Abstract
In bodily awareness body parts are felt to occupy locations relative to the rest of the body. Bodily sensations are felt to be, in Brian O’Shaughnessy’s terms ‘in-a-certain-body-part-at-a-position-in-body-relative-physical-space’. In this paper I put forward a dispositional account of the structure of the spatial content of bodily awareness, which takes inspiration from Gareth Evans’s account of egocentric spatial content in The Varieties of Reference (1982). On the Dispositional View, bodily awareness experiences have spatial content in virtue of a set of connections having been established between somatosensory and proprioceptive inputs on the one hand, and motor outputs on the other hand. This kind of account, according to which spatial content depends constitutively on bodily action, has been challenged by a set of neurological cases and behavioural studies on healthy subjects. The evidence has been used to motivate a functional distinction between two kinds of body representation: representations for perception and representations for action. I review and assess some of the main sources of evidence for this distinction, arguing that the evidence presents a challenge to the dispositional view only if we accept the unjustified assumption that differences in task performance can only be explained in terms of a difference in representation. I close by proposing, and offering some empirical support for, an alternative explanation of the empirical results. The availability of the alternative explanation means that further work is needed to establish whether or not there is any challenge to the Dispositional View.
Highlights
While we can gain information about the body through the exteroceptive senses, we receive various kinds of information about the current state of our bodies ‘from within’
By accounting for the difference in performance across the pairs of localization tasks in terms of recalibration, we offer an explanation of this particular set of experimental results that falls within a much more general account of the kind of mechanisms that must be in place to deal with sensory processing across different sensory systems in which spatial information is encoded in different formats, and which we need to appeal to in order to explain a wide range of behavioural effects involving vision, audition, touch and proprioception, as indicated above
I have tried to argue that the standard explanation of the empirical work underpinning this rests on assumptions about the kinds of tasks that enable us to measure where subjects feel parts of their body and bodily sensations to be, and where we must look for an explanation of differences in the performance of different kinds of task
Summary
While we can gain information about the body through the exteroceptive senses, we receive various kinds of information about the current state of our bodies ‘from within’. When I feel a pain in my neck, my experience is as of my neck hurting, where the body part that is felt to hurt—the neck—is felt to occupy a location relative to the rest of the body Bermúdez labels this the ‘connectedness’ of bodily awareness: “the spatial location of a bodily event is experienced relative to the disposition of the body as a whole” The spatial content of bodily awareness is integral to our conscious experiences of our bodies ‘from the inside’ It presents us with a structured relation between body parts and whole, such that sensations and the disposition of one’s limbs are presented as occurring within body-relative space. Though, might we account for this structuring of the spatial content of bodily awareness?
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