Chapter 12 - Bodily immunity to error

Summary

The tactile sensations experienced on the hand justify the patients in making an existential generalization such that there is a hand that is in contact with a paintbrush. However, the patients are wrong in figuring out which object instantiates the bodily property because they do not judge that it is their own hand that is in contact with a paintbrush. If this is the right analysis of somatoparaphrenia, then it constitutes counter-evidence to the hypothesis of bodily immunity to error through which-misidentification. The author shows that somatoparaphrenia is irrelevant for the discussion of bodily immunity to error through misidentification (IEM). The extent of bodily IEM is determined by the extent of multimodality: the more multimodality, the less bodily immunity. Most accounts of bodily IEM focus on proprioception, neglecting the multimodality of most bodily self-ascriptions. Proprioceptive signals are integrated only with visual signals coming from one's body under normal circumstances.