ARTICLE
Received 24 Aug 2016 | Accepted 19 Dec 2016 | Published 24 Jan 2017
DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108
OPEN
Kant and thought insertion
Sacha Golob1
ABSTRACT This article examines the phenomenon of thought insertion, one of the most
extreme disruptions to the standard mechanisms for self-knowledge, in the context of Kant’s
philosophy of mind. This juxtaposition is of interest for two reasons, aside from Kant’s
foundational significance for any modern work on the self. First, thought insertion presents a
challenge to Kant’s approach. For example, the first Critique famously held that “The ‘I think’
must be able to accompany all my representations” (Kant, KrV, B132). Yet thought insertion
raises the problem of representations that are “mine” by many natural criteria, and yet which
I am unwilling to self-ascribe. Ultimately, my argument will be that thought insertion
simultaneously problematises, and yet to some degree also vindicates, the complex distinctions between activity and passivity that underlie Kant’s system. Second, I argue that
Kant’s position contains resources that allow us to model thought insertion, and its broader
implications for self-knowledge, in an interesting and distinctive manner. Kant himself held an
extreme view of philosophy’s competence in the study of mental disorder: in the Anthropology, he suggests that courts must refer such cases to philosophers, rather than medics
(Kant, Anth, p. 214). My aim is much more modest: to suggest that a Kantian treatment of
thought insertion deserves consideration by both philosophers and clinicians. This article is
published as part of a collection on self-knowledge in and outside of illness.
1
Philosophy, King’s College London, London, UK Correspondence: (e-mail: sacha.golob@kcl.ac.uk)
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | 3:16108 | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108 | www.palgrave-journals.com/palcomms
1
ARTICLE
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108
Introduction
his article examines the phenomenon of thought insertion,
one of the most extreme disruptions to the standard
mechanisms for self-knowledge, in the context of Kant’s
philosophy of mind.1 This juxtaposition is of interest for two
reasons, aside from Kant’s foundational significance for any modern
work on the self. First, thought insertion presents a challenge to
Kant’s approach. For example, the first Critique famously held that
“The ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations”
(Kant, KrV, B132).2 Yet thought insertion raises the problem of
representations which are “mine” by many natural criteria, and yet
which I am unwilling to self-ascribe. Ultimately, my argument will
be that thought insertion simultaneously problematizes, and yet to
some degree also vindicates, the complex distinctions between
activity and passivity which underlie Kant’s system. Second, I argue
that Kant’s position contains resources that allow us to model
thought insertion, and its broader implications for self-knowledge,
in an interesting and distinctive manner. Kant himself held an
extreme view of philosophy’s competence in the study of mental
disorder: in the Anthropology, he suggests that courts must refer
such cases to philosophers, rather than medics (Kant, Anth, p. 214).
My aim is much more modest: to suggest that a Kantian treatment
of thought insertion deserves consideration by both philosophers
and clinicians.
Before proceeding, a few remarks on scope. This article is not
intended primarily as exercise in textual Kant scholarship. This is
partly because pinning down the views of the historical Kant
would require close exegetical discussion of many connected
areas: for example, his complex stance on rationalist models of
the self, or on the general relationship between understanding
and intuition. My aim is rather to show how a broadly Kantian
approach can accessibly and helpfully contribute to the existing
discussion of this complex medical phenomenon. In line with
this, I will try to keep Kantian technical terms to a minimum. I
am also not going to attempt to do justice to the full range of the
existing philosophy of mind literature: for example, I will not
discuss recent work on thought insertion and inner speech.3 The
underlying assumptions in play there—with respect to the nature
of such speech, its frequency and its links to ideas such as
Evansian transparency—are too different from Kant’s own for a
fruitful discussion to be possible in the current context. Finally, I
will treat the “thoughts”, which are inserted as beliefs (I say much
more on what this amounts to below). There are interesting case
of what are prima facie “emotion insertions” in patient reports,
but, given the emphasis on reason-responsivity which
characterizes the Kantian approach, these present a very
different set of challenges. I briefly indicate why in the
conclusion, but a full treatment is beyond the present article.4
T
Definitions and the basic Kantian apparatus
This section will introduce and define the basic concepts I will
use. Kant was an enormously systematic thinker, and the ideas I
isolate are, within his own work, embedded in a perhaps uniquely
complex larger system. I cannot do justice to this here, and I will,
in line with the aims set out above, simply bracket it.5
Thought-insertion is a delusion whereby “the subject believes
that thoughts that are not his own have been inserted into his
mind” (Andreasen, 1984: 3). What is striking is that while
subjects retain introspective access to the relevant thoughts, they
are insistent that they are not theirs: the experience is of thoughts
“which are not [their] own intruding” into their consciousness
(Wing et al., 1974: 160). Thought insertion so defined should be
distinguished from two potentially accompanying phenomena.
First, patients typically offer an explanation as to how this has
come about; for example, because of electrical transmission
2
(Jaspers, 1963: 580). Such explanations, whilst manifestly
problematic, do not carry the hallmark feature of alienation: the
patient regards the beliefs that articulate the explanation as their
own, and so I will not discuss this aspect of the situation here.
Second, the core phenomenon of thought insertion may be
supplemented by a further belief as to whom the relevant
thoughts actually belong. For example, this is a widely cited case
from Mellor:
I look out of the window and I think the garden looks nice and
the grass looks cool, but the thoughts of Eamonn Andrews
come into my mind. There are no other thoughts there, only
his…He treats my mind like a screen and flashes his thoughts
onto it like you flash a picture. (Mellor, 1970: 17)
One might thus contrast a “negative element” (that is, the fact
that the patients don’t recognize certain thoughts as belonging to
them) with this further “positive element” (that is, the fact that
they ascribe those thoughts to others) (Hoerl, 2001: 190). But this
further element is not necessarily present (for example, Jaspers,
1963: 580), and I will not focus on it here—although I suggest in
§4 that my approach can make sense of it.
The basic characterization of thought insertion that I have
given is a simple one, and it is natural to make it more precise by
introducing notions such as ownership. But these terms, and their
inter-relations, are highly contested: there are approaches that
present the subject as retaining ownership whilst lacking some
further factor (Gerrans, 2001), and approaches which would deny
even that (Bortolotti and Broome, 2009). So rather that importing
such terminology at this point, I want first to introduce the
Kantian apparatus I will use to frame my own account.
The place to begin is his conception of self-knowledge. There
are, of course, many senses in which I might have knowledge
about myself. But the one on which philosophers have focussed
and the one relevant here is knowledge of our own mental states,
a knowledge that is often thought to have distinctive characteristics of immediacy and authority. Kant draws a foundational
distinction between two forms of such knowledge, a distinction
which he articulates in terms of an active/passive contrast. On the
one hand, there is what he calls “inner sense”—this is “a mere
faculty of perception”, an awareness of “what happens to us”,
such as feeling pain from an injury (Kant, Anth, 153,161). On the
other hand, there is pure or transcendental apperception: whereas
inner sense is consciousness of what affects us, apperception is
consciousness of “what the human being does … this belongs to
the faculty of thinking (Kant, Anth, p. 161).6 Kant’s shorthand for
this active or “spontaneous” capacity for thought is the “I think”
(Kant, KrV, A107, B132).
The idea that thought insertion can be usefully analysed in
terms of some kind of active/passive framework is familiar from
many standard accounts: the inserted thoughts would be
something “done to” the patient, rather than things “done by”
her (Fulford, 1989: 220). But what makes Kant distinctive is the
way he understands the relevant notion of activity, and it is this I
want now to discuss. I will approach the issue via the
characteristically Kantian theme of self-determination.
There are many senses in which we might be said to determine
ourselves. Not all of these are on the same footing. Suppose John
takes steroids to speed up his muscle growth. The reflexive
structure of this act is purely incidental—he could equally have
used the same drugs to speed up someone else’s development.
Moran puts the underlying point nicely:
In various cases a person may produce in himself various
desires, beliefs, or emotional responses, either by training,
mental discipline, drugs, the cooperation of friends, or simply
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | 3:16108 | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108 | www.palgrave-journals.com/palcomms
ARTICLE
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108
by hurling himself into a situation that will force a certain
response from him….[T]he resulting attitude is still one I am
essentially passive with respect to. It is inflicted on me, even if
I am the one inflicting it. (Moran, 2001: 117)
Suppose alternately that I am faced with some factual
question; I consider the evidence, deliberate, and thereby acquire
the belief that P.7 This ability, an ability to exercise a rational
authority over one’s own beliefs, seems very different from the
steroid case:
[T]here is surely an intuitive contrast between my power to
govern whether I have a stomach ache and my power to
govern whether I believe P: whereas in the former case my
control over the relevant condition is at best indirect, in the
latter, one wants to say, my control may be direct. It is this
intuition—that settling on an answer to a question can itself be
an exercise of some sort of capacity for self-determination—
that is expressed in the traditional idea that rational creatures
have a capacity for free “judgment”, a capacity to “make up
their minds”. (Boyle, 2011: 17)
The basic idea is thus that rational agents are able to exercise a
particular form of self-regulation: I determine what my belief is
by establishing what is to be believed, given the facts before me. As
Moran has argued, this distinctive form of self-determination can
be used to underwrite a distinctively active story about selfknowledge, one on which I have special authority to know what I
believe, precisely because it is I who determine what it is I believe
—not in the voluntaristic sense that I can pick my views at
random, but in the sense that it is my mind to make up. As he
puts it:
If it is possible for a person to answer a deliberative question
about his belief at all, this involves assuming an authority over,
and a responsibility for, what his belief actually is. Thus a
person able to exercise this capacity is in a position to declare
what his belief is by reflection on the reasons in favor of that
belief, rather than by examination of the psychological
evidence. In this way … avowal can be seen as an expression
of genuine self-knowledge (Moran, 2004: 425).
This has the attractive feature of meshing neatly with what is
often called the transparency principle, the fact that when asked
whether I believe that P, I typically attend to the external
world, rather than “looking inward”: in Evan’s (1982: 225)
famous formulation, when asked whether I believe that there will
be a third world war, I consider the geopolitical situation rather
than engaging in some kind of introspection. On Moran’s
approach this makes immediate sense: I can answer questions
about at least reason-responsive mental states, such as beliefs, by
looking at the world because my verdicts on the latter constitute
the former.
Moran’s influential work has faced multiple challenges in the
literature—for example, I might sincerely judge that P and yet still
not form the belief that P when belief is understood to include
some rich set of dispositions (consider the phenomenon of
implicit bias).8 But in the present context, my interest is not in a
general assessment of Moran (for my views on this see Golob,
2016), but rather in two specific points. On the one hand,
Moran’s approach serves as a good example of the type of
Kantian approach I will sketch: this is because it powerfully
illustrates the idea that rational agents are able to exercise a
specific kind of self-regulation. On the other hand, however, as
has been widely discussed and as is visible even in my quick
summary, Moran naturally emphasizes cases in which I generate
beliefs through explicit deliberation. This has problematic
consequences. For example, it means that the theory is less
attractive when the relevant question is not “do you believe that
P?” but rather “do you already believe that P?”—since the latter is
naturally read not as asking me to now form a view on the
facts, but rather to report some antecedently existing state of
affairs (Shah and Velleman, 2005). This type of concern meshes
closely with broader post-Kantian worries about Kant’s talk of
apperception or self-consciousness: how is this to be understood
given that the vast majority of our behaviour does not involve
thematic, explicit reflection?9 So what I want to do is to press the
idea of rational self-governance further, but shift the focus away
from conscious deliberation and towards the distinctive forms of
behaviour, thematised or unthematised, which rationality makes
possible.
For Kant one of the key features of rational agents such as
humans, in contrast to non-rational animals (henceforth
“animals”), is an ability to “recognise” the “marks” or properties
of the things they encounter (Kant, SvF p. 59). On his view, while
animals will obviously respond differently depending on the
properties of the world around them (a dogs recoils from a heated
piece of metal, but not a cool one), only rational agents are able to
represent the fact that certain properties imply certain others.
This recognitional capacity is what defines concept use for Kant,
and he therefore cashes concepts in terms of “rules”: for example,
to possess the concept of obody4 is to represent the fact that its
application in turn “necessitates the representation of extension”
(Kant, KrV A106, A126).10 To adapt Kant’s own example, an ox
may respond very differently to a stall made of paper and one
made of steel; but only a rational being is able to represent the fact
that its being paper implies, given the relevant background
conditions, other properties (flammability, for example).
It is in this sense that the Logic treats marks as both “in the
thing” and as a “partial representation … considered as the
ground of cognition” (Log.:58): the recognition of such properties
regulates our representations.
Why does this matter? The answer is that for Kant this capacity
transforms the way in which rational beings engage with
themselves, with each other and with the world. Let me give
two examples. At an individual level, such recognition brings my
representations within the domain of a specific kind of
assessment. On Kant’s picture, the ox simply sees one thing after
another—it lack spontaneity in Kantian terms (I discuss
association shortly). Rational beings, in contrast, are continually
taking on commitments: to see the door as wooden means that I
must be willing to affirm various other properties of it or to
retract the initial attribution. Mark recognition thus imposes a
normative order on experience (Kant, KrV, A104). In contemporary jargon, human experience is conceptual or within the
space of reasons. But this capacity is also crucial from an intersubjective angle. Suppose the ox’s past leads it associate the
stall with distress. It is only insofar as I can represent the fact
that one property grounds another, that I can represent the
distinction between such property implications and the type of
associationistic link manifest in the ox. And it is only insofar as I
can draw that distinction that I can be aware of the difference
between links that are merely an artefact of my own psychological
history (like the ox’s fear), and those which, since putatively
grounded in the entity itself, should also hold for other agents. In
other words, the capacity to use rules to represent objectivity—the
entity as a locus of properties with their own implications
relations (Kant, KrV, A197/B242)—allows me in turn to
represent inter-subjectivity, to represent something as a fact that
should hold for a consciousness “in general, not only my own”
(Kant, Refl.16, p. 633).11
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | 3:16108 | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108 | www.palgrave-journals.com/palcomms
3
ARTICLE
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108
Much of Kant’s theoretical philosophy is devoted to unpacking
the conditions and the consequences of these ideas and of the
capacity for “apperception”, which makes them possible. But for
current purposes only one more point is needed: these abilities
will not typically involve thematic or explicit reflection. To adapt
a famous post-Kantian example, when you ask me to pass you a
heavier hammer, I unthinkingly reach for the smaller metal one,
avoiding the large wooden one: my system automatically
represents both the connections between the various materials
and weight, and the assumption that those connections, since
grounded in those entity, will also hold for you. These facts
provide the cognitive infrastructure for practices of explicit
justification: if asked why I did what I did, I can explain it, but
such justification will typically not in fact take place.
Bringing these points together, we now have a handle on the
distinctive capacity for self-determination possessed by Kantian
rational agents; it is a capacity to represent, and thus to act on,
certain relations and certain distinctions. Since this capacity will
be widely manifest in behaviour, there is no need to rely on cases
of explicit deliberation when cashing self-determination, something Moran and other prominent Kantians are frequently
accused of. The task now is to demonstrate how this material
can be used to flesh out the idea of an active/passive distinction.
Once that is in place I will then show, in §4, how the combined
results can be fruitfully applied to thought insertion.
Activity as commitment
As I noted above, a standard strategy is to argue that inserted
thoughts lack some sense of activity, be this “agency” (Stephens
and Graham, 1994) or “authorship” (Gerrans, 2001). But it is
obviously important to be sure we are operating with the right
concepts of activity and passivity here. On the passive side, for
example, it is widely recognized that we need to distinguish
thought insertion from cases of obsessive thoughts—the phobic’s
incessant fear that the plane will crash—which lack the distinctive
phenomenology of intrusion. But what about the relevant notion
of activity? After all, it is vital to keep inserted thoughts separate
from unbidden or spontaneous thoughts which simply pop in to
my mind; in a great many unpathological cases, a “thought comes
when ‘it’ wants, and not when ‘I’ want” (Nietzsche, 2002, §17). As
Mullins and Spence note, such “unbidden thoughts” create a
problem for authors, such as Stephens and Graham, who identify
an “experience of mentally acting” as the key feature missing from
the insertion case (Spence and Mullins, 2003: 296; the cited
remark is from Stephens and Graham, 1994: 2). This is why I
diverge from Kantian accounts such as Young’s which treats
active thoughts as those I “generate … and, importantly, I am
aware of generating them” (Young, 2006: 828). I think Young is
right that this approach has Kantian backing (for example, Kant,
KrV, B158-9), but I think, for the reason just given, it is not the
best aspect of Kant’s work to utilize here.12
As Bortolotti and Broome observe a similar problem will also
arise for accounts which, whilst incorporating notions like
reason-responsiveness, still frame the issue in terms of belief
formation. They give the example of two attempts to identify a
broadly rationalist notion of activity, “authorship” which inserted
thoughts might lack:
(a) In order to be the author of the belief that he should file for
divorce, Patrick needs to have formed that belief on the basis of
the best evidence available to him.
(b) In order to be the author of the belief that he should file for
divorce, Patrick needs to be able to endorse that belief on the
basis of the best evidence available to him. (Bortolotti and
Broome, 2009: 212)
4
The problem with (a) is that outside of explicit reflection, few
beliefs are so acquired—in addition to the unbidden thoughts just
discussed, we often form beliefs and only later come to find good
reasons for them. So even if inserted thoughts do lack (a), this
cannot be what makes them distinctive (Bortolotti and Broome,
2009: 212–213).
What about Bortolotti and Broome’s option (b)? They cash
“endorsement” in terms of “the capacity for reason giving in
deliberation or justification, or, depending of the type of thought,
on behavioural manifestability”. More specifically, it:
[C]ulminates with the subject taking responsibility over the
reported attitude and making a commitment to it that is likely
to be reflected in further reported attitudes and other forms of
behaviour. (Bortolotti and Broome, 2009: 213)
It seems to me that the account at the end of §2 shows how a
version of this might work; since I am now going to start
importing some specifically Kantian claims, I will call this version
“commitment” to distinguish it from Bortolotti and Broome’s
broader notion of “endorsement”.13 For rational agents, as Kant
sees it, to believe is to take on certain commitments, to recognize
their implications for your other beliefs, and for the resulting web
of norms that governs your behaviour. To use Kant’s own
example, to see something as a body is to bind oneself to the
application of various other properties to it, and to the interrelation of those properties putatively holding for other agents.
For a belief to be mine in this sense implies a capacity to
undertake a process of explicit justification—as Kant puts it, it
must be possible for the “I think” to accompany all my thoughts
(Kant, KrV, B131)—but this possibility need not be realised.
Rather, a belief is mine insofar as it enters in to the relevant forms
of rational combination, combinations which, in line with the
results of §2, will be behaviourably manifest.
“I”, in this context, expresses the fact that the representations
under consideration are bound and reflected from one
standpoint, that of the thinker that refers these representations
to herself and commits herself to the unity and consistency of
the conceptual ordering of these representations.
(Longuenesse, 2007: 153)
This model of activity fits well with Kant’s agnosticism (at least
in the theoretical domain) as to the true nature of the self: in the
absence of knowledge of the noumenal, it is this “relation of
rational dependence across mental states that constitutes [our]
existence as thinkers” (Kitcher, 2011: 252).
Kant on thought insertion
It is now time to directly apply these materials to the question of
thought insertion. The basic Kantian story will include three
elements, elements whose positioning differs significantly from
much of the literature. First, there is the notion of activity qua
commitment as defined in §3. Second, there is the notion of
ownership: this is to be understood in terms of a willingness to
self-ascribe the relevant states. Self-ascription is in turn is
understood as Longuenesse suggested: “the thinker that refers
these representations to herself and commits herself to [their]
unity and consistency” (Longuenesse, 2007: 153). Third, there is
some much weaker notion which picks out those representations
that are “mine” in the looser, non-Kantian sense—for example,
those available to introspection. In Kantian terms, these are
accessible via inner sense: a non-rational animal will have
representations of its own in this sense, while lacking any that are
owned in the stronger senses tied to apperception (Kant, Anth,
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | 3:16108 | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108 | www.palgrave-journals.com/palcomms
ARTICLE
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108
127). Defining this third group will be difficult, particularly given
the point, made by Kant long before Nietzsche, Freud and others,
that the vast majority of what is mine in this extended sense is in
fact barely accessible to consciousness (Kant, Anth, 136).14 What
makes Kant’s story distinctive, however, is not just the elements
in play but their connections. One standard way to handle
thought insertion is to frame the discussion in terms of a coming
apart of ownership and some relevant notion of activity: inserted
thoughts would have the former, but not the latter (for example,
Gerrans, 2001). But a Kantian approach will reject this precisely
because Kant cashes ownership in terms of commitment: as I
noted at the end of the previous section, a thought is mine insofar
as it is integrated within the normative web of commitments. As
Moran puts it, in this sense “someone determines what shall be
part of him as a person” (Moran, 2002: 214).
One might have several immediate worries about this proposed
taxonomy. On the one hand, it can seem a merely verbal shift—
why does it matter if we use “ownership” in a way that is tied to
commitment as opposed to mere introspection? Bortolotti and
Broome (2009: 216), who propose a similar switch, although on
different grounds, provide part of the answer: it does better justice
to the phenomenology of inserted thoughts, which are precisely
introspected states that the agent nevertheless refuses to accept as
her own. But for Kant himself there are also deeper reasons, and
these bring me to the other natural objection: far from being
merely terminological, doesn’t my proposal have the absurd
implication that huge numbers of non-pathological states are not
really mine? For example, sensations which do not enter into the
type of commitment or justification relations sketched: it makes
no sense, at both a trivial and a deep level, to say “I think hot”,
and yet surely I can have a feeling of heat? Or what about deep,
recurring desires that I see as central to myself (“how typical of
me to want that!”) but nevertheless regard as irrational?15 It is
important to see that for Kant this is not a problem, but precisely
the result he wants: we need to take very seriously the fact that the
“I” for Kant is the “I think”.16 This is not the place to enter in to
the details of Kantian ethics, but the basic point is that ownership
for him is necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility (Kant,
GMS, 457). In contrast, sensations and desires (incentives in
proper Kantian terminology) are seen as functions of causal
chains, stretching back before my birth and over which I have no
control, and by extension no direct responsibility (Kant, KrV,
A445/ B473, A448/B476).17 The fact that someone might
experience certain sexual desires, for example, is thus conceived
as an external force acting on them, as something merely factual.
Ownership and responsibility enter the picture only when I take
that desire as giving me a reason to act and thus embed it within
the web of normative commitments. The result is a sharp divide
for Kant between activity, commitment and ownership and
freedom on one side, and a vast multitude of representations
which are caused to occur “in me”, that is, at the point where my
body is situated, without thereby being “mine”, without being
something I own. With respect to these:
I could not say: “I do it” but must rather say: “I feel in myself
an impulse to do it which something has incited in me”. (Kant,
V-MP/Heinze: 269)
There is clearly a huge amount that is controversial in the views
just sketched. But the task now is to apply them to thought
insertion. To the lay the groundwork for this, I will take the cases
of non-pathological unbidden thoughts, and then obsessive
thoughts, before dealing with insertion itself.
First off, unbidden thoughts which are reason-responsive: for
example, my sudden realization that I have left the window open.
These are unproblematic for Kant for the reasons discussed in §2.
They are fully fledged beliefs, through which I thereby take on
various commitments (to the conditional that if it rains the floor
will be soaked, to the act of shutting it given my other beliefs and
desires). The fact that that they arose unbidden is unproblematic
since blanket talk of agency has been replaced by notions of
commitment and ownership defined in terms of normative
integration.
Second, obsessive thoughts, which lack the distinctive pathology of inserted thoughts. This is obviously a huge class ranging
from those linked to compulsive disorders (“I must wash my
hands again”) to images which continually intrude in the mind to
an endless posing and re-posing of what most agents would
see as settled questions (“do my friends like me” “is the gas on”
and so on). Such obsessive thoughts present an interesting case
for Kant because they are often not responsive to reasoning: “I
can find myself thinking or worrying that P even though
I realize that there is no reason to think or worry that P” (Cassam,
2011: 6). My suggestion is that the Kantian pursue a divide
and conquer strategy with respect to the class as a whole. On the
one hand, there are cases of systemic bias in reasoning—agents
who habitually endorse conclusions that the rest of us
regard as unsustainable. This might stem from a particular
attitude to the risk calculus, as in the case of agents who
systematically over-react to extremely small risks (one can
imagine a compulsive handwasher driven by this). Such
misguided judgments are, from a Kantian perspective, owned
by the agent; she has mistaken views, but they are hers. On the
other hand, there are states that are not best seen as actually
taking on a commitment (not seen as making a judgment in the
technical Kantian sense—Kant, Prol, p.305). Rather they are what
O’Brien (2013: 95) nicely calls “mere apprehensions of content”.
On this model, an image or a thought might insistently intrude
into my mind in the way a song or a pain can: standing at the top
of the stairs with the baby, an image of it lifeless on the floor
flashes before my eyes. For Kant such cases are genuinely passive,
genuinely unresponsive to reason and not owned: I cannot say “I
think” of them, “I could not say: ‘I do it’” but only that external
factors are generating a certain state within my body. (Kant,
V-MP/Heinze: 269). Whilst she would doubtless not endorse
Kant’s own use of this type of tactic, O’Brien’s own agency
approach thus offers a sharp formulation of the basic approach
Kant would use for dealing with “non-inserted” but obsessive
thoughts:
In response to the claim that there are ‘passive judgements’
that are unresponsive to reason the agency theorist can,
therefore, insist that either the recalcitrance is consistent with
us taking them to be active commitments by the subject to
how the world is on some basis, and are thus tractable from
the point of view of the agency theory approach to judgement,
or are such that it is inconsistent with them being
commitments at all. We get the impression that there could
be a genuine commitment to the world being thus and so only
by thinking it, only by switching between cases which are mere
entertainings and cases which are judgements based on
unstable reasons. (O’Brien, 2013: 98)
Adding the clarification that such “mere entertainings”, whilst
well labelled in contrast to judgments, may be radically disruptive
and troubling to the subject (for example, consider intrusive
images of violence), this is the divide and conquer approach I
advocated.
We are now in a position to tackle inserted thoughts directly. I
propose the following Kantian analysis. Inserted thoughts are
representations that have the semantic and cognitive form of
commitments, of “judgments” or “maxims” in Kant’s technical
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | 3:16108 | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108 | www.palgrave-journals.com/palcomms
5
ARTICLE
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108
vocabulary—and yet which are radically at odds with the subject’s
existing commitments. The key difference from obsessive
thoughts is that obsessive thoughts are either embedded within
the agent’s normative framework (the first horn of the strategy
just sketched), or are “such that it is inconsistent with them being
commitments at all” (O’Brien, 2013: 98).
One easy way to approach the proposal is by looking at cases
where the inserted thought takes the form of a command:
Thoughts are put into my mind like ‘Kill God’. It’s just like my
mind working, but it isn’t. They come from this chap, Chris.
They’re his thoughts. (Frith, 1992: 66)
What is happening here is that a representation has entered the
system which has normative force—it purports to oblige the
subject to do something. In Kantian terms, it is on the active side
of the line; it is a judgment or commitment that something ought
to be done. The problem is that the individual does not recognize
the state’s commitments and thus does not see himself as its
owner. This is because of its discontinuity with what Longuenesse
aptly called “the unity and consistency of the conceptual
ordering” of his existing “standpoint”. In this sense, the inserted
thought is on the passive side of the line: it is not part of the
network of self-legislated rules and obligations that define the
Kantian I. The result is twofold. First, the subject disavows
ownership due to this perceived clash: she cannot say “I think”.
Second, this disavowal generates the distinctive phenomenology
well-captured by Jaspers:
The patient does not know why he has this thought nor did he
not know why he has this thought nor did he intend to have it.
He does not feel master of his own thoughts and in addition
he feels in the power of some incomprehensible external force.
(Jaspers, 1963: 122–123)
This is exactly what Kant would predict: the phenomenology is of
being bound by a rule that you did not make yourself. What about
cases that lack a straightforward command form? Consider a
subject who reports experiencing misogynistic inserted thoughts,
a constantly intrusive insistence that “women are y” where “y” is
some string of sexual slurs. From a Kantian perspective, in line
with §2, such claims still contain, albeit less obviously, the same
command and obligation structure. To judge that x is y, as
opposed to merely associating the two such that the presence of
one triggers the presence of the other before the mind, is to
represent the former property as grounding the latter, to oblige
oneself to attribute the latter to anything that has the former, and
to represent the fact that since this attribution is so grounded it
should hold for all similar agents and not just for me.
Thus to have this judgment in the system is to take on a whole
web of commitments as sketched in §2. What patients are
reacting to in thought insertion is the fact that something
of this form has suddenly been added to their system, a line of
normative coding, which they cannot reconcile with what else was
already there.
It is important to stress how this differs from mere
inconsistency. Doubtless we all have multiple conflicts between
our various commitments. But these are typically not manifest to
us, and when they become so we either try to repair them, or
simply ignore the clash until our attention shifts elsewhere. But in
the thought assertion case, a radical clash is presented with an
insistent degree of phenomenological saliency: the inserted
thoughts don’t simply fade in to the background in the way the
conflicts between someone’s highly paid job and their professed
politics might as other things dominate their attention. The result
is effectively a persistent avowal of both P and not P;
6
unsurprisingly, individuals faced with this come to disown one
of the thoughts.
The irony of the Kantian framework is this. My strongest desire
is, as discussed above, in an important sense not mine; it is
something that happens “in me”. This is, very crudely, because it
is a product of causal forces, ultimately stretching back beyond
my control. The “I”, in contrast, is defined in normative terms, in
terms of the ability to subject my representations and so my
behaviour to rules (Kant, KrV, A104-5). Inserted thoughts have
this normative structure, and yet precisely because of it are
disowned by agents. I have focussed on what §2 called the
“negative” aspect of thought insertion, the denial of ownership,
rather than on the “positive” aspect, the belief that the thoughts
belong to some (possibly quite specific) other person. But one can
see how the approach sketched might naturally handle that. From
a Kantian perspective, a commitment, a judgment, is an act of
some agent, an act of binding themselves in various ways.18 If I
am introspectively aware of such a representation and yet am sure
that I have not made the relevant commitments, it becomes
natural to assume that someone else has done so.
Suppose an agent is faced with this state—what might he or she
do? Clearly, one option is to try to remove the inserted thought
from the system or at least lessen its prominence; for example,
through some form of drug treatment. But from a Kantian
perspective, there is another, interesting alternative: try to restore
“the unity and consistency of the conceptual ordering”
(Longuenesse, 2007: 153). If the divide between the rogue code
and their existing perspective is too great, that may be impossible
and some form of breakdown will result. But what is striking is
that at least in some case reflective patients report trying exactly
what the Kantian approach would predict: removing the feeling of
alienation by integrating the problematic thoughts so that they
become “mine” and not just “in me”. This is an exchange between
an interviewer, Ira Glass, and Patricia Deegan, a psychologist who
suffers from auditory hallucinations:
IG: How do you conceive of the voices that you hear? As
separate from yourself, or do you conceive of them as part of
your self that you can recognize?
PD: I think that for me it’s a goal to eventually say these voices
are a part of me, and that’s actually one of the self-help coping
strategies that I do use sometimes...So, for instance, if I have a
particularly derogatory or awful voice, that I might say, as a
coping strategy, ‘today I am feeling like I am no good, today I
am feeling like I’m a worthless person, these are my thoughts,
these are my feelings. (Jenkins and Barrett, 2004: 37)
Conclusion
One of the classic questions Kantian philosophies face is the
sustainability of the different dualisms on which they are built.
Thus post-Kantian thought often focussed precisely on those
elements—such as socially cultivated desires (Hegel) and the
transcendental imagination (Hegel and Heidegger)—which might
problematize the boundary between active and passive, between
spontaneity and sensibility. The case of thought insertion raises
similar issues. In a more modern idiom, the position I have
outlined is one on which inserted thoughts are unusual precisely
because they are both within and without the space of reasons.
Obsessive thoughts, in contrast, are easier to regiment as either in
or out. Leaving aside these kind of broader issues, it further seems
that Kant’s account has some interesting implications at the
micro-level. One is the link just noted to particular treatment
strategies. Another concerns the relationship between selfascription and activity. For example, Bortolotti and Broome
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | 3:16108 | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108 | www.palgrave-journals.com/palcomms
ARTICLE
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108
(2009: 219) identify thought insertion as a failure of both selfascription and authorship. But, given their definitions, selfascription without authorship is extremely common (Bortolotti
and Broome, 2009: 212): if this is the case, why is the latter’s
absence sometimes bound up with the radical refusal to selfascribe seen in thought insertion? On the Kantian picture, what
makes inserted thoughts distinctive is not a straightforward
failure of commitment, something that is extremely widespread
for Kant, but the distinctive hybrid state I have discussed.
One way to develop these results would be to use the “inserted
emotion” case to drive the wedge in from another angle, so to
speak. Consider this report from Mellor:
I cry, tears roll down my cheeks and I look unhappy, but I
have a cold anger because they’re using me in this way, and it’s
not me who’s unhappy, but they’re projecting unhappiness
onto my brain. They project upon me laughter, for no reason,
and you have no idea how terrible it is to laugh and look
happy and know it’s not you, but their emotions. (Mellor,
1970: 17)
The challenge for Kant here is to explain, in effect, how one
emotion can be any more heteronomous than another; but that is
a task for another paper.
13
14
15
16
17
Notes
1 Despite Kant’s enormous influence on modern conceptions of the self, there has been
relatively little direct research applying his views to the thought insertion case. The
only existing items of literature of which I am aware are Chadwick, 1994 and Young,
2006. Whilst I am indebted to both authors, the approach defended here differs
substantially, in part because it draws on the last decade’s research on Kant’s philosophy of mind. I flag particular points of divergence from these accounts as
they occur.
2 As is standard, all references to Kant are to the Akademie edition, Kant 1902-, using
the following abbreviations: Anth: Anthropologie … (Ak.7); KrV: Kritik der reinen
Vernunft (Ak.4); Prol: Prolegomena (Ak.4); Log: Logik (Ak.9); Refl.:Reflexion (Ak.16);
SvF: Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit … (Ak.2); V-MP/Heinze Kant Metaphysik L1 (Heinze)
(Ak.28).
3 For a helpful survey see Roessler, 2013.
4 For simplicity’s sake, I follow the standard reading of Kant and treat the perceptual
states of adult human agents as having the same kind of representational content,
namely intuitive judgments, as found in fully meaningful beliefs more generally; in
other words, I am leaving aside here both the longstanding issue of judgments lacking
intuitive content, and the more recently pressed one of relationalist readings of Kant
on perception (see, for example, Gomes, 2014).
5 Perhaps the main omission will be a detailed discussion of the Paralogisms—this is,
unfortunately, simply not possible without introducing material regarding Kant’s
idealism, his relationship to rationalism, and the complex epistemic status of Kantian
regulative (as opposed to constitutive) claims about the self, material that would take
us too far from the main focus of the article.
6 In addition to pure or transcendental apperception, Kant also talks occasionally of
“empirical apperception”; this is equivalent to inner sense (Kant, KrV, A107). In what
follows “apperception” will always mean pure or transcendental apperception.
7 Moran’s account should equally apply to desires insofar as these are reason
responsive—faced with the question of whether I ought to take a job in another
country, I reflect on the evidence, deliberate and end by wanting to do so. But the
issue of desires is complex in a Kantian context due to the distinction between
maxims and incentives—I discuss this below.
8 For an illuminating and sophisticated treatment of the worry see McGeer, 2007: 10.
9 See, for example, Crowell, 2007.
10 Such inter-property implications may be analytic or synthetic.
11 I might be wrong in any particular case—we mistake mere associations for facts all
the time. But what is significant for Kant is the ability to represent the distinction
(similarly, the Second Analogy is an attempt to show that the ability to draw a
distinction between a succession of perceptions and a perception of succession
depends on a capacity to deploy the categories; this is perfectly compatible with the
fact that we may be wrong about which is which in a given case).
12 Generally, it seems that the cases of automatic or fluid action emphasized by postKantian phenomenology should make us wonder how often an experience of “generating” thoughts is ever really present. For a classic formulation of the phenomenological critique, see Dreyfus, 1991. One other point of difference between Young
18
and I is that he assigns a central role to Kant’s complex theory of the imagination; I
touch on this at the end, but my position in no way relies on it.
In virtue of its explicitly Kantian heritage, the account I am outlining differs from
Bortolotti and Broome on several points. For example, I am—in virtue of the facts
about Kantian semantics noted in footnote 4—more willing to apply it to perceptual
beliefs than they are (Bortolotti and Broome, 2009: 210). I am also unclear how
strongly they intend the requirement regarding reason giving: what, for example, of
beliefs which the subject has inherited unquestioned? (Bortolotti and Broome, 2009:
212–213). On my account such beliefs remain on the active side; what matters is the
commitments an agent takes on, even if she can offer no more illuminating justification than “that is just how things are”. I return to another important point of
difference from Bortolotti and Broome below; despite these differences, I am indebted
to their work.
In opposition to my approach, Young aligns this loose grouping with the “I think”
(Young, 2006: 830). There are many ways one might regiment the terminology, but it
seems to me Young’s tactic of aligning apperception with what he calls “global”
representation will create problems with regards to animals, since Kant is insistent
these lack the “I think” (Kant, Anth, p.127). At a primary text level, the issue is visible
in Kant’s vacillations over whether to allow animals “consciousness” [Bewustβein]
(for a close study of the relevant passage see McLear, 2011).
In Kantian technical terms, incentives or Triebfedern that are not taken up into
maxims. I am supressing complications here concerning the precise way in which
incentives might be incorporated into maxims and potentially harmonized with our
other commitments and with obligations such as those set out by the categorical
imperative; their recognition would not affect the basic point of the paragraph, but
would require extensive treatment of issues surrounding the so called “Incorporation
Principle” (the locus classicus here is Allison, 1990).
Or the “I do”, that is, “the I endorse this maxim”—see the citation at the end of the
paragraph.
I say “likely” as I cannot deal here with the complex issue of our responsibility not to
enter situations in which, the relevant causal chains being what they are, my
incentives will tend further in directions that I ought not to endorse (Kant,
GMS, 399).
I am supressing various complexities regarding the relation between spontaneity,
which I take to be exercised in taking on conceptual commitments in this fashion,
and full blown Kantian autonomy which involves self-legislation in an even stronger
sense (crudely, I not only give myself some law like “treat all x as y” I, or rather my
rational nature, is the full source of the law’s content). Treatment of this issue would
require a discussion of the theoretical/practical distinction in Kant which is beyond
the scope of this article.
References
Allison H (1990) Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge, UK.
Andreasen NC (1984) Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptons. University of
Iowa: Iowa.
Bortolotti L and Broome M (2009) A role for ownership and authorship in the
analysis of thought insertion. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences; 8 (2):
205–224.
Boyle M (2011) Making up your mind’ and the activity of reason. Philosophers’
Imprint; 11 (17): 1–24.
Cassam (2011) Knowing what I believe. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society CXI
(I); 1–23.
Chadwick R (1994) Kant, thought insertion and mental unity. Philosophy,
Psychiatry and Psychology; 1 (2): 105–113.
Crowell S (2007) Sorge or Selbstbewußtsein? Heidegger and Korsgaard
on the Sources of Normativity. European Journal of Philosophy; 15 (3):
315–333.
Dreyfus H (1991) Being-in-the-World. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
Evans G (1982) The Varieties of Reference. Clarendon Press: Oxford.
Frith CD (1992) The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia. Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates: Hove, UK.
Fulford KWM (1989) Moral Theory and Medical Practice. Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge, UK.
Gerrans P (2001) Authorship and ownership of thoughts. Philosophy, Psychiatry
and Psychology; 8 (2/3): 231–237.
Gomes A (2014) Kant on perception. Philosophical Quarterly; 64 (254): 1–25.
Golob S (2016) Self-Knowledge, transparency and self-authorship. Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society CXV (3): 235–253.
Hoerl C (2001) On thought insertion. Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology; 8 (2/3):
189–200.
Jaspers K (1963) General Psychopathology. Manchester University Press: Manchester, UK.
Jenkins JD and Barrett RJ (2004) Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity.
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.
Kitcher P (2011) Kant’s Thinker. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Longuenesse B (2007) Kant on the identity of persons. Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society; 107 (1): 149–167.
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | 3:16108 | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108 | www.palgrave-journals.com/palcomms
7
ARTICLE
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108
McGeer V (2007) The moral development of first-person authority. European
Journal of Philosophy; 16 (1): 81–108.
McLear (2011) Kant on animal consciousness. Philosopher's Imprint; 11 (15): 1–16.
Mellor CS (1970) First rank symptoms of Schizophrenia. British Journal of
Psychiatry; 117 (536): 15–23.
Moran (2001) Authority and Estrangement. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
Moran (2002) Frankfurt on Identification. In: Buss and Overton (eds.) Contours of
Agency. MIT Press: London, pp 188–217.
Moran R (2004) Precis of authority and estrangement. Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research; 69 (3): 423–426.
Nietzsche F (2002) Beyond Good and Evil. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
UK.
O’Brien L (2013) Obessive thoughts and inner voices. Philosophical Issues; 23, 93–108.
Roessler J (2013) Thought insertion, self-awareness, and rationality. In: Thornton
T, Graham G, Sadler J and Davies M (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy
and Psychiatry. Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp 658–672.
Shah N and Velleman D (2005) Doxastic deliberation. Philosophical Review; 114
(4): 497–534.
Spence S and Mullins S (2003) Re-examining thought insertion. British Journal of
Psychiatry; 182, 293–298.
Stephens GL and Graham G (1994) Self-consciousness, mental agency and the
clinical psychopathology of thought insertion. Philosophy, Psychiatry and
Psychology; 1 (1): 1–10.
Wing JK, Cooper JE et al (1974) Measurement and Classification of Psychiatric
Symptoms. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.
8
Young G (2006) Kant and the phenomenon of inserted thoughts. Philosophical
Psychology; 19 (6): 823–837.
Data availability
Data sharing not applicable to this article as datasets were neither generated nor
analysed.
Additional information
Competing interests: The Authors declare no competing financial interests.
Reprints and permission information is available at http://www.palgrave-journals.com/
pal/authors/rights_and_permissions.html
How to cite this article: Golob S (2017) Kant and thought insertion. Palgrave Communications. 3:16108 doi: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License. The images or other third party material in this
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise
in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license,
users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material.
To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | 3:16108 | DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.108 | www.palgrave-journals.com/palcomms