Abstract
On the classical internal account of bodily immunity to error through misidentification (IEM), bodily self-ascriptions are immune when they are based solely on perception of one’s own bodily properties ‘from the inside’. De Vignemont (Bodily immunity to error. In: Prosser S, Recanati R (eds) Immunity to error through misidentification. CUP, Cambridge, 2012) has criticised this account on the basis of the multimodal character of internal perception and the marginality of the cases covered by the internal account. She proposes a multimodal account of bodily IEM. We argue that de Vignemont’s account of multimodal bodily IEM is open to counterexamples and thus fails to explain bodily IEM. We catalogue different kinds of multimodal body experience and the self-ascriptions they can support so as to find the difference between the self-ascriptions which are immune and those which are not. We suggest that the difference is due to whether the self-ascription is based on externally perceiving oneself. Using this insight, we propose a revised version of the internal account which allows for multimodal bodily IEM. To address the marginality challenge, we also offer a new account of bodily IEM in terms of tracking-freedom, which draws on the style of explanation for the IEM of perceptual demonstratives.
We are grateful to Chiara Brozzo, Herman Cappelen, Malte Hendrickx, Ville Paukkonen, Wesley Sauret, Lucas Thorpe, and especially François Recanati, Matthew Nudds and Alfredo Vernazzani. Earlier versions of this paper were delivered in Freiburg, Istanbul, Rijeka, and Tübingen. We thank the audiences on all these occasions for their reactions. This publication was made possible partly through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Hong Yu Wong. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
We will use ‘judgement’ and ‘thought’ interchangeably.
- 3.
Morgan (2015) holds that perceptual experience via a demonstrative to an object grounds immune judgement about that object. The experience enables the subject to know which property to attribute to which object – the object being fixed via a demonstrative. On his demonstrative model of ‘I’ the reference of ‘I’ is fixed by a demonstrative (or ‘I’ is a demonstrative). If such a demonstrative is an internal demonstrative, which relies on internal experience (via internal information channels), then Morgan’s account is an elaboration of the internal account.
- 4.
This does not mean that when information is gained which is in fact about the subject, the subject will take it to be about herself. Some delusional subjects may not take the information to concern herself (e.g. in the case of somatoparaphrenia, when a limb is felt ‘from the inside’ yet judged not to belong to the subject, but to someone else). (Note also the opposite case of patients who misidentify other people’s limbs as their own under experimental conditions. See footnote 12 below.)
- 5.
- 6.
Martin’s (1995) sole-object view of bodily awareness is another important point of reference, though he does not discuss IEM explicitly.
- 7.
All page references are to this article unless otherwise stated.
- 8.
Following De Vignemont, we understand ‘multimodal’ for the purposes of this paper as the integration of vision and somatosensation (235, fn. 6). Some of the cases discussed concern bodily IEM based on vision; there the emphasis is on how bodily IEM can also be based on external perception and less on multimodality.
- 9.
In stating her unity account, De Vignemont writes that “the assignment to a common source results from a subpersonal comparative process that does not depend on self-identification [i.e. an identification component [a = me]]” (245). This statement is infelicitous. IEM is a property defined for judgements (based on some grounds) and not processes. Thus, we shall read her as claiming that the judgements based on multimodal experiences of looking down are not dependent on self-identification.
- 10.
By ‘normal human vision’, we mean to exclude video systems, VR, brain computer interfaces, chips built into the brain and other technical sensory enhancements.
- 11.
“Bodily self-knowledge most probably derives also from visual experiences that do not guarantee bodily IEM, such as visual experiences of the body from an unspecific first-person perspective” (243).
- 12.
There are also cases of patients who, while they do not explicitly deny that their limbs as belonging to themselves, misidentify other people’s limbs as their own in experimental settings (Garbarini et al. 2013; Garbarini and Pia 2013). This gives rise to judgements which are not immune. Note that Peacocke would rule these cases out as not part of ‘normal conditions’.
- 13.
The authors disagree on the preferred response to the challenges. The NIM is Orbán’s view.
- 14.
In schizophrenic patients, it sometimes happens that they think they know of someone else through internal information channels. In these cases, they ascribe content gained through such channels to external subjects. But IEM is only about self-ascriptions. It does not rule out the possibility that the subject in a delusional condition can ascribe the relevant property to the wrong person.
- 15.
How about introspection? Either it can be rewired or not. If it cannot be rewired then there is always an internal information channel available to the subject: introspection. If introspection can be rewired then our prediction is that the subject might not be able to use ‘I’, only ‘I*’, a different kind of self-referring expression.
- 16.
This is Wong’s preferred response to the challenges. We wish to thank Matthew Nudds for discussion.
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Orbán, K., Wong, H.Y. (2021). On the Possibility of Multimodal Bodily Immunity to Error Through Misidentification. In: Calzavarini, F., Viola, M. (eds) Neural Mechanisms. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54092-0_21
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