Phenom Cogn Sci (2009) 8:205–224 DOI 10.1007/s11097-008-9109-z A role for ownership and authorship in the analysis of thought insertion Lisa Bortolotti & Matthew Broome Published online: 27 August 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008 Abstract Philosophers are interested in the phenomenon of thought insertion because it challenges the common assumption that one can ascribe to oneself the thoughts that one can access first-personally. In the standard philosophical analysis of thought insertion, the subject owns the ‘inserted’ thought but lacks a sense of agency towards it. In this paper we want to provide an alternative analysis of the condition, according to which subjects typically lack both ownership and authorship of the ‘inserted’ thoughts. We argue that by appealing to a failure of ownership and authorship we can describe more accurately the phenomenology of thought insertion, and distinguish it from that of non-delusional beliefs that have not been deliberated about, and of other delusions of passivity. We can also start developing a more psychologically realistic account of the relation between intentionality, rationality and self knowledge in normal and abnormal cognition. Keywords Authorship of thoughts . Self-knowledge . First-person authority . Thought insertion . Rationality . Ownership of thoughts . Intentionality . Self-ascription Introduction In the recent philosophical and psychological literature (Moran 2001; Velleman 2005; McAdams 2001; Wegner 2002; Wilson 2002), renewed attention has been drawn to the relationship between rationality, intentionality and self knowledge. In this paper we want to explore this relationship within psychopathology and provide L. Bortolotti (*) Philosophy Department, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston B15 2TT, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Broome Health Sciences Research Institute, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK e-mail: [email protected] 206 L. Bortolotti, M. Broome an analysis of thought insertion according to which subjects affected by this condition lack self knowledge.1 We argue that this failure of self knowledge consists in failing to ascribe to oneself a thought that is accessed first-personally and in failing to either endorse the content of that thought with reasons or manifest commitment towards it in behaviour. These failures have effects on the construction of the subject’s self image and, ultimately, the exercise of autonomous thought and action. The long-term research project of identifying failures of self knowledge in people affected by thought insertion and detecting the consequences of such failures will prove fruitful in two ways: (1) it will help us gain a better understanding of how the capacities for self knowledge, and rationality are interrelated in normal and abnormal cognition, and especially of whether they should be regarded as necessary conditions for the ascription of beliefs and other intentional states; and (2) it will provide a framework for assessing the degree of personal autonomy and responsibility of subjects affected by delusions in relation to those instances of behaviour that are consistent with or caused by their delusional states. But there are also some immediate benefits in adopting the analysis of thought insertion we put forward. In this paper, we have three main objectives: (1) analyse the condition in a way that is compatible with the phenomenology of typical delusional reports; (2) distinguish between the experience of ‘inserted’ thoughts and ordinary thoughts; ‘inserted’ thoughts and ‘controlled’ thoughts; and ‘inserted’ thoughts and alien movements; (3) clarify the sense in which thought insertion constitutes an impairment of self knowledge. According to our analysis of thought insertion, the breakdown of self knowledge is manifested not just in the sense that one’s personal boundaries have been violated, but especially in the failure to ascribe reported thoughts to oneself and to express a genuine commitment to their content. The ‘inserted’ thoughts can be accessed directly, but are neither acknowledged as one’s own nor endorsed on the basis of reasons. Psychopathology and self knowledge Individuals with delusions vary widely in terms of the commitment they express to the content of their delusional states. In some cases, they acknowledge the reported delusional beliefs as their own and they are prepared to justify them with reasons (Bortolotti and Broome, forthcoming), although the reasoning behind the justification provided might be affected by biases such as jumping to conclusions. Both subjects with delusions and subjects at high risk of psychosis seem to be vulnerable to these reasoning biases (Broome et al. 2005, 2007). A subject suffering from persecutory delusions may be able to justify the belief that people around her are hostile by reference to episodes in which she was avoided or looked at in a way that she perceived as contemptuous. She may give some reasons in support of her beliefs and behave in such a way that manifests her commitment to the truth of the reported belief contents: she appears to be concerned and under stress, she loses sleep, she develops suspicion towards strangers, and so 1 For similar projects, see the presentations by Fernández and Pickard at the Delusions and Self Knowledge workshop in Bristol in February 2008. A role for ownership and authorship 207 on. Such a subject can be said to be both the owner and the author of her beliefs. She owns the belief that others are hostile, because she can acknowledge it as her own and ascribe it to herself, and she is the author of that belief, because she is in a position to provide reasons for supporting it. In other delusions, the very capacity for ownership and authorship of thought is compromised. When suffering from the Cotard delusion,2 subjects report beliefs that are not well integrated with other beliefs they have—for instance they may assert that they are dead, but when asked where they are, they report that they are in a hospital bed receiving visits from their relatives. In other types of delusions, subjects seem unable to support their reported belief with reasons—not even bad reasons. For instance, consider a young man who is absolutely convinced that all the songs played on the radio are sung by him but cannot justify his conviction nor explain how such an extraordinary fact can happen (Yager and Gitlin 2005, page 978). Finally, subjects may report beliefs that do not have the expected action-guiding role. For instance, a man with Capgras syndrome3 may report to believe that his wife has been replaced by an impostor and yet show no signs of distress, manifesting no intention to go and look for his missing spouse. Why should we map psychopathologies in terms of whether ownership and authorship are preserved? In cognitive neuropsychology the methodological assumption guiding many empirical studies is that an explanation of what makes a belief pathological can shed light on the mechanisms underlying ordinary cognition. This approach is useful in the context of an empirically informed analysis of the conditions for intentionality and rationality. The capacities to own and author reported beliefs are typically taken for granted. But when these capacities are not manifested in a subject’s observed behaviour, both the rationality of the reported beliefs and the subject’s first-person authority over them are challenged. In some extreme cases, the subject’s behaviour cannot be described in intentional terms, or the only beliefs that can be ascribed to her have indeterminate content, compromising intentional explanation and prediction of behaviour (Bortolotti 2004). Thus, ownership and authorship determine how intentionality and self knowledge are ascribed. These ascriptions, in turn, have implications for individual and societal attitudes towards those subjects whose behaviour cannot be described in intentional terms. The characterisation of behaviour via the ascription of beliefs is central to the conception of the subject as an intentional agent able to act on the basis of what she believes in order to achieve her goals; and affects the subject’s capacity to form a coherent narrative conception of herself. If the subject does not see the thoughts she can access first-personally as her own, they won’t be integrated in her system of beliefs, desires and long-term goals which guides her future behaviour and contributes to the creation of a coherent self narrative. 2 Typically people suffering from Cotard’s syndrome believe that they are dead, or have other nihilistic delusions, e.g. about parts of their bodies missing, or the world no longer existing. Berrios and Luque (1995) have analysed many such cases. 3 Capgras syndrome involves the belief that a dear one has been replaced by an impostor and is due to abnormality of perception of familiar faces. For more details about Capgras syndrome, see Stone and Young (1997). 208 L. Bortolotti, M. Broome In this paper we want to set the conceptual foundations for addressing some of these issues. We shall focus exclusively on the analysis of the phenomenon of thought insertion. In thought insertion subjects experience a thought as foreign. This experience is accompanied by a story about how the thought has been inserted from without. This condition is usually analysed in the literature in terms of a subject having ownership of a thought towards which she fails to experience a sense of agency. In other words, subjects introspect and find that there is a thought in their minds which they feel they have not themselves voluntarily produced. We find the characterisation of thought insertion in terms of a loss of the sense of agency with respect to a reported thought unsatisfactory. It fails to provide a distinct account of the phenomenology of ‘inserted’ thoughts from that of either ordinary thoughts whose content has not been the object of explicit deliberation or other thoughts that are perceived as controlled by forces outside the subject. Moreover, the plausibility of the standard analysis relies on the dubious analogy between the passivity experienced in disorders of activity and that experienced in disorders of thinking. The claim that ownership is preserved is also problematic, given that the subject affected by thought insertion is often radically alienated from the thought she reports. Those who argue that ownership is preserved in thought insertion deploy a notion of ownership primarily characterised by the spatiality condition, i.e. the capacity to locate a thought within the subject’s personal boundaries. This notion of ownership has a number of limitations. It is too weak, as it allows for someone to own a thought that cannot be self ascribed; and it relies for its intelligibility on a metaphor (i.e. the mind as a container with thoughts as material objects occupying that space) that is at best controversial, both as a psychologically realistic image of how the mind works and as a naïve image of how laypeople conceive of their minds as working. We shall articulate these objections in more detail (in “Thought insertion as a failure of self ascription” and “Thought insertion as failure of endorsement”). But before we can challenge the standard analysis of thought insertion and offer an alternative, we need to say more about what authorship and ownership are (in “Authorship and reason giving”, “Owning, endorsing and producing thoughts” and “Thought insertion and two notions of ownership”). This is an especially important task, because these notions have been used to refer to different capacities in different philosophical and psychological research programmes. Authorship and reason giving There is a sense in which people are the authors of a story that they recognise as a story about themselves. The implications of these self narratives have been related to metaphysical questions about the nature of the self. For instance, starting from a critical review of Daniel Dennett’s fictional view of the self (Dennett 1992), David Velleman (2005) characterises autonomy and self determination in terms of self constitution. The leading character in the story one tells about oneself and the narrator start out as significantly different entities, as the narrator is often vulnerable to self-attribution biases and tends to rationalise the actions and decisions the leading character is responsible for. That said, narrator and narration are ‘mutually determining’, as Velleman elegantly puts it. The events in one’s life affect the story one tells about A role for ownership and authorship 209 oneself, but at the same time that story affects future behaviour by contributing to creating a self image one might want to adhere to or to take distance from. The story can also be told ahead, and therefore play the role of a self fulfilling prediction. Let’s use a concrete example and construct it in such a way that it is not an example of self deception or weakness of will. Patrick’s story about why he filed for divorce can be different from the way in which his friends explain his decision. He might justify his decision as motivated by the incompatibility of character between himself and his spouse, whereas his friends believe that he chose this course of action because he fell in love with someone he met at work. First-person and thirdperson accounts of behaviour often diverge for at least two important reasons. Patrick knows things about what he thinks and how he feels that others can only infer by observing his behaviour. He has some prima facie epistemic advantage over his friends, given by direct access to the content of some of his mental states. Moreover, Patrick is vulnerable to different attribution and reasoning biases from the ones that affect his friends. For instance, Patrick is exposed to self-attribution biases when he reflects upon his own dispositions, personality traits, past history, likelihood of success, and so on. Hence, access to the content of his mental states is not entirely transparent, but rather, his knowledge of his own reasons is refracted through such biases. It is not easy to determine which story is the correct one if conflict between first- and third- person accounts emerges, and it is equally hard to come up with criteria of correctness for the ascription of mental states to people, given that psychological explanations for action are often complex and dispositions, traits, even biases are malleable. The notion of authorship as developed by Moran (2001) suggests that, independent of whether Patrick’s story is closer to the truth than a third-person account, there is something special about Patrick giving reasons for his decision. Engaging in the reason-giving exercise allows him to take the perspective of a deliberator. Patrick sees his decision as the right decision (unless he is weak willed or self deceived) because he has come to it, or endorsed it, on the basis of what he takes to be the best reasons available to him. The interesting claim that Moran makes is that by authoring his decision, by deliberating about it or being able to justify it with reasons, Patrick acquires some sort of first-personal authority over the content of the decision. He comes to know the content of his decision, and that he made a decision with that content, not just by observing his own behaviour or by introspection, but by reflecting on the reasons that make his decision the right one in his own eyes. Moran’s message is not that authorship replaces other forms of self knowledge or that it is more fundamental, but that it supplements them in a very significant way. The point is that self knowledge is not exhausted by direct epistemic access and self interpretation of behaviour. Self insight into some mental states, such as beliefs about issues that are central to one’s concerns and interests, can be questioned if the content of those states is not something the subject deliberates about, or justifies on the basis of reasons. Reason giving offers an additional route to the knowledge of the content of one’s mental states and to the knowledge that one has mental states with that content. If it is possible for a person to answer a deliberative question about his belief at all, this involves assuming an authority over, and a responsibility for, what his belief actually is. Thus a person able to exercise this capacity is in a position to 210 L. Bortolotti, M. Broome declare what his belief is by reflection on the reasons in favor of that belief, rather than by examination of the psychological evidence. In this way […] avowal can be seen as an expression of genuine self-knowledge (Moran 2004, 425). Implicit in what we have just said is that authorship does not equally apply to all conscious mental states. Some mental states are not candidates for authorship or can be authored only to a very limited extent, as one does not typically deliberate upon or justify the content of a merely perceptual belief. We would not think that Patrick had self knowledge with respect to the claim that filing for divorce is the best course of action for him, unless Patrick were in a position to defend that claim with reasons. But we would not say the same about other conscious mental states of Patrick. His being hungry or his seeing a car parked in front of the post office are states that he can authoritatively report without giving reason for them; it is not so clear what it would mean to ‘endorse’ them, other than acting in a way that is compatible with their being true. The endorsement of an opinion or a conscious decision, which are good candidates for authorship, can be a matter of degree and seems to vary together with the significance of those attitudes for the subject reporting them. Some decisions seem to be for many people central to their self narratives, such as which subject to study at university, whether to get married or to separate from their spouses, or which charitable foundation to support. Other decisions, such as what to eat for breakfast one morning, are likely to be marginal and are not likely to be retained as evidence for a certain self image. Of course, this attribution of importance varies across individuals and contexts. Events that for some people are marginal and unimportant can be central to other people’s self images: if Patrick’s self-image is that of a decadent languid aesthete, then eating quails’ eggs and sipping champagne in a silk dressing gown at breakfast time may be more important in defining what type of person he is than the reasons why he is getting a divorce. This point needs to be kept in mind when we turn our attention to delusional states and attempt to determine the extent to which delusional states are authored, as people reporting delusions often ascribe significance (and self-referring significance) to episodes that appear to others as trivial or merely coincidental. Judgements of authorship will be affected not just by the type of attitude, but also by the way in which attitudes are formed and reported. There are beliefs that one just ‘inherits’ and beliefs that one carefully deliberates over. If one accepts that an available piece of information is true without checking the reliability of its source or without having any reason for endorsing that truth, one can still be said to believe that content, but does not satisfy the conditions for being the author of the belief. The belief remains a candidate for authorship, but the possibility of authoring it hasn’t been made actual. For instance, a subject can be said to believe that the effects of global warming are irreversible and yet fail to be the author of that belief if she is in no position to defend its content. Some beliefs are such that, just by having them, one is expected to be in a position to offer some justification for them, because they have a special role in one’s conception of oneself and other attitudes and actions seem to hang on them. For instance, if someone who was born and has always lived in England reports the belief that it is best for her to move to Egypt, then that person is expected to have A role for ownership and authorship 211 some reasons for the belief, as acting on it would constitute a life change with fairly radical consequences. There would be something deeply puzzling about the following exchange: Bonnie: ‘The best thing for me is to move to Egypt’ Adam: ‘Why?’ Bonnie: ‘I don’t know. No reason.’ The phrase ‘the best thing’ seems to imply some weighing and evaluation on behalf of the speaker, as if the statement made were the outcome of reason, but no reason giving follows the statement. In this case, the lack of justification in Bonnie’s answer could make Adam not only doubt whether Bonnie has authority over the belief she reports, but also whether she really believes what she says, i.e. that the best thing for her would be to move to Egypt. Such exchanges are not uncommon in psychopathology, where some people affected by delusions can offer no reason for the beliefs they report, even though the content of those beliefs is such that we would expect it to play a significant role in their cognitive, emotional and relational lives. From the point of view of the interpreter or interlocutor, when authorship of such beliefs fails, two reactions can ensue. One might ascribe the belief to the person who reports it and deny that the person has authority with respect to that belief. Alternatively, one might be inclined to think that no genuine belief has been reported.4 Failure of authorship can be seen as evidence for lack of self knowledge or, more radically, as an obstacle to the intentional characterisation of the observed behaviour, depending on the nature of the attitude and the context in which it is reported. Owning, endorsing and producing thoughts In order to apply the notions of ownership and authorship to pathologies of belief, it is useful to distinguish and compare five capacities that are important to the analysis of behaviour in terms of intentionality, rationality and self knowledge: (1) to locate a thought in one’s personal boundaries (spatiality condition); (2) to access the content of a thought directly and first-personally (introspection condition); (3) to acknowledge a thought as one’s own (self ascription condition); (4) to endorse the content of a thought on the basis of one’s best reasons (authorship as endorsement); (5) to be causally responsible for the formation of a thought (agency with respect to thoughts). The notions of ownership available in the literature are defined in terms of the conjunction of (1) and (2), or in terms of the conjunction of (2) and (3): the owner of 4 It is worth noticing that it is to some extent controversial whether delusions should ever be characterised in intentional terms. The debate between doxastic (e.g. Stone and Young 1997; Bayne and Pacherie 2005) and non-doxastic accounts of delusions (e.g. Berrios 1991; Stephens and Graham 2006) is relevant to the argument we present in this paper, and those on the side of doxastic accounts are likely to be more sympathetic to our approach. 212 L. Bortolotti, M. Broome a thought is taken to be either the subject who can locate the thought within her personal boundaries and has direct access to the thought, or the subject who can introspect the thought and acknowledge it as her own, thereby ascribing it to herself. Ownership of a thought is never sufficient for its endorsement, which is based on the capacity for reason giving in deliberation or justification, or, depending of the type of thought, on behavioural manifestability. For the purposes of applying the notion of authorship to cases of thought insertion, from now on we shall focus on those thoughts whose content can be endorsed on the basis of reasons (e.g. opinions), and leave aside the case of thoughts towards which commitment is primarily manifested in behaviour (e.g. basic perceptual beliefs). In the former case, it is clear that ownership is not sufficient for authorship. Recall our previous example: one can believe that the effects of global warming are irreversible, and ascribe the belief to oneself, without being able to provide any justification for it. We shall discuss the merits of different notions of ownership in the next section. Here we would like to address the issue of what authorship requires. In some psychological literature authorship is often identified with intentional causation: authoring an action consists in being causally responsible for it via the formation of a prior intention (Wegner and Sparrow 2004). The notion of authorship we are proposing is primarily concerned with the endorsement of the content of a mental state, where the endorsement is measured in terms of the capacity for reason giving. In order to be the author of a belief in this sense, to take responsibility for it and be committed to its content, it is not necessary to assume that the reasons that justify endorsing the belief map onto the psychological causes of its formation. Let’s think about the difference between the following formulations: a) In order to be the author of the belief that he should file for divorce, Patrick needs to have formed that belief on the basis of the best evidence available to him. b) In order to be the author of the belief that he should file for divorce, Patrick needs to be able to endorse that belief on the basis of the best evidence available to him. Formulations (a) and (b) differ in that (a) is concerned with the process of formation of the belief and (b) with the process of justification of the belief. In order to make sense of the notion of authorship that we have described in the previous section and largely borrowed from Moran, (a) is far too demanding as a condition for authorship. Following Moran, the conditions for authorship can be met by the process of justification only, as it is perfectly conceivable and often the case that: & & 5 one acquires good reasons for endorsing the content of a belief that was initially formed on the basis of very weak evidence; a belief is justified in a way that is distinct from the way in which it was originally formed—as the results of the introspection effect studies show;5 Evidence from the psychological studies on the effects of introspection confirms that the account of why one endorses the content of a certain attitude often changes across time. Further, sometimes reflecting on the reasons for an attitude leads one to revise the content of the initially reported attitude. Research participants asked to say what they thought about Reagan when he was president of the United States were later on asked to justify their opinion and, as a result of reflecting on their attitude, ended up expressing opinions that were different from the ones they reported at the start (Wilson and Hodges 1994). A role for ownership and authorship & 213 a belief appears in the belief box as the result of dispositions that are not transparent to the subject via introspection, and then is defended on the basis of reasons after the subject has been made aware of the existence of the belief and challenged to offer a justification for it. If we took authorship of thoughts to require (a), the attitudes to count as authored in a psychologically realistic account would be so few that the phenomenon might be deprived of some of its interest: it would legitimately apply only to the outputs of explicit deliberation. However, one objection often raised against our account of authorship is that it is too revisionist: why should we call this phenomenon ‘authorship’ in the first place, if the subject authoring an attitude is not herself the source of that attitude? To this we reply that the process of endorsement via reason giving is not necessarily a process of thought production, but it is not a causally inert process either. It is a process that, in Moran’s words, culminates with the subject taking responsibility over the reported attitude and making a commitment to it that is likely to be reflected in further reported attitudes and other forms of behaviour. This sense of responsibility and commitment is often described by suggesting that it is up to the subject what to believe. Authorship of beliefs is not hostage to the way in which beliefs are formed but to whether their content is endorsed on the basis of reasons. It is not about creation ex nihilo; it is about what relation one bears to the content of a belief, in deliberation or justification. In the literature on authorship processing, as we mentioned, authorship is discussed in the context of movements rather than thoughts and it is taken to require intentional causation. Subjects are regarded as authors when they act on their intentions. Wegner and Sparrow (2004) suggest that there are cases in which the self is the author of an action, but does not perceive the action as self-generated (e.g. hypnosis or alien hand syndrome) and there are other cases in which the subject is not causally responsible for an action, but the action is perceived as self generated (e.g. when an instance of behaviour has good consequences for the subject, the behaviour is seen as willed and self generated even if it was not). In the notion of authorship we have developed following Moran (2001), there is less scope for a mismatch between actual authorship and the sense of authorship. If the content of a belief is endorsed by the subject of that belief on the basis of reasons, then she is the author of that belief, no matter how the belief got there in the first place. Is it possible to develop a notion of authorship as intentional causation for beliefs, a notion that makes sense of the formulation in (a)? In order to apply the analysis that Wegner (2002) provides for the production of movements to the production of thoughts and we would need to assume that the latter works in an analogous way to the former. The sense of authorship Wegner talks about rests on there being an intention prior to a perceived movement that the subject regards as the cause of the movement. But the analogy does not seem to work, and we shall come back to this point later. The notion of authorship in the authorship processing literature seems to be at home with movements, which can be perceived as anticipated by intentions or as involuntary, but not to beliefs, which can be formed independently of the presence of explicit intentions and acts of deliberation. The notion of authorship we find in Moran seems to be better suited to account for intentional states of a certain type, as it requires the presence of a content that can be endorsed on the basis of reasons, but 214 L. Bortolotti, M. Broome not to movements which cannot be ‘endorsed’ independently of the intentions that precede them and sometimes cause them. Thought insertion and two notions of ownership There are a number of disorders of the self that might affect the way in which one feels one’s thoughts are formed, held, reported, accessed and affected by other individuals or external forces. In delusions of passivity, we need to distinguish between the delusional belief that some third party is controlling one’s thoughts or inserting thoughts into one’s head (the delusional explanation); and the thought that is regarded as controlled by others or inserted (the inserted or controlled-by-others thought). The former belief can be authored, as the subject is not alienated from it and can offer some (often implausible) explanation of how alien control and thought insertion occurred. For example, a subject might explain that the ‘inserted’ thought has been put in her head via a special device capable of transmitting thoughts. She might go into greater detail as to how the machine can transmit thoughts and elaborate on the magical power or the technology responsible for such a device. The transmission or the ‘inserting’ process is seen as a physical process. It is worth noticing that in some standardized interviews (such as PSE and SCAN6) one needs to have the experience of a physical sensation to be regarded as suffering from thought insertion. However, this is not universal to all assessment tools and not integral to most common definitions. It is with respect to the latter thought—the ‘inserted’ or ‘controlled’ one—that questions of ownership and authorship emerge. The thought is known firstpersonally by the subject and therefore the subject is aware of the content of that thought independently of behavioural evidence. But the subject also feels some passivity with respect to the thought and regards it as alien or out of her own control (Sims 2003, page 164). Not all thinking disorders involve the subject’s total alienation from a thought that is known first-personally. In some cases, the subject feels that her own thought is shared with others, broadcast without her permission or withdrawn by others, but she maintains a limited sense of attachment to the thought in so far as she recognises the thought as originally her own, as produced by her, or as something she is committed to. In these cases, distress derives from a perceived violation of privacy or breach of personal boundaries. In thought insertion total alienation ensues, and this is the case we are going to concentrate on, because it has the most puzzling theoretical consequences for the philosophy of thought, that is, the divorce between first-personal awareness of the content of a thought, and the possibility of self ascribing that thought. The subject “experiences thoughts that do not have the feeling of familiarity, of being his own, but he feels that they have been put in his mind without his volition, from outside himself” (Sims 2003, page 168). Radical alienation can be experienced to the same degree with respect to physical movements as well as to thoughts, when the 6 PSE = present state examination, SCAN = schedule for the clinical assessment of neuropsychiatry. A role for ownership and authorship 215 movement of a limb, for instance, occurs independently of the subject’s will to move and is perceived as foreign. Here are some examples of disorders of passivity: 1. A university student in her second year believes that her university lecturer has implanted an electronic device in her head that can control her thoughts. (Lewis and Guthrie 2002, page 70) 2. “One evening one thought was given to me electrically that I should murder Lissi.” (Jaspers 1963, page 580) 3. “When I reach for the comb, it is my hand and arm which move. But I don’t control them. I sit watching them move and they are quite independent, what they do is nothing to do with me. I am just a puppet manipulated by cosmic strings.” (Graham and Stephens 1994, page 99) 4. A 57-year-old woman suffered a stroke and thereafter perceived her left hand as having a will of its own. On one occasion, the hand grabbed her by the throat and choked her, requiring great effort to pull it off. She described the hand as possessing “an evil spirit” and stated that it did not belong to her: “Those are two very different people, the arm and I” (Scepkowski and Cronin-Golomb 2003, page 261). Of the examples above, only (2) is a case of thought insertion, and now we turn to the discussion of how best we can explain the phenomenon. Recall the five capacities we referred to in the previous section: spatiality; introspection; self ascription; authorship as endorsement via reason giving; agency with respect to thoughts. As we did argue before, introspection and authorship can come apart in the reporting of both ordinary and delusional beliefs. But introspection and self ascription seem to come apart only in quite exceptional cases; in thought insertion, the subject is aware of the content of a thought in a first-personal way but does not acknowledge that the thought is her own. Because of the detachment of self ascription from introspection, thought insertion challenges commonsense and it is a puzzle for our philosophical conception of what it is to have a thought. Thus, it deserves careful analysis. According to standard analyses of thought insertion (e.g. Gerrans 2001; Gallagher 2004, 2007), the subject is aware of a thought in a first-personal way, and recognises that the thought is within her personal boundaries, but lacks something else, which is described as a sense of agency with respect to the thought. This is the sense that the thought was voluntarily produced or brought into existence by the subject. In other words, it is the sense that the subject had a causally efficacious role in the generation of the thought. What is the evidence that the sense of agency is what is missing from the experience leading to reports of thought insertion? The phenomenology of the delusion seems to be compatible with the subject lacking a sense of agency; the subject affected by the delusion typically says that she has the thought because someone else gave it to her, or because some piece of machinery forced it into her head. Additional support for this view would come from the alleged parallelism between loss of agency with respect to movements and loss of agency with respect to thoughts. When people suffer from alien hand syndrome, they claim that their hand moves independently of their will (sometimes, against their will). Subjects do not recognise themselves as those who initiated the movement, as if they were controlled by others or as if the hand had a will of its 216 L. Bortolotti, M. Broome own. This experience has often been compared with some reports of thought insertion where the mind is described as a passive instrument in the grip of someone else’s will, as a medium for thinking thoughts that are generated by other people or by external forces. In the loss-of-agency account, it is the causal element which is missing from the subject’s awareness of her relation with the thought. The subject is aware of the content of the thought but she is not aware that she is responsible for producing the thought. When discussing thought insertion, Shaun Gallagher (2004) employs a notion of ownership that is characterised by the spatiality condition and the introspection condition. Thus, for Gallagher, it is sufficient for one to own a thought that the thought is experienced first-personally in one’s head. This experience is independent of any sense of acknowledgement, and of any sense of responsibility for the generation or the maintenance of the thought. If we apply the notions of ownership characterised by introspection and inclusion in the subject’s personal boundaries to the case of thought insertion, we find that the subject owns the ‘inserted’ thought, as she can locate it within her personal boundaries and has direct, first-personal access to its content. This notion of ownership has several drawbacks, though. To start with, it does not seem to vindicate the everyday notion of ownership as having an entitlement to or a legal right of possession over the object that is owned (Oxford English Dictionary 2007). John Campbell (2002) discusses a more demanding notion of ownership, according to which a subject needs to acknowledge the thought as her own and ascribe it to herself in order to be its owner. To some extent, the notion of ownership as including the self ascription condition does justice to the notion of ownership as entitlement, because the subject can ascribe the thought to herself on the basis of introspection, psychological information about herself or consideration of the reasons in favour of the content of that thought. All these sources of entitlement are possible, and in some cases more than one source is available at once. However, it is not necessary for self ascription that the subject considers the reasons in favour of the content of the acknowledged thought. Thus, when granting the capacity for self ascription, no additional claims need to be made about the thought being endorsed by the subject. If we apply the more demanding notion of ownership to the case of thought insertion, then we find that the subject does not own the ‘inserted’ thought. The thought is accessed directly and reported first-personally, but it is not reported as the subject’s own thought. It is ‘mineness’ as entitlement to the thought which is the crucial and distinguishing feature of this account of ownership; and it is this ‘mineness’ which is conspicuously missing from the subject’s phenomenology. Thought insertion as a failure of self ascription An appropriate notion of ownership in the context of thought insertion needs to be able to (a) vindicate some of our intuitions about ownership in general; (b) be sensitive to what is peculiar about ownership of thoughts; (c) avoid explaining away the puzzling nature of thought insertion. We should be wary of a notion of ownership that de-pathologises thought insertion and leads to describing the condition as one way in which subjects relate to their thoughts. A role for ownership and authorship 217 If we think about the notion of ownership in general, spatial considerations are usually not sufficient to claim ownership. If a neighbour’s child throws a ball into your garden, the ball does not become yours in virtue of the fact that it fell within the boundaries of your property. In order to keep the ball and silence the protestations of the weeping child you would have to show that you are entitled to keeping that ball, e.g. show a receipt from a toy shop indicating that you did acquire that ball some time in the past. Another example which might be more relevant: what happens in successful transplants is that someone else’s organ is inserted in one’s ‘personal boundaries’. The fact that a heart is beating inside you, does not necessarily make the heart yours. More generally, it is not sufficient for an object to be within one’s personal boundaries, or within the boundaries of one’s property, to be owned by that person. Additional reservations could be expressed about the significance of the spatiality condition for the notion of ownership when such a notion is applied to thoughts. All conditions for ownership of thought are to some extent reliant on a metaphorical way of describing thoughts as things that can be possessed. However, the introspection condition seems to take into account the specific attributes of what is owned, that is, thoughts are the type of objects that can be introspected, i.e. mental states, because they have a content that can be accessed first-personally, and that can be ascribed to oneself on the basis of introspection. Instead, the spatiality condition seems to rely for its plausibility on a very controversial conception of the mind as a container where objects are placed and can be later retrieved. If one finds the thought in the box, then the thought is one’s own. Independent of what we think about the ontological status of thoughts, this metaphor is excessively crude. Proponents of the significance of the spatiality condition might reply that subjects with thought insertion talk about their thoughts as foreign objects unduly pushed into a personal and private space: subjects report thoughts to be physically inserted in their minds. Conceptualising thoughts as material objects enclosed in a physical space would then be acceptable, as it is compatible with the reports of subjects with the condition. But this move is problematic for two independent reasons. First, untutored descriptions of mental life might be relevant for psychological theories of belief formation and ascription, but are rarely a good guide to the ontology and epistemology of the mind. Second, if one wanted to take all aspects of the phenomenology of thought insertion at face value, one would also have to take into account that subjects with thought insertion explicitly disown and take distance from the thoughts they report, claiming that they are the thoughts of others. These observations about the alleged match between the spatiality-focused account of ownership and the phenomenology of thought insertion raise further concerns. An appeal to the notion of ownership in the case of thought insertion needs to make sense of ownership of thoughts in general and give us the tools to describe what is puzzling about the thought insertion case. If the proposed analysis of ownership fits the case of thought insertion extremely well, but the price to pay is that it cannot be successfully applied to other cases of ownership of thoughts, then it is ad hoc. An indication that the notion of ownership as satisfaction of the spatiality and introspection conditions is ad hoc is given by the fact that it makes thought insertion lose all of its puzzling features. What seems puzzling about thought insertion is that one can introspect a thought without acknowledging that the thought is one’s own. But this is no longer a 218 L. Bortolotti, M. Broome difficult condition to describe, given that the less demanding notion of ownership vindicates it entirely. The capacity for self ascription is missing, but it is not an integral part of what ownership requires. In thoughts that can be first-personally accessed, as opposed to other objects, ownership and acknowledgement of ownership seem to go together. One usually knows that a thought is one’s own when it is, because ordinarily one would not be in a position to access the content of that thought unless one was the subject of that thought. Introspecting a thought is usually sufficient for ascribing that thought to oneself.7 This is what makes thought insertion interesting to philosophers: if you suffer from thought insertion, you recognise that the thought is in your mind (spatiality condition), and you can access its content first-personally (introspection condition), but you don’t think the thought is yours (failure of the self ascription condition). You might have a story to explain how the ‘inserted’ thought ended up in your mind (delusional explanation) in which it is clear that you had no role in bringing that thought about, and, typically, that you do not endorse it (failure of authorship). Independent of how that thought got into your mind, and what role it now has in your system of beliefs, you don’t acknowledge the thought as yours and you don’t ascribe it to yourself. The notion of ownership primarily characterised by inclusion in one’s personal boundaries and introspective access is not suitable to account for the experience of the person affected by the delusion, because it cannot capture the conflict that is experienced. For the subject affected by thought insertion, the ‘inserted’ thought is an unwanted intruder and the very distress lies in the fact that the thought is in their head but also, in a conventional sense, they don’t acknowledge it as theirs. The exclusion of the self ascription condition from the less demanding notion of ownership makes the experience of thought insertion apparently more tractable, and less pathological, but at the cost of accepting statements of the form “x is mine, but I don’t acknowledge it as mine”, or “x is P’s but P does not acknowledge x as hers” that are acceptable when applied to many objects, and yet have the flavour of inconsistency when applied to thoughts. According to the more demanding notion of ownership, the subject with thought insertion fails to satisfy the conditions for ownership, because she fails to satisfy the self ascription condition. This means that thought insertion is characterised by a failure of ownership. The thought does not belong to the subject; she doesn’t acknowledge it as hers. This account gives us the resources to explain what does work in thought insertion (the introspection condition is satisfied), and allows us to make sense of the conflict that is experienced by subjects with thought insertion (due to the fact that the introspection condition is satisfied, but the self ascription condition is not). No special role is played by the spatiality condition, whose reliance on a dubious model of the mind we have already discussed. Thoughts might be ‘seen from the inside’ but they are not acknowledged as belonging to the subject. Inserted thoughts are unwanted and unwelcome, and this is one of the key symptoms often linked to violence in psychotic illness. 7 Sometimes philosophers talk about “immunity from error through misidentification”. The idea is that I can be mistaken about what my thought is about, but I cannot be mistaken about who the subject of my thought is. A role for ownership and authorship 219 Thought insertion as a failure of endorsement As we have seen in the previous section, the standard analysis of thought insertion in the literature attempts to make sense of its phenomenology in a way that is compatible with ascribing to the subject ownership of the thought as inclusion of the thought in one’s personal boundaries and first-personal awareness of the content of the thought. The next move is to rely heavily on the analogy between thinking disorders and disorders of activity involving alienation, and to suggest that there is a common answer to the question about what is amiss in, say, thought insertion and alien hand syndrome. The subject fails to experience a sense of agency with respect to the ‘inserted’ thought or to the alien hand. The thought and the hand are owned, in the sense that the subject is aware that they are located within her personal boundaries. Yet the subject feels passive with respect to them, as she does not feel that she initiated or controlled the formation of the thought or the movement of the hand. To support this interpretation, and the analogy between ‘inserted’ thoughts and alien movements, Gerrans (2001) describes the experience of a subject as feeling like a marionette controlled by others. Campbell (2002) notices that loss of agency in thought insertion implies that there is no sense that the thought has been produced by the subject, it has just forcefully and intrusively appeared. Although it is an attractive option to account for a variety of delusions of passivity in a way that is sufficiently homogeneous, there are good reasons to keep disorders of thinking and disorders of activity apart in this context and to focus on the nature of the commitment to the thought that is regarded as ‘inserted’. We want to resist an account of thought insertion which rests primarily on a loss of the sense of agency, and propose that thought insertion should be analysed as a condition in which typically both the capacity of self ascription and authorship as endorsement fail with respect to the ‘inserted’ thought. What are the advantages of talking about loss of ownership and authorship rather than loss of agency? Isn’t the whole dispute merely terminological? We believe it is not. Our analysis, we shall argue, can allow us to distinguish between: (a) delusions of passivity and ordinary beliefs when are formed in absence of explicit deliberation; (b) the role of intentional causation and production in disorders of activity and in disorders of thinking; (c) the phenomenology of thought insertion and that of delusions of control with respect to thoughts. Moreover, our account can make sense of the claim that thought insertion is a failure of self knowledge independently of a reference to the breach of personal boundaries. Let us assess the loss-of-agency account. First, the failure to experience a sense of agency does not discriminate between the phenomenon of the inserted thought and that of many ordinary beliefs. As Mullins and Spence (2003) argue, to offer an explanation of thought insertion which relies on the distinction between subjectivity and agency (Stephens and Graham 2000) or between sense of ownership and sense of agency (Campbell 2002) does not satisfactorily account for the peculiarity of the delusional experience. The unsolicited thoughts that come spontaneously to mind, without being preceded by explicit deliberative intention, do not typically give rise to delusional beliefs about others inserting or implanting thoughts. The sense of agency with respect to these beliefs is lacking as it is in the thought insertion case, but no such a delusional explanation is reported. This suggests that the sense of 220 L. Bortolotti, M. Broome passivity in belief formation cannot be the core element of the condition of thought insertion. If we analyse the condition in terms of failure of the capacity for self ascription and failure of authorship as the potential for justification and endorsement, the problem Mullins and Spence identify vanishes. Those ordinary thoughts that are not the outcome of explicit deliberation can still be acknowledged and even endorsed post-hoc. That is probably why they do not give rise to delusions of passivity. In our analysis of thought insertion in terms of a failure of acknowledgement and endorsement there is no need to make the controversial assumption that subjects ordinarily have a sense of agency with respect to their thoughts, where sense of agency amounts to a feeling that the thoughts have been produced by the subjects. In order to ascribe a thought to oneself and feel entitled to it, one does not need to have formed it as a result of explicit deliberation. As we saw, very few thoughts are produced in this way and yet unsolicited thoughts do not ordinarily appear as alien to their subject. When we discussed the conditions for authorship, we found that deliberation is not a necessary condition for authorship of beliefs, because the commitment to the content of a thought can take the form of a reason-guided post-hoc justification. Second, there are elements of discontinuity between disorders of thinking and of activity. The idea that subjects with thought insertion lack a sense of agency as thought production is the result of the forced analogy between thoughts and movements on which the loss-of-agency account rests. This analogy is very problematic, even when we compare basic descriptions of the phenomena. If you suffer from alien hand syndrome, the hand moves in a way that is not controlled by you, and you feel the movement is not yours, because you have not formed a prior intention to move your hand in that way. But in thought insertion you do not fail to acknowledge that the brain is yours because it has engaged in an act of thinking that was not willed by you. Rather, you explain that others are using your brain and take distance from the product of that thinking activity, ascribing it to someone else. What matters to the ascription of the thought? That the thought is acknowledged as one’s own, as either introspected, attributed on the basis of psychological evidence about oneself, or supported with reasons. Trying to establish whether there was a prior intention to produce the thought is irrelevant and slightly misleading: we do not typically form intentions to produce thoughts, although we might intend to engage in thinking activities that have as their objectives the solution of a problem or a deliberation. If we take introspection, self ascription and endorsement to be the central notions in the assessment of self knowledge for reported attitudes, then the analogy between ‘inserted’ thoughts and alien movements breaks down entirely. Movements themselves do not seem to be the appropriate object of introspection or justificatory exercises, although intentional actions can be authored to some extent, as they involve intentional attitudes that can be introspected, acknowledged and endorsed. Third, the analysis of thought insertion that concentrates on the failure to experience a sense of agency does not allow for discriminations that are fine-grained enough to distinguish thought insertion from other delusions of passivity, such as thought-control. Consider the difference between cases (1) and (2) in “Thought insertion and two notions of ownership”: in the former a university student believes that a lecturer is controlling her thoughts; in the latter a thought is “given A role for ownership and authorship 221 electrically” to the subject that they should kill someone. Ownership as the satisfaction of the spatiality and introspection conditions cannot discriminate between these two cases. But tracking the self ascription condition helps. In the case of the university lecturer, acknowledgement of the thoughts is preserved, but thoughts are perceived as controlled and possibly produced by someone else. In the case of the murderous thought, there is no apparent endorsement or sense of agency. More importantly, there is no attempt to self ascribe the thought. It is this failure of self ascription that an observer perceives as a radical breakdown of self knowledge and that makes thought insertion distinct from thought control. Similarly, (3) and (4) differ in that the subject in (3) recognises the limb as her own but cannot control its movements, whereas the subject in (4) denies that the limb is hers and talks about the limb as a separate entity with intentions. The notion of acknowledgement is doing the work here, as the preservation of the spatiality condition and the violation of the agency condition cannot discriminate between the two cases. Movements are outside the agent’s control in both (3) and (4). Both the anarchic hand and the alien hand are cases in which the subject lacks agency—as she perceives the limb to move independently of her will—but only in the latter case the limb is described as belonging to someone else, or even as being someone else (Marchetti and Della Sala 1998). Whereas authorship seems to be relevant only to thoughts, acknowledgement seems to play a role in the analysis of disorders of activity as well as in that of disorders of thinking. The experiences of having a thought broadcast externally or controlled by someone else are compatible with the preservation of the spatiality condition and in some cases even with the violation of the agency condition, but they differ from the experience of thought insertion. In these other cases, the thought can be acknowledged as one’s own, ascribed to oneself and endorsed. What makes thought insertion a dramatically different experience is that the violation of the self ascription condition and typically a failure of authorship. One possible objection to this account is that some reports of thought insertion seem to suggest that the subject endorses the ‘inserted’ thought. A more careful consideration of these individual cases is needed before any satisfactory response can be made. But here are some considerations. First, there are different types of thoughts. As we explained in “Authorship and reason giving”, for some thoughts the notion of authorship as endorsement via reason giving will not apply. If the ‘inserted’ thoughts are merely perceptual beliefs, then the question whether the subject endorses them on the basis of reasons will lose centrality and significance in the analysis of her condition, and the (lack of) endorsement will probably be manifested only behaviourally. If the ‘inserted’ thoughts are emotionally charged, and concern hating or intending to kill other people, then notion of endorsement via reason giving will play an important role, as these thoughts are such that, if self ascribed and integrated in a system of beliefs, they would be central to the subject’s self image. Second, it is plausible to think that thoughts are not identified uniquely on the basis of their propositional content, but also on the basis of the attitude that the subject has towards that content. It is known that people recovering from thought insertion go through an intermediate phase of confusion but may end up acknowledging as their own the thoughts they once regarded as alien. Are those 222 L. Bortolotti, M. Broome the same thoughts, first rejected and then acknowledged, or are we confronted with different thoughts that play different role in the subject’s belief system and self image, but that happen to have the same content? If a subject with thought insertion is able to give reasons for a thought reported as ‘inserted’, one possible description of the situation is that there are really two thoughts. One is the ‘inserted’ one, disowned and rejected. The other is the thought which is acknowledged and endorsed. And they both have the same content. We suggested at the start that our proposed analysis can shed some light on the claim that thought insertion is a failure of self knowledge. The view identifies two different senses in which a subject might fail to know herself when she is affected by thought insertion, and creates a connection between failures of self knowledge and failures of rationality. The subject with thought insertion fails to ascribe the thought to herself and (typically) she cannot give reasons for endorsing the content of that thought. Both self knowledge and rationality are negatively affected by a breakdown in the capacity to give reasons for the accessible content of reported thoughts. The disruption of self knowledge manifests itself not just as a false conception of one’s personal boundaries, but as a failure to ascribe to oneself and give reasons for a first-personally accessed and reported thought. Subjects with thought insertion do not have any difficulty in satisfying the introspection condition, but they do not feel entitled to the thought they can introspect and struggle in making it an integral part of their own self narrative and self image. They come to believe that their personal boundaries have been breached and are horrified by the exception to the rule that, if something is in their head, then it is their thought. When something that is in their head turns out to be something that they do not recognise as one of their thoughts, they are very distressed and, as a consequence, might start doubting the ownership of all of the thoughts they can access first-personally. Both intentional causation in terms of thought production and endorsement via reason-giving have repercussions on attribution of autonomy and responsibility and are relevant to further analyses of intentionality and rationality in subjects with thought insertion. But we believe that conceiving of thought insertion as a failure of ownership and authorship has significant benefits: as we showed, it is psychologically realistic, as it does not need to assume that ordinary thoughts are experienced as willed and produced; and it does not attempt to explain away the puzzling features of thought insertion, thereby vindicating the evident distress that the condition causes in those who suffer from it. Conclusion In this paper we argued that in order to analyse the phenomenon of thought insertion in a way that does justice to the experience and the reports of subjects affected by the condition, it is useful to appeal to two notions: the notion of ownership of a thought as including the capacity for acknowledging a thought as one’s own; and the notion of authorship of a thought as endorsement of the content of that thought via reason giving. As ownership and authorship of thoughts are conditions for self knowledge, and typical subjects with thought insertion fail to manifest ownership and authorship of the ‘inserted’ thoughts, thought insertion turns out to be a failure of self A role for ownership and authorship 223 knowledge. In particular, it is a failure in acknowledging a thought as one’s own and precludes the possibility for ascribing that thought to oneself. Subjects with thought insertion also are typically unable to give reasons for endorsing those thoughts which would typically be endorsed via reason giving if they were ascribed to oneself. This signals the breakdown of a capacity which is relevant both to judgements of firstperson authority and rationality: the capacity for deliberation and justification. Acknowledgements The authors are grateful for comments on previous versions of this paper to: the audience of the Philosophy of Psychiatry Work-in-Progress Workshop organised by Rachel Cooper at the University of Lancaster in January 2008; the audience of the Delusions and Self Knowledge Workshop organised by Finn Spicer at the University of Bristol in February 2008; and the audience of the Cognitive Sciences seminar in Barcelona. In particular, the paper benefited from discussion with Hanna Pickard and Jordi Fernández who have been working independently on self knowledge and accounts of alien and inserted thoughts. 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