Frederique de Vignemont

When considering the sense of bodily ownership, one needs to answer at least three questions: (i) Is there a phenomenology of ownership? (ii) If there is a phenomenology of ownership, is it an inherent quality of the sensory phenomenology of bodily awareness, such as the location at which one feels tactile and painful sensations, or is it beyond the sensory qualities? (iii) If it is beyond, then what is it? An irreducible feeling of myness? A specific type of agentive feelings, which is grounded in the control that one exerts over one’s body? A cognitive feeling, or possibly even a metacognitive one? Or a specific type of affective feeling, which is grounded in the special significance of one’s body for self-preservation?

Several authors deny that the senses of agency and of bodily ownership have distinctive phenomenology. This is in line with a general principle of phenomenal parsimony, according to which one should not posit additional phenomenal properties in one’s mental ontology when one can explain them by appealing to other properties. The crucial question is then to determine what reasons there can be to enrich our phenomenal ontology. This debate has recently turned to cognitive science to find answers. Those who defend a liberal or rich view of phenomenology have taken pathological disorders and illusions as evidence in favor of the existence of a distinctive phenomenology, but even in these borderline cases there is room for interpretation, and where the liberals see feelings, the proponents of a more conservative view see cognitive attitudes. The argument then becomes an inference to the best explanation. But whose side offers the best explanation?

This chapter deals with the concept of embodied cognition (EC) in relation to social cognition; EC states that the physical body holds a bigger role in the interpretation of cognitive activities. The chapter aims to create an empirically productive definition of EC that can be used in understanding social cognition. It begins by presenting four notions of embodiment with two of these, bodily content and bodily format, having a significant causal role in cognition. It then discusses embodied social cognition (ESC) by establishing which kinds of social-cognitive activities meet the standards for embodiment, including language understanding, mindreading, empathy, emotional cognition, joint action, and behavior imitation.

Individuals with mirror-touch synaesthesia report consciously feeling tactile sensations on their own body when they see another person being touched. They have what may be called vicarious tactile sensations. Vicarious tactile sensations may almost seem unbelievable. How could one feel from the inside someone else’s sensations? First, I will focus on the intersubjective dimension of vicarious touch. In particular, I will examine whether it constitutes a kind of empathy. I will then argue that vicarious touch cannot be taken as evidence in favour of embodied social cognition. Second, I will focus on the intermodal dimension of vicarious touch. I will show how it differs from standard cases of idiosyncratic synaesthesia. I will then argue that it is a by-product of the multimodal nature of non-vicarious bodily experiences.

When we see the motion of a ball looming toward us, is there a sense in which we might be said to be visually aware of the impending collision? One may be immediately tempted to reply negatively if one assumes that we can visually experience only what is visible and what is happening now. Yet, I shall propose here that we can be visually aware of the close future qua the future. To do so, I will first argue that when one sees an object looming, one anticipatorily represents the endpoint of the motion and that this anticipatory representation is perceptual. I will then propose that perceptual anticipation is a constitutive part of visual experiences of looming objects by enabling a temporal form of amodal completion of the on‐going motion. I will finally assess the temporal implications of the intrinsic anticipatory component of visual experiences of looming objects and propose that visual experiences can be oriented toward the future.

There seems to be no dimension of bodily awareness that cannot be disrupted. To account for such variety, there is a growing consensus that there are at least two distinct types of body representation that can be impaired, the body schema and the body image. However, the definition of these notions is often unclear. The notion of body image has attracted most controversy because of its lack of unifying positive definition. The notion of body schema, onto which there seems to be a more widespread agreement, also covers a variety of sensorimotor representations. Here, I provide a conceptual analysis of the body schema contrasting it with the body image as well as assess whether the body schema can be specifically impaired, while other types of body representation are preserved; and the body schema obeys principles that are different from those that apply to other types of body representation.

In this paper, we show that there is a distinctive mode of spatial awareness in blind individuals, which we call sense of volume, that is not to be confused with echolocation based on self-generated sounds. It is based on the analysis of variations in the ambient sound field and it provides locational information about objects in one’s surroundings. We propose that the sense of volume offers a primitive contact with the outside world. It does not give access to perceptual objects as such, but it should rather be understood as a rudimentary sense of presence that expresses that there is something out there at a certain distance and in a certain direction. We conclude by highlighting its tactile quality. More specifically, we argue that the sense of volume consists in a form of tactile anticipation: when one experiences something as being out there, one tactually expects that one could come in contact with it.

Most accounts of bodily self-awareness focus on its sensory and agentive dimensions, tracking the origins of our special relationship with our own body in the way we gain information about it and in the way we act with it. However, they often neglect a fundamental dimension of our subjective bodily life, namely, its affective dimension. This Element will discuss bodily self-awareness through the filter of its affective significance. It is organized around four core themes: (i) the relationship between bodily awareness and action in instrumental and protective contexts, (ii) the motivational role of pain and interoception, (iii) the sense of bodily ownership and its relation to the value of the body for survival, and (iv) bodily anchoring in peripersonal and egocentric awareness. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The classic notion of an egocentric frame of reference cannot be easily applied to bodily space, given the difficulties in providing a centre of such frame as well as axes on which one could compute distances and directions. Yet, Smith tries to rehabilitate the egocentric account of bodily frame by switching from an anatomical definition of egocentricity to a more functional definition. Here I will review some empirical evidence that shows that one cannot ground bodily experiences in action. There is more than one type of bodily spatial representations, and only one of them is linked to actions. How then to account for bodily spatial content? What is encoded in the spatial content and how? I will provide a tentative account based on two types of spatial content, namely, coordinate body space and categorical body space.

What are the epistemic bases of the knowledge of the reality of our own body? Proprioception plays a primordial role in body representation and more particularly at the level of body schema. Without proprioception people can feel amputated and the mislocalization of proprioceptive information through the remapping of the Penfield Homonculus induces illusions of phantom limbs, illusions that contradictory visual feedback cannot erase. However, it turns out that it is not as simple as that and that vision also intervenes in body knowledge: vision of one's own body allows deafferented patients to move and phantom limbs to disappear. Finally, the existence of phantom limbs in aplasic patients as well as studies on neonates provide evidence of an innate component of body representation.

According to a motor theory of empathy, empathy results from the automatic activation of emotion triggered by the observation of someone else's emotion. It has been found that the subjective experience of emotions and the observation of someone else experiencing the same emotion activate overlapping brain areas. These shared representations of emotions could be the key for the understanding of empathy. However, if the automatic activation of SRE suffi ces to induce empathy, we would be in a permanent emotional turmoil. In contrast, it seems intuitively that we do not empathize all the time and that far from being automatic, empathy should be explained by a complex set of cognitive and motivational factors. I will provide here a new account of the automaticity of empathy, starting from a very simple question: when do we empathize? We need to distinguish clearly the activation of SRE and empathy. I will provide a model that accounts both for the automaticity of the activation of SRE and for the selectiveness of empathy. As Prinz says about imitation, the problem is not so much to account for the ubiquitous occurrence of empathy, but rather for its notorious nonoccurrence in many situations.

The golden rule of most religions assumes that the cognitive abilities of perspective-taking and empathy are the basis of morality. One would therefore predict that people that display difficulties in those abilities, such as people with psychopathy and autism, are impaired in morality. But then why do autistics have a sense of morality while psychopaths do not, given that they both display a deficit of empathy? We would like here to refine some of the views on autism and morality. In order to do so, we will investigate whether autism really challenges a Humean view of morality. We will then provide a new conceptual framework based on the distinction between egocentric and allocentric stances, which may help us to make some predictions about the autistic sense of morality.

Hysteria has been the subject of controversy for many years, with theorists arguing about whether it is best explained by a hidden organic cause or by malingering and deception. However, it has been shown that hysterical paralysis cannot be explained in any of these terms. With the recent development of cognitive psychiatry, one may understand psychiatric and organic delusions within the same conceptual framework. Here I contrast hysterical conversion with anosognosia. They are indeed remarkably similar, though the content of their respective delusions is the opposite. In hysterical paralysis, patients are not aware of their preserved ability, whereas in anosognosia for hemiplegia, patients are not aware of their disability. Four main explanations have been provided to account for anosognosia: metacognitive, attentional, motor, and motivational views. I will apply each of these accounts to hysterical paralysis and show that, at each level, hysterical conversion is the reverse of anosognosia. I will suggest that hysterical paralysis results from the interaction between attentional somatosensory amplification and affective inhibition of action.

Are bodily self-ascriptions immune to error through misidentification? According to the Inside mode view, one cannot be mistaken about whose body part it is when experiencing them from the inside. Here I shall consider two possible objections to bodily immunity. On the one hand, I shall briefly envisage two cases of misidentification: somatoparaphrenia and the Rubber Hand illusion. I shall show that none of them challenges the immunity principle. On the other hand, I shall highlight a more serious issue for bodily immunity, namely, the multimodal nature of bodily self-knowledge. Very few bodily self-ascriptions are based on grounds that are purely or exclusively from the inside. I shall evaluate the consequences of multimodality for bodily immunity.

According to a traditional Cartesian view of the mind, you have a privileged access to your own conscious experiences that nobody else can have. Therefore, you have more authority than anybody else on your own experiences. Perceptual experiences are selfintimating: you are aware of what you are consciously perceiving. If you report seeing a pink elephant, nobody is entitled to deny it. There may be no pink elephant, but you do have the conscious experience of such elephant. However, the progress in brain imaging might lead to the possibility that the scientist knows as well as you – or even better than you – what you are seeing, and even what you are hallucinating. What was only a thought experiment fourty years ago has become reality. Does brain reading challenge the privacy of the mind? Who has the most authority on your mind in case of conflict? You or the brain scientist?

In many circumstances we tend to assume that other people believe or desire what we ourselves believe or desire. This has been labeled 'egocentric bias.' This is not to say that we systematically fail to understand other people and forget that they can have a different perspective. If it were the case, then it would be highly difficult, if not impossible, to communicate, cooperate or compete with them. In those situations, we need to take the other person's perspective and to inhibit our own. But can the other's perspective furtively intrude even when no reason seems to require it, or even when it is detrimental for us? We shall see a series of evidence of what has been called altercentric bias (Samson et al., 2010; Apperly, 2011): other people's beliefs can unduly influence us even when they are wrong. At first sight, altercentric bias questions 1st person priority. In particular, it may appear as incompatible with simulation-based accounts of 3rd person mindreading. We shall argue, on the contrary, that the simulationist framework enables confusions between self and others that go both ways: taking one's beliefs for the other's beliefs (egocentric bias) and vice-versa, taking the other's beliefs for one's beliefs (altercentric bias). We shall then see how the risk of such confusion may be disadvantageous from an evolutionary perspective, questioning thus the evolutionary plausibility of the simulation theory.

Touch seems to enjoy some epistemic advantage over the other senses when it comes to attest to the reality of external objects. The question is not whether only what appears in tactile experiences is real. It is that only whether appears in tactile experiences feels real to the subject. In this chapter we first clarify how exactly the rather vague idea of an epistemic advantage of touch over the other senses should be interpreted. We then defend a “muscular thesis”, to the effect that only the experience of resistance to our motor efforts, as it arises in effortful touch, presents us with the independent existence of some causally empowered object. We finally consider whether this muscular thesis applies to the perception of our own body.

Many agree that the more we feel that we can handle a given situation, the less afraid we are. But why? Is the situation no longer dangerous or is fear a response to more than danger? Here I analyze situations in which one reacts in cold blood to danger and argue that the formal object of fear is not the dangerous, but the unsafe. The unsafe indicates not only how the world is, but also how it can be handled. Safety, and its negative counterpart, are characterized by their duality, both evaluative (is the snake dangerous?) and agentive (is it under control?).

Our own body seems to be the object that we know the best for we constantly receive a flow of internal information about it. Yet bodily awareness has attracted little attention in the literature, possibly because it seems reducible to William James’s description of a “feeling of the same old body always there” (1890, p. 242). But it is not true that our body always feels so familiar. In particular, puzzling neurological disorders and new bodily illusions raise a wide range of questions about the relationship between the body and the self. Although most of the time we experience our body as our own, it is possible to report feeling parts of our body as alien. It is also possible to experience extraneous objects, such as prosthetic hands, as our own. Hence, what makes us feel this particular body as our own? The fact that we feel sensations there? The fact that we can voluntarily move it? Or the fact that it needs protection for self-preservation? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the various aspects of bodily self-awareness, including the spatiality of bodily sensations, their multimodality, their role in social cognition, their relation to action, and to self-defence. Mind the Body thus provides a comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness and of the sense of bodily ownership, combining philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science.

There is a large amount of evidence of placebo and nocebo effects showing that one’s expectation of a forthcoming pain can influence the subsequent experience of pain. Here I shall not discuss the implications of these findings for the nature of pain, but focus instead on the nature of pain anticipation itself. This notion indeed remains poorly analysed and it is unclear what type of anticipatory state it involves. I shall argue that there is more to pain anticipation than a mere combination of anticipatory beliefs and fears. When the impending damage is imminent, pain anticipation involves a distinctive sui generis mental state, which I call nociceptive prediction. One then anticipates the forthcoming event under the pain mode. After analysing its points of similarities and differences with pain, I shall argue that nociceptive prediction is best understood in imperative defensive terms.

Can concepts represent subtleties in emotions, bodily sensations, and perceptions? What is the nature of mental representations in nonlinguistic and prelinguistic creatures? _The European Review of Philosophy, Volume 6_ tackles issues such as these by asking how far the analogy between conceptual and nonconceptual content can be carried. By bringing together contributions from both conceptualists and nonconceptualists, this volume sheds new light on an issue sure to interest cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind.

One of the assets of the simulation theory, as defended by Alvin Goldman in many papers and in his book Simulating Minds, is its ability to explain egocentric bias, and more generally the priority of first‐person mindreading over third‐person mindreading (ascription of mental states to other people). This chapter argues, on the contrary, that the simulationist framework enables confusions between self and others that go both ways: taking one's beliefs for the other's beliefs (egocentric bias) and vice versa, taking the other's beliefs for one's beliefs (altercentric bias). It sees how the risk of such confusion may be disadvantageous from an evolutionary perspective, questioning thus the evolutionary plausibility of the simulation theory. Egocentric errors have been taken as evidence of the priority of first‐person mindreading over third‐person mindreading, which seems in line with the simulation theory. Recent findings on altercentric bias have opened a new promising way to investigate the cognitive basis of third‐person mindreading.