Imagination, delusion and hallucinations

Chris Frith has argued that a loss of the: sense of agency is central to schizophrenia. This suggests a connection between hallucinations and delusions on the one hand, and the misidentification of the: subject's imaginings as perceptions and beliefs on the other. In particular, understanding the mechanisms that underlie imagination may help us to explain the: puzzling phenomena of thought insertion and withdrawal. Frith sometimes states his argument in terms of a loss of metarepresentational capacity in schizophrenia. I argue that this formulation is unhelpful.