Obsessive Thoughts and Inner Voices

My concern is this paper is to consider the nature of obsessive thoughts with the aim of getting a clearer idea about the extent to which they are rightly identified as passive or as active. The nature of obsessive thoughts is of independent interest, but my concern with the question is also rooted in a general concern to map the extent of mental activity, and to defend the importance and centrality of a view of self-knowledge that appeals to agency. I hold that much of our mental lives is active, and that the distinctive knowledge we have of our own minds is in many cases best explained by appealing to agency. Along with many others, I take knowledge of our actions and activities to be distinctive. We know our actions and activities in a way that we do not know anything else, and in a way that is distinctively and essentially self-conscious. I am not going to attempt to offer a proper account of what I take an action to be, nor of how we know them as we do. But, very roughly, I take actions to be psychological events—some overt physical, some covert mental—that are the selections an agent makes against options, where her so selecting is her taking that selection as apt. Often, but not always, an agent’s taking her selection as apt is her selecting on the basis of reasons. Further, I hold that selecting as apt gives a subject immediate self-conscious agent’s awareness of the action that is her selecting. The claim is that once we appreciate that there are mental actions and activities, as well as physical actions and activities, we can give an explanation much of our self-knowledge that draws on an understanding of our knowledge of actions in general.2 Let us call a view that explains self-knowledge by appealing to agency, the agency view of self-knowledge. We can distinguish between an extreme and a