Crossed Wires about Crossed Wires: Somatosensation and Immunity to Error through Misidentification

Abstract

Suppose that the following describes an intelligible scenario. A subject is wired up to another's body in such a way that she has bodily experiences ‘as from the inside’ caused by states and events in the other body, that are subjectively indistinguishable from ordinary somatosensory perception of her own body. The supposed intelligibility of such so‐called crossed wire cases constitutes a significant challenge to the claim that our somatosensory judgements are immune to error through misidentification relative to uses of the first person pronoun. After all, the subject in this case is liable to commit precisely the sort of error ruled out by such a claim. In this paper I argue that the proponent of this challenge must establish at least two things: that the subject is committing an error of misidentification, and that her judgement shares its epistemic grounds with our ordinary somatosensory judgements. Neither condition, I argue, can be reached from the stipulations permitted into the starting descriptions of the cases.

The Feeling of Bodily Ownership

“…Many argue that bodily awareness cannot ground judgments that are absolutely IEM due to the possibility of crossed wire (Evans, 1982, p. 221) and body swap (Shoemaker, 1963) cases. Full consideration of these challenges is beyond the scope of this paper, but see Salje (2017) for recent discussion.…”