Bodily illusions and representationalism

One motivation for adopting a representational theory of bodily awareness are cases in which our bodies appear other than they are. The representationalist proposes to account for such cases in terms of misrepresentation. In this paper I argue that putative bodily illusions fall into two categories: either they do not involve illusory bodily awareness experience, even though we may have reason to think that experience in one of the exteroceptive senses is illusory; or, we can allow that the appearance of the body is misleading, without accepting that our experiences misrepresent the body and its properties. This being so, bodily illusions offer us no argument for representationalism.

The senses and illusions of spatial location

​Spatial ventriloquism and the Rubber Hand Illusion induce conflicts between spatial cues in different sensory systems. Such ‘inter-sensory spatial conflicts’ are typically taken to generate spatial illusions. In this paper I examine the different ways we might think of the resulting perceptual experiences as illusory and evaluate the relevant empirical evidence, allowing that such conflicts may be taken to generate a cross-modal spatial illusion, but arguing against the prevailing assumption that at the same time they generate illusions within a sense modality.