The mark of bodily ownership

Abstract

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. The mark of bodily ownership FREDERIQUE DE VIGNEMONT When I touch the table, I have a sensation of pressure on my hand. My tactile sensation includes sensations of resistance, texture and temperature, as well as the sensation of the hand location where the pressure occurs. But does it also include a distinctive experience of the hand as of my own? I am aware that this hand is mine. But is the sense of ownership of my hand manifested to me in a more primitive form than beliefs or judgements? Is there an experi-ence of ownership independent of the judgement of ownership at the doxastic level (for a similar distinction within the sense of agency, see Bayne and Pacherie 2007)? Bermúdez (2011) has recently argued in favour of a defla-tionary account of the sense of ownership, according to which there is noth-ing it feels like to experience one’s body as of one’s own. On his view, the sense of ownership is exclusively judgemental; it has no counterpart at the experiential level. To some extent, Martin (1992, 1995) defends a similar view, according to which there is no distinctive positive phenomenology of ownership as such, no felt ‘myness ’ that goes over and above the mere ex-perience of one’s bodily properties. In his view, bodily experiences are the be-all and end-all of the sense of ownership. On the deflationary conception of ownership the sense of ownership consists, first, in certain facts about the phenomenology of bodily sen-sations and, secondly, in certain fairly obvious judegments about the body (which we can term judgements of ownership). (Bermúdez, 2011: