Carlota Serrahima

This paper contributes to, and underpins, the project of an integrative account of psychological and bodily self-consciousness. Following a trend in the literature that uses the notion of “ownership” to discuss self- consciousness, and adapting José Luis Bermúdez’s terminology, I refer to psychological self-consciousness as “ψ-ownership” and to bodily self-consciousness as “φ-ownership.” The paper has two main aims. First, it presents a methodological framework for the study of ψ- and φ-ownership based on the framework that Bermúdez has put forward for this purpose. My framework involves three desiderata that apply mutatis mutandis to both the ψ and the φ domains. By laying out this framework, I clarify the relationship between ownership and the epistemic phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification (both in the ψ and the φ domains), and I highlight the appeal of the notion of a phenomenology of ψ- and φ-ownership. Hence, this methodological discussion helps disclose deep similarities between the very explananda of the inquiries into ψ- and φ-ownership. Second, the paper critically examines one aspect of Bermúdez’s approach to self-consciousness, namely his explanation of bodily immunity to error in view of his defense of the phenomenology of bodily ownership. In order to articulate this criticism, I leverage the conclusions of the first half of the paper about ownership and immunity. I suggest that, despite Bermúdez’s explicit advocacy for the integrative project, his strategy at this specific point prevents him from seeing this project to completion.

This paper presents a view on bodily IEM by describing, first, the structure that grounds need to have in order to yield IEM judgments, and then arguing that somatosensation has this structure. I make my case by presenting an analysis of the sense of bodily ownership. According to this analysis, there is a substantive explanatory relationship between bodily self-consciousness and psychological self-consciousness. I argue that one central virtue of this approach to bodily self-consciousness is that, not only does it help explain bodily IEM, but it also sheds some light on the fact that both psychological and bodily self-ascriptions are subject to analysis in IEM terms, despite their differences.

Dysmenorrhea, or menstrual pain, is regularly suffered by 45 to 95% of menstruating women. Despite its prevalence, and despite the philosophical importance of pain as a general phenomenon, dysmenorrhea has been all but completely overlooked in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind. This paper aims at rectifying this situation. We single out three properties of what is often considered the paradigmatic case of painful experience, what we call injury-centered pains, and argue that dysmenorrhea does not have any of them, and hence that it does not neatly conform to the injury-centered model of pain. This calls into question the centrality of the injury-centered model, and suggests novel research avenues within theoretical debates on affectivity.

Experientialism about the sense of bodily ownership is the view that there is something it is like to feel a body as one’s own. In this paper I argue for a particular experientialist thesis. I first present a puzzle about the relation between bodily awareness and self-consciousness, and introduce a somewhat underappreciated view on the sense of bodily ownership, Implicit Reflexivity, that points us in the right direction as to how to address this puzzle. I argue that Implicit Reflexivity, however, does not provide a full solution to the puzzle. I then introduce a novel view on the sense of bodily ownership that inherits a central tenet, Reflexivity, from the above view, without having its flaws. According to Reflexivity, the sense of bodily ownership consists in the reflexive character of bodily sensations, namely in the fact that bodily sensations have experience-dependent properties as part of their content. Cashed out this way, Reflexivity is an attractive way of explicating the notion that bodily sensations are experiences of the body as subject. Reflexivity also highlights a central, but so far neglected, connection between the sense of bodily ownership and the sense of experience ownership.

Philosophers of perception have been readier to postulate the existence of a visual field than to acknowledge sensory fields in other modalities. In this paper, I argue that the set of phenomenal features that philosophers have relied on when positing a visual field aptly characterise, mutatis mutandis, bodily sensation. I argue, in particular, that in localised bodily sensations we experience the body as a sensory field. I first motivate this claim for the case of haptic touch, and then generalise it to other kinds of bodily sensation. I demonstrate the theoretical fruitfulness of this notion of a bodily field for the debate on the phenomenology of bodily ownership.

Bodily sensations are mental states typically suitable to be reported in judgments in which a first-person indexical is used to qualify the felt body. In other words, subjects typically have a sense of bodily ownership for the body that they feel in bodily sensations. This paper puts forward, firstly, three desiderata that theories on the sense of bodily ownership should meet. Secondly, it assesses two views that account for the sense of bodily ownership in terms of the spatial content of bodily sensations, appealing to a notion of a sense of boundedness, and argues that they do not meet the goals defined.