The first issue raised by Haug and Jung concerns whether the sense of experiential ownership could misrepresent the fact of experiential ownership at all. For ease of discussion, I will present my argument against IEM again, and then reply to Haug and Jung’s objection. Here is the argument:
(1) For every phenomenal state there must be a subject who experiences it.
(2) Every phenomenal state is in principle available to first-personal access.
(3) Every phenomenal state is experienced by the one who has first-personal access to that state.
However, (1)~(3) do not imply:
(4) Every phenomenal state is, from the first-person point of view, represented as experienced by the one who has first-personal access to that state (Liang this collection, p. 8).
Three remarks are in order: first, when Haug and Jung characterize the fact of experiential ownership as a conceptual truth or a matter of logical necessity, what they say can be accommodated by (1) above. I agree with (1), but that is not my notion of the fact of experiential ownership. For me, the fact of experiential ownership is an empirical fact: it is not just that every phenomenal state has a subject; rather, it concerns exactly who is the subject of a specific experience in a given situation. For example, right now, it is me, not you, who is experiencing back pains. So, the fact of experiential ownership is captured and fixed not by (1) but by (3) in my argument above; i.e., the question “who is the subject of that particular phenomenal state?” can be answered by ascertaining which particular subject has first-personal access to that state. Second, I would not characterize the sense of experiential ownership as concerning “the content of a phenomenal state” (Haug & Jung this collection, p. 5). As I stated in the target paper (Liang this collection, pp. 6–7), the representational content and the phenomenal character of a phenomenal state belong to the what-component of that state. The sense of experiential ownership is exclusively about the who-component, which is captured by (4) in my argument. Third, central to my argument is that (3) and (4) are not equivalent: as in FB’s case of somatoparaphrenia, feeling sensations is one thing, but whether she experiences herself as the subject of those sensations could be another. Misrepresentation may occur in one’s sense of self-as-subject when there is a mismatch between (3) and (4), i.e., when the sense of experiential ownership fails to pick out the same subject as the one settled by (3). As I suggested, the best way to describe FB’s case is that, while the fact of her experiential ownership is intact, her sense of experiential ownership fails to represent that fact. Given these remarks, the first four premises of Haug & Jung’s argument (on p. 5 of their commentary) seem to be problematic.
The second issue is about whether the sense of experiential ownership, as a phenomenal state, is eligible to serve as a bearer of IEM.[2] Haug and Jung insist that self-ascriptions relevant to IEM must be an explicit judgment (or belief) in an inference. However, it is not obvious that this restriction is mandatory. Given that my focus is on how to understand the sense of self-as-subject, I think that what is crucial for IEM is that the self-ascriptions are justified on first-personal grounds, e.g., introspection, somatosensation, proprioception, etc. (cf. footnote 19 of the target paper). As the examiners of FB said: “The patient was blindfolded and instructed to say ‘yes’ when she felt a touch and ‘no’ when she did not feel any touch” (Bottini et al. 2002, p. 251). When FB said “yes” based on her sense of experiential ownership, there is no reason why this response shouldn’t count as a self-ascription. If we wish, we can reconstruct FB’s response in propositional form: I am mistaken in reporting “yes” during the test (ii) because, although I do know of someone that feels the sensations (via first-personal access), I am mistaken in thinking about who that person is. This seems to be a clear threat to IEM.
Also, it is worth pointing out that not all defenders of IEM think that self-ascriptions must explicitly be in propositional form. According to what may be called the Pre-reflective Account (Legrand 2006, 2007, 2010; Gallagher 2012; Zahavi 2005), at the pre-reflective level, the sense of self-as-subject is a constitutive component of the conscious state rather than an intentional object of consciousness. This phenomenological structure makes the sense of self-as-subject identification-free and hence enjoys IEM: when I am pre-reflectively conscious of myself-as-subject, I cannot be wrong about whether I am the subject of experiences. For the proponent of this account, making judgments about one’s sense of self-as-subject would count as reflective rather than pre-reflective self-consciousness, and hence ceases to be identification-free (Gallagher 2012, pp. 207–209). Given these considerations, I believe that the premises of Haug and Jung’s argument for the ineligibility of IEM-P are not as firm as they might think.[3]
The third issue is whether the specific case of somatoparaphrenia and the body swap illusion that I discussed are genuine counterexamples to IEM. The way that Haug and Jung oppose my counterexamples is related to our dispute above concerning whether IEM has to be in the form of judgment. Haug and Jung define “judgment” as referring to a whole inference and “belief” as the conclusion of an inference. They then use their definitions to articulate a version of IEM and the necessary conditions for falsifying it. I concede that I don’t see why their account is obligatory for investigating the connection between IEM and the sense of self-as-subject. IEM has many varieties (cf. Liang this collection, pp. 7–8 and footnote 17). In my paper (Liang this collection, pp. 2 and 6), I did not claim that the two counterexamples would undermine all versions of IEM. It was “experiential immunity” in its de re and which-object forms that came under my attack. According to experiential immunity, when I am aware of a phenomenal state through first-personal access, I cannot be wrong about whether it is me who feels it. This variety of IEM focuses on phenomenal states rather than judgments, and a key feature is that it is relative to first-personal access, such as introspection, somatosensation, and proprioception. This feature accommodates a widely accepted view that whether a self-ascription enjoys IEM depends on its grounds (Pryor 1999; Coliva 2006). The feature, however, is omitted from Haug and Jung’s account, which indicates that their version of IEM is different from my target.
Haug and Jung argue that FB’s case is not a genuine counterexample because she did not judge “I am being touched on my hand”, and hence the necessary conditions for falsifying their version of IEM are not met. However, the perplexity of this case is not why FB felt nothing when she expected that she would be touched, but why she felt the sensations when she expected that her niece would be touched. So, when FB reported feeling the sensation in test (ii), a more appropriate reconstruction of FB’s self-ascription would be: “I am being touched on my niece’s hand.” She was wrong because in fact it was her own hand being touched by the researcher, not her niece’s hand. Then, my interpretation in the paper suggested that, using Haug & Jung’s formulation, “the only reason why she was wrong was because she misidentified her own sensations with someone else’s” (this collection, p. 9). This provides a falsification of experiential immunity.
Regarding the case of the body swap illusion, Haug and Jung argue that this is simply a case of mispredication. Instead of adding in more conceptual analyses to compete for the best interpretation of the study by Petkova & Ehrsson (2008), I will briefly describe a set of new experiments that combine the RHI and the body swap illusion. They explicitly address the Wittgenstein Question and measure the sense of experiential ownership. Before doing so, let me reply to the last issue raised by Haug and Jung.
The last issue concerns whether IEM is merely a trivial property. Here, I will limit myself to one remark. Haug and Jung consider IEM as purely a linguistic rule regarding how to use the first-person pronoun. Although many philosophers share this view, the goal of my paper was not to attack a linguistic rule. The opponents that I have in mind are those who try to use IEM to distinguish between the sense of self-as-object and the sense of self-as-subject. For these philosophers, IEM is not trivial at all. It matters to them and it matters to me if it turns out that the sense of self-as-subject really is fundamentally different from the sense of self-as-object. Because if the answer is yes, it would be very significant to consider whether the necessary and sufficient conditions for these two types of self-consciousness are distinct, and whether they are generated by different (though partially overlapping) neural mechanisms.