Joëlle Proust

The abilities to attribute an action to its proper agent and to understand its meaning when it is produced by someone else are basic aspects of human social communication. Several psychiatric syndromes, such as schizophrenia, seem to lead to a dysfunction of the awareness of one’s own action as well as of recognition of actions performed by other. Such syndromes offer a framework for studying the determinants of agency, the ability to correctly attribute actions to their veridical source. Thirty normal subjects and 30 schizophrenic patients with and without hallucinations and/or delusional experiences were required to execute simple finger and wrist movements, without direct visual control of their hand. The image of either their own hand or an alien hand executing the same or a different movement was presented on a TV-screen in real time. The task for the subjects was to discriminate whether the hand presented on the screen was their own or not. Hallucinating and deluded schizophrenic patients were more impaired in discriminating their own hand from the alien one than the non-hallucinating ones, and tended to misattribute the alien hand to themselves. Results are discussed according to a model of action control. A tentative description of the mechanisms leading to action consciousness is proposed.

La connaissance de soi suppose que l'on puisse former des pensées vraies de la forme 'je Y que P', où 'Y' fait référence à une attitude propositionnelle, 'P' à son contenu, et 'je' au penseur de cette pensée. La question qui se pose est de savoir, ce qui, dans le contenu mental occurrent [P], justifie l'auto-attribution de cette pensée. Ce problème dit de la transition soulève trois difficultés ; celle de la préservation du contenu intentionnel entre la pensée de premier et de second ordre ; celle de la reconnaissance de l'attitude ayant ce contenu intentionnel pour objet, et enfin la reconnaissance que ce qui est pensé l'est par le sujet qui pense. Le présent article se propose de montrer que la troisième difficulté résiste à une approche fondée sur l'expérience ou sur la signification cognitive de [P], et avance l'idée que la notion d'action mentale permet d'éclairer les conditions d'identité du penseur de [P] et du sujet de l'auto-attribution de l'attitude propositionnelle 'Y que P'.Self-knowledge requires the capacity to think true thoughts of the form 'I Y that P', where 'Y' refers to a propositional attitude, 'P' to a propositional content, and 'I' to the thinker of the thought of content P. The question that this requirement raises is to know what, in the occurrent mental content [P] , justifies the self-attribution of this thought. This problem, called the transition problem, includes three difficulties : how is intentional content stable across first- and second-order thoughts ? How is the attitude with this intentional content identified by the thinker ? And how is the thinker of the second-order thought able to claim truly that he himself is the thinker of the first-order thought ? The present paper's aim is to show that the third difficulty cannot be solved through an examination of the experience of having [P] or on the basis of the cognitive significance of P, and suggests that an analysis of mental actions in which propositional attitudes play a causal and feedback role give a better grasp on the conditions of identity of the thinker of [P] with the thinker of the propositional attitude 'Y that P'

Experience of agency in patients with schizophrenia involves an interesting dissociation; these patients demonstrate that one can have a thought or perform an action consciously without being conscious of thinking or acting as the motivated agent, author of that thought or of that action. This chapter examines several interesting accounts of this dissociation, and aims at showing how they can be generalized to thought insertion phenomena. It is argued that control theory allows such a generalization; three different comparators need to be distinguished: the sense of subjectivity relies on a comparator in which motivation and emotion play a structuring role. The sense of agency emerges in a system that delivers a rough categorization of self-generated – versus other- generated – actions and mental activities. A third system specializes in the social evaluation of the effects of an action, intention or other thought process, given certain goals in self or in others.

This article is a summary of two chapters of a book published in French in 1997, entitled Comment L'esprit vient aux Bêtes, Paris, Gallimard. The core idea is that the crucial distinction between internal and external states, often used uncritically by theorists of intentionality, needs to be made on a non-circular basis. The proposal is that objectivity - the capacity to reidentify individuals as the same across places and times depends on the capacity to extract spatial crossmodal invariants, which in turn presupposes a capacity to (re)calibrate perceptual inputs across modalities in a principled way