February 26 : Max Seeger (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, IJN)

February 26 from 16.30 to 18.30 in the meeting room, 29 rue d’Ulm, Pavillon Jardin

Max Seeger (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, IJN)

Immunity to Error through Misidentification and the Self : An Assessment of Alleged Counterexamples.

The immunity thesis regarding the first-person holds that introspection-based self-ascriptions are immune to error through misidentification. Several authors attempt to refute the thesis by appeal to psychopathologies (such as thought insertion, somatoparaphrenia, and anarchic hand syndrome) or experimentally induced body illusions (such as the rubber hand illusion or the body swapping illusion). I defend the thesis with a simple point : The immunity thesis is a thesis about self-ascriptions which are based on introspection. Although the putative counter-examples involve misattributions, they are either not self-ascriptions or they are not based on introspection. Hence, they do not refute the thesis. However, the cases do raise two issues that merit more discussion : the multimodal nature of self-representations and identification freedom as an explanation of first-person immunity.