Motivation and Content of the Special Issue
It is against this backdrop that this special issue finds its motivating questions. In this
section we present these, and show of how various contributors address them.
First off: If we experience thoughts in our head, how can they seem to not be our
own? That is the central paradox of thought insertion. To understand this, though, we
need to explore what thoughts are and how we know them in the first place. In his
paper, Johannes Roessler outlines two views about knowledge of our own thoughts,
attributed to Gilbert Ryle. The first, is that we are Balive^ to our own thoughts in the
Bserial process^ of thinking, and the second is that we can Beavesdrop^ on our inner
speech, and interpret our own utterances in much the same was as we interpret the
utterances of others. Roessler argues that the former is the correct account of how we
know that (and what) we are thinking for the vast majority of the time. On this reading,
unusual cases such as thought insertion depend on a breakdown in this experience, such
that thoughts are not intelligible in terms of an ongoing serial process.