Abstract
This article is about how to describe an agent’s awareness of her bodily movements when she is aware of executing an action for a reason. Against current orthodoxy, I want to defend the claim that the agent’s experience of moving has an epistemic place in the agent’s awareness of her own intentional action. In “The problem,” I describe why this should be thought to be problematic. In “Motives for denying epistemic role,” I state some of the main motives for denying that bodily awareness has any epistemic role to play in the content of the agent’s awareness of her own action. In “Kinaesthetic awareness and control,” I sketch how I think the experience of moving and the bodily sense of agency or control are best described. On this background, I move on to present, in “Arguments for epistemic role,” three arguments in favour of the claim that normally the experience of moving is epistemically important to one’s awareness of acting intentionally. In the final “Concluding remarks,” I round off by raising some of the worries that motivated the denial of my claim in the first place.
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Notes
For a discussion of the distinction between enabling and justificatory roles, see Falvey (2000).
Among people endorsing the claim that bodily movements are neutral with respect to agency we find O’Shaughnessy (1973), Hornsby (1980, Chaps. 1–3), Armstrong (1981, pp. 74f.), McGinn (1982, Chap. 5), Ginet (1990, p. 23), Pietroski (1998, § 3), and Lowe (2000, Chap. 9). For the idea that action-awareness is non-inferential, see Anscombe (2000, p. 54), Hossack (2003), and O’Brien (2003).
For this idea, see O’Brien (2003). Even though I think this motive is completely unfounded, I include it here because it is present in the literature. There are, however, good reasons not to accept it. Firstly, there is no phenomenological warrant for the claim that the sensory experience is delayed. We simply do not kinaesthetically experience our movements as chasing after the actual movement. Secondly, there might even be evidence for the fact that “sensory” experience of moving precedes the actual movement (in terms of overt limb movement or muscle contraction). Some “sensory” awareness might be generated in advance by some neural sensory-prediction mechanism. For these reasons I don’t take idea of time lack to constitute any real challenge to my proposal, and will not return to it again.
For references, see note 4.
For a brief review of some of the relevant literature, see Jeannerod and Pacherie (2004). The basic idea is that voluntary movements have a characteristic motoric fingerprint in terms of distinctive patterns of acceleration and deceleration.
For a similar continuum conception, see Husserl (1973, Beilage 25).
In my use of the term “sense of agency” I follow the usage of recent discussions by, e.g., Gallagher (2000). It refers to the agent’s experience of bodily activity.
See Frankfurt (1978).
See Della Sala et al. (1994), Marchetti and Della Sala (1998). In the latter article they write: “The patients are aware of the bizarre and potentially hazardous behaviour of their hand but cannot inhibit it. They often refer to the feeling that one of their hands behaves as if it has a will of its own, but never deny that this capricious hand is part of their own body” (p. 196). And later: “[The patients] are always well aware of their odd behaviour and consciously try to overrule the unwanted action by appeasing the wayward hand” (p. 202). For a different and conflicting account, see Riddoch et al. (2000, esp. p. 607).
For this point, see Haggard (2005).
I agree with Jeannerod and Pacherie (2004) that ordinarily problems of action-attribution or ownership do not arise for our own ordinary motor acts. But I disagree with their Rylean conclusion that this must mean that ordinarily motor acts are experienced as belonging to nobody. The explicit form of self-attribution rests on an implicit sense of ownership. For ideas congenial to mine, see Bermúdez (1998, Chaps. 5–7), and Zahavi (2005, Chap. 5).
Admittedly, here it is not kinaesthetic awareness but merely kinaesthetic information that plays the role of enabling intentional action. I think this move is defensible because if information alone can do the job, then it seems as if by assigning awareness only a enabling role this might in the end make it completely epiphenomenal. Awareness does no real work here. This points to another important problem. When it comes to awareness of aspects of our intentional behaviour – and surely the active bodily movement is an aspect – what sense does it actually make to distinguish between an enabling and an epistemic function? I think none. For the sake of argument I have followed my opponent in making the distinction; but in the end it should be dropped.
For a related proposal, see Peacocke (2003).
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Johannes Roessler, Dan Zahavi, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful discussions and criticism of earlier versions of the paper. The research for this paper was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation and the Carlsberg Foundation.
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Grunbaum, T. The body in action. Phenom Cogn Sci 7, 243–261 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9072-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9072-0