Rasmus Thybo Jensen
University of Copenhagen
Can you see my phenomenal body?
Facing certain thought experiments and pathological cases Gallagher has argued that a principled immunity to error through misidentification is limited to what he with Merleau-Ponty calls the phenomenal body: On the basis of my kinesthetic experience I can in principle be wrong about who’s physical arm is moving but I cannot be wrong about from whose embodied perspective I experience an arm moving. For Gallagher the relation between my kinesthetic experience and my actual arm is a merely contingent causal relation: In principle I could have had the very same experience had no arm been there. In so far as we accept that if X contingenly causes Y then Y is merely contingently related to X, Gallagher’s picture implies that a bodily movement caused by an intention and accompanied by a sense of agency stands in a merely contingent relation to the intention and the experience of agency. This corollary however creates a problem for Gallagher’s claim that we can directly perceive the intentions and emotions of another person, it now seems to be ruled out that your body can directly reveal aspects of your mental life to me when I perceive it. In order to hold on to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that I can see your phenomenal body I propose that we adopt what Overgaard has called a disjunctive account of behaviour. Such a model not only allows us to make it intelligible how aspects of another person’s mental life can be directly perceived, it also provides us with a novel response to the counterexamples that led Gallagher to regard the relation between the phenomenal and the objective body as merely contingent.