Abstract

An attribution of mental agency is defined as the act of assigning the initiation or authorship of a first personal thought to a specific agent in order to generate sufficient degrees of control over our own cognitive life. Although this strategy is crucial to distinguish different types of cognitive states - such as deliberations, reasonings, judgements, among others a number of authors have suggested that it is also crucial to understand psychopathological cognitive experiences in psychosis. This paper explores the way in which the subjective structure of thought insertion can be used as a strategy to evaluate the merits of theories aiming at explaining the nature and architecture of attributions of mental agency. After examining some of the most fundamental aspects of the two dominant theories in current literature, I suggest that, despite the contributions made by such theories to the discussion, none of them is able to face the challenge in a plausible way.