Mind and Language 20 (2):241-57 (2005) |Abstract||Anosognosia is
literally ‘unawareness of or failure to acknowledge one’s hemi-
plegia or other disability’ (OED). Etymology would suggest the
meaning ‘lack of knowledge of disease’ so that anosognosia would
include any denial of impairment, such as denial of blindness
(Anton’s syndrome). But Babinski, who introduced the term in
1914, applied it only to patients with hemiplegia who fail to
acknowledge their paralysis. Most commonly, this is failure to
acknowledge paralysis of the left side of the body following
damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. In this paper, we
shall mainly be concerned with anosognosia for hemiplegia. But
we shall also use the term ‘anosognosia’ in an inclusive way to
encompass lack of knowledge or acknowledgement of any
impairment. Indeed, in the construction ‘anosognosia for X’, X
might even be anosognosia for some Y.| |Keywords||Amnesia Belief
Delusion Epistemology Impairment| |Through your
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