Possibilities of Misidentification

We seem to have a special, seemingly direct, relationship to our own thoughts that we do not have to the thoughts of others; I can become aware of my thoughts in a way that I cannot become aware of yours: through introspection. Those who have delusions of thought-insertion, however, claim not only to be aware of another’s thoughts, but to have another’s thoughts in their own mind. These thoughts, of course, cannot actually be someone else’s thoughts. However, if we take those who have this delusion at their word, it certainly seems to them that these thoughts belong to another. Although introspection is no longer generally thought to be absolutely error free, this misinterpretation seems quite a strange mistake to make. Surely, we cannot misidentify who has the thoughts we are aware of through introspection! Yet the existence of thought-insertion delusions shows that this kind of misidentification is not just possible—it actually happens. So thought-insertion delusions seem to threaten the principle of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) of our introspective mental state attributions (Campbell, 1999a). However, in “Pathologies of Thought and First-Person Authority,” Michael Young argues that thought-insertion delusions are not counterexamples to this immunity principle, once we properly formulate it. One might gloss IEM by saying things like, “we cannot misidentify who has the thoughts that we are introspectively aware of,” just as I did above. And thought-insertion delusions, if we interpret these reports straightforwardly, certainly are counterexamples to this. Yet, as Young points out, they are not counterexamples to the following principle: