Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Reinier Schuur, who is a PhD candidate in philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. His primary research interest is in philosophy of medicine. Reinier won the 2022 Peter Sowerby Prize for his essay ‘The Puzzle of Addiction: Knowledge of the Good as an Achievement’. This is a short version of his essay for a wider audience.  Reinier Schuur The puzzle of addiction refers to the problem of explaining how addictive behaviour appears to be both voluntary and destructive. This puzzle arises when we assume that people will stop engaging in a voluntary behaviour if the costs outweigh the benefits, all else being equal. The main solution to the puzzle had been to argue that addictive behaviour is in fact involuntary. This solution, however, has come under criticism over the last few decades, with both empirical data and theoretical analysis arguing that addictive behaviour is voluntary in some significant sense. But this raises again th...

This post is by  Shaun Gallagher  (pictured above). He is Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. In this post he summarizes his recent article ' Relations between Agency and Ownership in the Case of Schizophrenic Thought Insertion ', published in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. In a recent paper I offer a response to some philosophers who have raised objections to the idea that in schizophrenic delusions of control and thought insertion the problem is primarily with the sense of agency. Instead, they argue, it concerns the sense of ownership. Let me start by clarifying the distinction, because in fact it is a double distinction, or a distinction made on two levels. On the level of first-order, pre-reflective experience the distinction between sense of agency (SA) and sense of ownership (SO) can be seen in the contrast between voluntary and involuntary movement. In the latter case, for example, if some one pushes me from ...

Vince Polito I’m Vince Polito , a postdoctoral researcher at Macquarie University, Sydney Australia. My area of research is sense of agency, that is the sense of control that each of us feels over our own self-generated actions. This is normally an unremarkable sense – right now I am intending to type this post and so my fingers move to press each key in turn and I have a sense of agency for the movements. There are situations, however, where our normal sense of agency is disrupted. Perhaps the most striking example is alien control delusions. Patients with these delusions report that particular body movements are controlled by some external entity (Spence, 2001) . A reduced sense of agency is also a defining characteristic of hypnotic responding. Individuals who are highly hypnotisable will often report that actions they make in response to hypnotic suggestions occur without their conscious intention. Hypnosis provides a marvellous opportunity to study sense of agency alteratio...