How Close Are We to Understanding the Sense of Body Ownership?

There has been much discussion about the sense of ownership recently. It is a very controversial topic and even minimal consensus seems hard to achieve. In this paper we attempt to assess the prospects of achieving a better understanding of what is meant by ‘sense of body ownership’. In order to do so, we begin by addressing an objection on which the notion itself might depend, coming from the distinction between ‘inflationary’ and ‘deflationary’ accounts of the sense of body ownership. Once the path is clear, we will consider some influential ways of approaching the issue, which propose grounding the sense of ownership in the spatiality of bodily sensations, the affective dimension of bodily experience, and in its spatial dimension, among other things. We expect the results of our discussion will allow us to both identify the strongest candidates for an account of the sense of body ownership and to determine the challenges that must be met by competing explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]