Joëlle Proust

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

Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one’s own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity and inferential promiscuity only occur in metarepresentation. It is concluded that, although metarepresentations can redescribe metacognitive contents, metacognition and metarepresentation are functionally distinct