘I have a headache’ or ‘I am thinking’, seem to be immune to error through misidentification relative to ‘I’. By this, I mean that it cannot happen that I judge that I have a headache but be mistaken in that someone else has a headache which I think I have. When I have a warrant to judge ‘I have a headache’, it cannot turn out that I am mistaken because my warrant is not for thinking ‘I have H’ but rather a warrant to think something like ‘you have H’. More generally, a term a is immune in the judgement ‘Fa’ iff whenever the subject s has a warrant to judge Fa, it cannot be the case that it warranted him to judge Fb, even when it is not the case that a is F (Evans 1982, Campbell 2002). In contrast with our examples of I-judgements, judgements such as ‘Here is Romulus’ are open to misidentification relative to ‘Romulus’ – e.g., when the speaker misidentifies him with Remus – and similarly with judgements like ‘Romulus has a headache’. Although it may seem to me that I am warranted in attributing a headache to Romulus, it turns out that my warrant is one for attributing a headache to Remus, rather than Romulus.

I want to suggest that I-judgements such as ‘I have pain’ or ‘I am thinking’ are immune to error through misidentification because of something distinctive about how we know the referent of the first-person pronoun. In particular, I will argue that our knowledge of the referent of the first-person pronoun is warranted by our awareness of that referent which is distinctive in that it is a form of awareness that presents one and only one object. Prima facie, there are two such forms of awareness: introspection and our awareness of our own body.

Consider a toy world with a species of creatures which have a special form of awareness which is sensitive to only one particular object O and nothing else. These creatures have no way to misidentify O via this special form of awareness. My suggestion is that certain of our self-ascriptive practices work in a similar way. If introspection gives information just about ourselves, and bodily sensations are ways in which we sense the one individual object that is our own body, then sentient beings like us cannot misidentify our body via bodily awareness or ourselves via introspection. And this is because our knowledge of the referents is warranted by this distinctive kind of awareness which is sensitive just one and only one object. I explore the sole object view as an attempt to answer the question of what makes misidentification impossible.  

In Campbell’s account, the comparator is an enabling condition for immunity which is a feature of some I-judgements. The idea is that the comparator labels one’s thoughts as generated by oneself, and when this fails, as in the case of schizophrenics who have ‘inserted thoughts’, immunity is lost. Whilst I agree that a working comparator mechanism functions as the enabling condition of I-judgements, certain I-thoughts may still be immune relative to ‘I’. If a schizophrenic subject Z has the thought ‘I think the world will end now’, but claims that it is not his thought, but is somehow ‘inserted’ into his mind, whilst we do not have an I-judgement – since Z possess no warrant for that judgement – we seem to have an I-thought. Here the ‘I’ is not immune. But this cannot be the case with every occurrence of ‘I’ in Z’s thoughts. Z thinks: ‘You insert an idea into my mind’, but ‘my mind’ refers to Z’s mind, and in thinking that Z cannot think it is someone’s else mind. So some I-thoughts are still immune relative to ‘I’, but not all of them. The breakdown of the comparator mechanism results in Z thinking that he is not the agent of his thought – but the thought appears ‘in’ him for sure and strikes him as such. If he did not think that the offending thought is ‘in’ his mind, or inserted ‘into’ him, then he would have no sense of conflict at all, but would at most be very puzzled. The source of internal strife is precisely due to his realisation that it is in his mind without claiming agency of that thought. If this is correct, then immunity is a more widespread phenomena, restricted not just to judgements, and thus the comparator cannot be an enabling condition for the immunity phenomena.

J. Campbell (1999) “Schizophrenia, the Space of Reasons and Thinking as a Motor Process”, The Monist 82, 609-625.

—— (2002) Reference and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

G. Evans (1982) The Varieties of Reference. Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

C. Frith (1992) The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia.  Hove, Sussex:  Erlabum. 

M.G.F. Martin (1995) “Bodily Awareness: A Sense of Ownership” in Bermúdez, Marcel and Eilan (eds.) The Body and the Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.