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Agentive awareness is not sensory awareness

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Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the conscious awareness one has of oneself as acting, i.e., agentive awareness, is not a type of sensory awareness. After providing some set up in Sect. 1, I move on in Sect. 2 to sketch a profile of sensory agentive experiences (SAEs) as representational states with sensory qualities by which we come to be aware of ourselves as performing actions. In Sect. 3, I critique two leading arguments in favor of positing such sensory experiences: the argument from pathology and the argument from cognitive impenetrability. Since neither of these arguments succeeds, the case for positing SAEs is dealt a significant blow. I proceed in Sect. 4 to advance my positive argument against SAEs. The argument runs as follows: If SAEs exist, then they must exist in some sensory modality or set of sensory modalities. Either the relevant sensory modalities are ones that we already recognize, or they are novel sensory modalities. I will argue that neither of these options is workable, and so we have nowhere to locate SAEs. Agentive awareness is not sensory awareness.

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Notes

  1. This brand of self-awareness has gone under a number of other labels as well, most popularly, “the sense of agency” (e.g., de Vignemont and Fourneret 2004; Gallagher 2000; Marcel 2003; Peacocke 2003). Others include “the phenomenology of agency” (e.g., Pacherie 2008), “control consciousness” (e.g., Mandik 2010), and “action consciousness” (e.g., Prinz 2007).

  2. Though this first argument, if it were successful, would not by itself be sufficient for establishing the existence of sensory agentive experiences, it is worth considering here, since some theorists may be tempted to appeal to it in order to move towards that conclusion.

  3. Certainly there is considerable dispute that the converse holds. For example, MacPherson (2012) argues that there is at least one case of color perception in which one’s beliefs about the typical colors of objects affects the colors that those objects appear to have, and that the interpretation of this result that appeals to cognitive penetration of color perception cannot be dismissed.

  4. I set aside for now mental actions such as mentally multiplying twelve times thirteen or imagining a pink elephant. It is worth noting, however, that sensory approaches to agentive awareness have difficulty accounting for such actions, especially when grounded in the comparator model, since it is unclear that forward modeling takes place in these cases given that there is no reason for a motor command to be generated (though see Campbell 1999).

  5. I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for directing me to this study.

  6. Though see also Prinz (2012, pp. 237–239) in which he notes some problems for the Prinz (2007) view, and ends up abandoning it in favor of a deflationary approach to agentive awareness on which there is no experience of authorship, but simply experiences of our actions and their disruption.

  7. It is worth noting that Prinz’s (2007) original proposal is that SAEs arise from the match between the forward model prediction and sensory feedback. But he revises it to exclusively rely on forward model predictions in order to accommodate cases in which agentive experiences seem to be present despite there being no sensory feedback to match with a forward model prediction, as in the case of deafferented individuals and when one is under anaesthesia.

  8. This reasoning seems problematic, however, since the two could be compared simply in terms of their representational content, in the way that a belief about something might be compared with a perception of that thing in terms of the respective content of each state, despite having different representational formats. I set aside this worry here, however, to focus on other aspects of Prinz’s view.

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Acknowledgments

I’m very grateful to Jacob Berger, Grace Helton, David Rosenthal, Frédérique de Vignemont, and audiences at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and NYU for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Philosophy Department, Fordham University, 527 E. 6th St., Apt. BW, New York, NY, 10009, USA

    Myrto I. Mylopoulos

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Mylopoulos, M.I. Agentive awareness is not sensory awareness. Philos Stud 172, 761–780 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0332-x

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