The Limits of Subjectivity: A Response to the Commentary

I would like to thank Professor Stephens for a thoughtful and poignant response to my essay. I think of his response not so much as a reply to the position I have espoused in my essay, "Thought Insertion and the Inseparability Thesis," as it is a defense of his own position. My essay, that is, represents a rather delayed commentary on Professors Stephens and Graham's thought-provoking 1994 essay, "Self-Consciousness, Mental Agency, and the Clinical Psychopathology of Thought Insertion," the first essay to be printed in this journal (the fuller position I am critiquing is contained in three 1994 essays: Stephens and Graham 1994a, 1994b; and Graham and Stephens 1994).

Before moving onto the essential question that Professor Stephens has just asked, there is one issue from my preceding essay that I would like to reiterate: the dispute is not necessarily about whether the inseparability thesis can possibly be refuted. Indeed, Stephens has previously made the case that introspective awareness and subjectivity can come unglued. In "Mind and Mine" (1994), he and Graham persuasively argue that auditory hallucinations are exactly that kind of disturbance (a disturbance, that is, of self-consciousness). So I might, after all, be simply claiming that thought insertion is not importantly different from auditory hallucinations--that it, too, is a disturbance of self-consciousness, not simply an innocent matter of mistaken identity as Stephens might have us think.

Now for the essential question that Professor Stephens has put to me: would further study of the delusion of thought insertion provide philosophers with evidence that would discredit the inseparability thesis? That's a hard question and certainly not one to be settled in these few pages. I say it does. Professor Stephens says it does not. With the advantage of dialogue between us, it seems that what lies at the heart of the disagreement is primarily definitional. We seem to be holding onto slightly differing conceptions of how to interpret the inseparability thesis. My conception is more narrow, and his is more broad; consequently, he can incorporate more mental phenomenon into his conception than I can.

Stephens claims implicitly in his 1994 essays, and explicitly in the previous pages, that all that is necessary to meet the condition of subjectivity is that I recognize that I am the subject in whom a thought M occurs. In other words, it is enough to satisfy the condition of subjectivity to know that it occurs in my psychological history rather than someone else's. This will allow many anomalies of normal mental functioning to meet the subjectivity requirement including, of course, thought insertion. He pushes his interpretation further, though, by claiming that there is a third element at work, which is distinct from introspection and subjectivity: agency. The agency component is an issue of authorship or who is responsible for the genesis of the thought. The subject experiencing the inserted thought has the distinct conviction that some other subject possesses the mental contents necessary to generate thought M. So Stephens separates this condition of agency from M occurring in one's psychological history (the only condition for subjectivity); agency, for Professor Stephens, is separate from self-consciousness, which lets the inseparability thesis stand.

Stephens interprets me as saying something more about the condition of subjectivity in my argument, and I agree with him. Some state of affairs, S, must exist to bring M into existence. Here, Stephens is following the causal chain of events back to its genesis, back to its agency; furthermore, he correctly interprets me as claiming that S might be consciously unknown to the subject in whom it occurs. My view on the inseparability thesis is quite narrow since I argue that it is not enough simply to be aware that M occurs in my psychological history to meet the condition of subjectivity, but I must also be the author or agent of the thought to meet that condition--what Professor...