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ABSTRACT
Subjects suffering from extreme peripheral deafferentation can recruit vision to perform a significant range of basic physical actions with limbs they can’t proprioceptively feel. Self-ascriptions of deafferented action – just as deafferented action itself – fundamentally depend, therefore, on visual information of limb position and movement. But what’s the significance of this result for the concept of self patently at work in these self-ascriptions? In this paper, I argue that these cases show that bodily awareness grounding employment of the self-concept in self-ascriptions of action can be fundamentally third-personal and concern a body that is not presented as one’s own, but as an object among others.
Acknowledgements
Early versions of this material were presented at seminars organised by the Valencia Philosophy Lab (University of Valencia) and the Philosophy of Neuroscience (PONS) research group (University of Tübingen). I am very grateful to their audiences and to two anonymous referees for their constructive feedback. This work has benefited from the support of the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Government of Spain) MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, Grants RYC2021-033972-I and PID2019-106420GA-100, and the European Union «NextGenerationEU»/PRTR.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I borrow the term ‘sole-object’ from Martin’s writings. Schwenkler (Citation2013) criticises sole-object views by considering body parts as proper objects of bodily awareness, but offers a picture of bodily awareness that, just as sole-object views would have it, guarantees that only one’s body is its source. Other than that, I shall not discuss the details of the different versions of this family of views. As considered here, sole-object views take bodily awareness presenting the body as its sole object to be a necessary condition for this awareness to ground employment of the self-concept in bodily/action self-ascriptions and self-awareness. Whether this is also a sufficient condition is a further matter of controversy (cf. Martin Citation1995, Citation1997).
2 The point is so obvious that it hardly gets explicitly mentioned in the clinical reports. The kind of action awareness at stake is perhaps more emphatically captured in Peter Brook’s play on IW’s case (see Cole Citation2016, Chap. 5, esp. 59–60).
3 Not, however, ‘I am raising my arm’ since the latter would suggest the (proprioceptive) feeling of the arm as one’s own (Vignemont Citation2018, 167). The focus is here on self-ascription/ownership of the action, not the body as such.
4 One interesting ramification in this regard concerns the suggestion that this kind of knowledge is not based on observation (Anscombe Citation1957; O’Shaughnessy Citation1980). I address this complex issue in Verdejo (Citationmanuscript) and I shall sidestep it in what follows.
5 According to Wong (Citation2018) the difference between deafferented and afferented subjects on this count has to do with the fact that deafferented subjects lack a grasp of practical possibilities through engaged, first-personal motor imagery. Although I am indeed sympathetic to Wong’s approach, other approaches might also be compatible with the analysis presented here.
6 When approached in terms of capacities, the key idea is put in terms of different exercises of or ways of exercising the same thought capacity. For simplicity’s sake, however, I will not attempt to account for the theoretical differences corresponding to the terminological variation reflected in this sentence. The differences might be important when discussing each author’s work but not presently.
7 Other works have undertaken that task (see, e.g. Bermúdez Citation2017; Ludlow Citation2019).
8 This is so even if it is a requirement for employments of a self-concept referring to x from the first person perspective by a thinker y that x = y – though even in this case the terms uttered to express the thought containing that self-concept may go beyond the first person pronoun (as when one refers to oneself in the third person). I am grateful to an anonymous referee for this journal for urging me to clarify these points.
9 In my view, they will be preserved, in particular, as insights into the nature of the bodily first person perspective but not, of course, as insights about the whole arrange of perspectives from which the self-thought can be employed on bodily grounds.
10 The basic idea is that vision involves information that can’t fail to specify the experiencer’s body. I shall return to this idea below, as it can be taken to support the second type of objection against the multi-perspective account.
11 Not at least after the basic action capacities are regained (cf. Cole Citation1991).
12 As can be shown with the aid of brain-machine interfaces (Evans et al. Citation2015).
13 The link might be, for instance, a matter of a (perceived) temporal correlation between one’s intention to move and the body’s actual movement (what in psychological studies is known as ‘intentional binding’). Still, the fundamental ground for the employment of the self-concept in the self-ascription will be third-personal in the case at hand. This is plausibly what happens when you identify your avatar’s actions in a multiplayer video game. This kind of self-identification requires thinking of oneself as an object third-personally presented on a screen – what Boyle (Citation2018) has elucidated as ‘objective self-awareness’ (cf. Evans Citation1982, 205–215). The temporal correlation between inputs to your controller and the avatar’s actions is what indicates that it is your avatar and no other. Yet there is no point in denying that the use of ‘I’ to refer to your avatar’s actions will be fundamentally grounded in third-personal awareness of the scenes in the video game.
14 It has been shown that deafferented subjects, in fact, outperform control subjects in some mirror drawing tasks (Lajoie et al. Citation1992; Miall and Cole Citation2007).
15 Cf. Martin’s jelly fish example (Martin Citation1993, 211–212). The line dividing self-specific information and first-personal awareness corresponds, in the terms I am proposing, to the one separating out degree 0 and degree 1 of first person content involvement (Peacocke Citation2014). I am indebted here to Vignemont (Citation2018, 61–63).
16 Bradley (Citation2021) provides a recent account that agrees with this diagnosis when it excludes deafferentation from a feeling of minimal ownership understood as the ‘first-personal aspect of bodily awareness’ arguably preserved in other ownership disorders.
17 I thank an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
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Víctor M. Verdejo
Víctor M. Verdejo is a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the Department of Humanities at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain). He is the author of over 30 papers covering a range of issues in philosophy of mind and language and co-editor of the forthcoming book Sharing Thoughts (Oxford University Press). His current research focuses on the first person, communication and bodily action.