Thought insertion

abnormal sense of thought agency or thought endorsement?

Paulo Sousa

Lauren Swiney

pp. 637-654

in: Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 12 (4), 2013.

Abstract

The standard approach to the core phenomenology of thought insertion characterizes it in terms of a normal sense of thought ownership coupled with an abnormal sense of thought agency. Recently, Fernández (2010) has argued that there are crucial problems with this approach and has proposed instead that what goes wrong fundamentally in such a phenomenology is a sense of thought commitment, characterized in terms of thought endorsement. In this paper, we argue that even though Fernández raises new issues that enrich the topic, his proposal cannot rival the version of the standard approach we shall defend.