Liang investigates some interesting issues concerning self-consciousness and its relation to conscious phenomenology and bodily self-consciousness. His argumentation, which has the aim of being interdisciplinary fruitful, is closely tied to some conceptual distinctions that are also very important for our commentary. First, he refines the initial point of the Wittgensteinean distinction between self-as-object and self-as-subject (Wittgenstein 1958). An important distinction concerning the former is the sense of body ownership and the sense of self as physical body, which describes the self-as-object in a more fine-grained manner. The self as subject is also sub-classified in terms of the fact of experiential ownership and the sense of experiential ownership. The sense of experiential ownership describes mental states that refine proprietarily aspects of who is having the experience in question. Liang claims that the sense of experiential ownership is is not privileged in the sense that it gives rise to the well-known property immunity to error through misidentification (IEM). In the second part of his investigation he is concerned with theoretical and empirical investigations made by Damasio, Panksepp and Northoff, which do not provide substantial evidence in their measurements for the sense of self as experiential subject. They rather concern the self-as-object and therefore disregard substantial aspects of self-consciousness. Our commentary will focus on the sense of experiential ownership with regard to IEM. According to Liang, there are several counterexamples to IEM, mainly to be found in misrepresentations (like in the body-swap illusion) due to a sense of experiential ownership. In this commentary, we ask ourselves the following questions: is the sense of experiential ownership a plausible candidate for exemplifying the property of IEM, and could there be serious counterexamples to that principle? We defend the following four theses:
(1) The sense of experiential ownership cannot misrepresent the fact of experiential ownership (cf. section 3).
(2) Phenomenal states like the sense of self as experiential subject are ineligible to serve as bearers of IEM as a property (cf. section 3).
(3) Liang’s counterexamples do not provide real counterexamples to IEM, because they do not aim at the target phenomenon (cf. section 4).
(4) IEM is either a very trivial property of judgments or beliefs or could be explained in terms of immunity to misguided reference (cf. section 5).
In order to defend these four theses we introduce two conceptual distinctions by which we hope to describe the target phenomenon in greater detail. Some philosophers, such as Evans (1982) and Shoemaker (1968) consider IEM to be a property of judgments, whereas others, such as Coliva (2002) and Bermúdez (1998), talk about some phenomenal aspects. Let us summarise these two accounts of IEM as follows:
First-person pronoun immunity (IEM-FP): A speaker who uses the singular indexical expression “I” knows a thing to be φ and conducts a predication “a is φ”. This judgment is based on the rule of identification-freedom, so that it is clear that “I am φ” is a judgment that does not depend on any further identification component.[1]
Phenomenological immunity (IEM-P): Immunity to error through misidentification is a property of phenomenal states that characterises the constituents of first-person judgments. These identification-free constituents manifest themselves in phenomenological experiences about oneself.[2]
There is a strong inclination that the above philosophers who describe IEM as a property of judgments claim IEM to be something like a conceptual truth. But this would be overhasty, because of the fact that it is not yet clearly elaborated what a judgment with regard to the property in question actually is. We turn to this problem later. Liang seems to be a proponent of IEM-P, which holds that IEM is a property of phenomenal states:
My target is a form of mental immunity that I call experiential immunity. Experiential immunity concerns phenomenal experiences. It is a form of relative immunity ―that is, it is relative to first-personal access to phenomenal states, such as introspection, somatosensation, proprioception, etc. (Liang this collection, p. 8)
What distinguishes Liang’s account from others is that he emphasises that IEM does not hold necessarily. In an older paper he and Lane state that the philosophical orthodoxy of IEM has never been empirically challenged. That is because the majority of philosophers hold IEM as a conceptual truth, which has nothing to do with the empirically-tractable structure of reality (cf. Lane & Liang 2011). Our commentary is structured as follows. First, we summarize Liang’s most interesting claims and distinctions (cf. section 2). In section 3 we claim that it is impossible that the sense of experiential ownership can misrepresent the fact of experiential ownership, and that phenomenal states are not eligible bearers of IEM as a property. In section 4 our main claim is that Liang’s interpretation of some empirical studies does not provide counterexamples to IEM. Section 5 develops the consequences of this claim and concludes with some aspects concerning the way in which we could talk about IEM in a more deflationary and less mysterious manner, such as in terms of immunity to misguided reference (IMR) or mispredication. In section 6 we conclude with some proposals for future research.