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Auditory Verbal Hallucination and the Sense of Ownership
- Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 25, Number 3, September 2018
- pp. 183-196
- 10.1353/ppp.2018.0028
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
About 75% of subjects diagnosed with schizophrenia experience auditory-verbal hallucination (AVH) and report "hearing voices" that are not actually present. Wu maintains that AVHs should be understood as aberrant auditory experiences. However, his account is unable to make sense of a full range of AVH experiences and mistakenly treats AVH as an isolated symptom. Because AVH is phenomenologically heterogeneous in certain respects, an adequate explanation of AVH needs to take this diversity of experience into account. Still, it is important to understand what these different sorts of AVHs have in common with each other, and also how they are linked to some of the other characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia. I maintain that AVHs result from an underlying disruption to self-consciousness, namely, a diminished sense of ownership. This diminished sense of ownership, in turn, is caused by a breakdown in selective attention.