Today’s post is contributed by Víctor Verdejo. He is a philosopher of language and mind who has recently published the article “On the rationality of thought-insertion judgments”, now featuring in a special collection on delusions in Philosophical Psychology. Víctor Verdejo is currently a Ramón y Cajal fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and a member of Logos Research Group.
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| Víctor Verdejo |
We often think of delusional experience as not particularly revealing with respect to a subject’s rationality. In this paper, I explore a different—some might say daring—approach: what if delusional experience were to illuminate the rational grounds associated with our judgments and concepts? In this work, I focus on the experience of thought-insertion and the first-person concept.
Consider what I term the “rationality hypothesis”: this hypothesis holds that when subjects with schizophrenia report thought insertion, they may be expressing fully rational judgments about the ownership of their thoughts. These subjects report feeling as though thoughts they can introspect are not their own. This seems puzzling and may lead to questioning whether individuals with such experiences can really understand or intelligibly explain their own reports and judgments.
By contrast, the rationality hypothesis considers the reports as not just comprehensible—as John Campbell and others have suggested in other work—but also as reflecting the basic structure of one’s rational grounds for self-ascriptions of thought. This approach brings out a deeper sense in which subjects undergoing the experience can be considered to be rational. In doing so, it not only makes sense of the patients’ capacity for rational thought—beyond their mental condition—but also offers key insights into the nature of thought insertion and the first person.
Two insights in particular arise from the rationality hypothesis. First, from this angle the reports of thought insertion can be seen as evidence that our judgments about whether we own a thought—whether the thought is truly ours—depend more on our agentive awareness than on our introspective awareness of that thought. In other words, thought-insertion reports show that, in order to rationally determine whether a thought is ours, we rely first and foremost on whether we have the experience of having caused or controlled that thought (agency awareness) rather than simply on whether we are aware of it introspectively (introspective awareness). Interestingly, this first insight aligns with mainstream theories about how thought insertion operates on both a personal and mechanistic level.
The second key insight provided by the rationality hypothesis concerns the use of the first-person pronoun and the associated first-person concept. Suppose that—following the hypothesis—it is fully rational under certain circumstances to judge that an introspectively accessible thought is not our own. It just seems to follow that there are different kinds of awareness—ways or perspectives—I can exploit when considering the relevant uses of the first person (other applications of this basic idea can be found in Verdejo 2018, 2021, 2023).
The presumption is that, when considering our thoughts, a full-fledged first-person perspective towards them is only available when agency awareness is also present. This is thus the kind of awareness that seems most fundamentally involved in fixing the referent of the first-person concept. Bluntly put, and pace an illustrious Cartesian tradition, when we refer to ourselves with “I” in thought self-ascription, we take ourselves to be fundamentally the agents, and not the introspectors of our thoughts.
These insights have both ethical and theoretical drives. Ethically, the rationality hypothesis respects the cognitive capabilities of individuals experiencing thought insertion, treating their experiences as genuine and valuable sources for understanding the mind and rationality. Theoretically, it highlights the complexity of self-awareness in ways that align with available reports and accounts, challenging the traditional idea that introspective awareness is the essential rational basis for establishing ownership of one’s thoughts.