On a Clear Day

First-person reports of ‘thought insertion’ in schizophrenia (hereafter TI) suggest that it is possible to experience one’s own thoughts as emanating from someone else. On one interpretation, TI involves an error of identification: you recognize the thought but fail to recognize it as your own. If this is right, it overturns the assumption that you can be ‘wrong about which psychological state you are in’ but not about ‘whose psychological state it is’ (Campbell, 1999.). In phenomenological terms, it challenges the view that, if you experience psychological state x, then you experience x as yours. A comprehensive explanation of TI needs to include an account of (a) what a TI experience consists of and (b) how TI is generated, where (a) is concerned solely with clarifying the relevant phenomenology, while (b) also addresses non-conscious or ‘subpersonal’ mechanisms. We focus upon (a), but there are also implications for (b). 

Suppose TI is taken to be an experience of type x when it is in fact an experience of type y, and that an account is then offered of x-generating mechanisms, where x-generating mechanisms are not involved in generating y. Such an account would not merely be false but also irrelevant. Hence it is crucial to get the phenomenology broadly right, and that is what we seek to do here.