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Agency and Self-Awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology
In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims
to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness.
to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness.
- GenresPhilosophyPsychology
428 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
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May 14, 2022
This is a fascinating collection of papers. The intro chapter lays out the questions that serve as themes across the collection. What is the relationship between self-awareness and action? Do we have to be aware of what we're doing in order to have control over it, or to have free will? The latter is apparently insufficient; there's a neurological condition of anarchic hand syndrome, on which a person is aware of what their hand is doing, but cannot control it, and it does things against their desires (e.g., their own hand buttons down their shirt, when they try to button it voluntarily up with the other hand).
But in the case of anarchic hand syndrome, a patient is aware of what their own hand is doing, in a way that differs from their awareness of other people's actions, which happens on the basis of observation. It seems that the patient can 'feel' their own actions 'from the inside,' even if they're not in control. So another way to frame our question is, how should we characterize normal 'inner' knowledge, so that we can characterize the anarchic hand case as deviant? We can split this question into two further questions about the causal explanation we'd give to actions in the normal case, and about how we come to know or explain our actions as such. Some of the authors in this anthology set out to address, how are these questions related?
Another fascinating question pursued by some of the authors is, what can we learn about normal cases of action by studying abnormal cases? It turns out most of the philosophical and psychological literature of control, in action, define control in opposition to one of three different types of failure of control: pathological (e.g., anarchic hand syndrome), slips of action (e.g., everyday absent-mindedness), and infant failures of control (e.g., a child might automatically respond to commands in Simon Says even when they are told to inhibit responses). Is there a unitary phenomenon of control that can be identified, given the variety of these types of failures? Why do we find only the pathological cases surprising, and not slips of action?
When we explain actions, we can give person-level, reason-giving explanations (e.g., I pushed the boulder because I wanted to see if I was strong enough to move it), or causal explanations that appeal to subpersonal variables (e.g., I shivered because my body has an evolutionary adaptation to do so when it is below a certain temperature). But sometimes it also seems that we don't have reasons for doing something, and yet there is a certain person-level explanation: we represent the desired outcome and let this representation control our bodily motions. We can also make a distinction between reasons or motives that are activated by the environment v. by conscious deliberation. Making these distinctions paves ways for explaining these different types of failures of control. Generally, human infants' development into adulthood involves a progression from having their actions be controlled by contingencies of their environments, to controlling their actions themselves in the basis of grasp of rules or employing consciously-formed intentions.
How is it that we have special knowledge of our own actions, which differs from the type of knowledge we have of others' actions, and how should we characterize this special knowledge? Some proposals might be that we are aware of our trying to action, which has a phenomenal presence that is like proprioceptive sensations. Or, we are aware of our actions by virtue of having reasons for acting; we grasp these reasons directly, or hold them prior to action, in a way for which there is no analogue to be found in the case of observing others' actions.
Here are summaries of some favorite chapters. In "The sense of agency: awareness and ownership of action" Marcel argues awareness of what we're doing and our sense that we're agents of our actions are constitutively linked. This sense of agency is one form of self-consciousness of our bodies, and it serves as a special route through which we access information about ourselves. We lack this sense when it comes to other people, so we cannot access their intentions and understand what they're doing in the same way in which we can do with respect to ourselves. Marcel also explores what this sense of agency consists in. He argues that it is based in our awareness of ourselves being the source of action, in a way analogous to our awareness that we are the perspectival sources of visual information in the domain of visual perception. This is more and different than awareness that we are trying or of our intentions.
In "Intentional action and self-awareness" Roessler points out that when we perform some action, only under certain descriptions of it is it intentional (e.g., when my mouth moves upwards in a smile, this is intention under the description that I smiled to calm my friend down, but it is not under the description that the muscles of my mouth contract in a certain way). The author asks, how do we come to identify these descriptions that make our action intentional? Is it based in perceptual experience or some mode of introspection or proprioception? In "Action: awareness, ownership, and knowledge," Peacocke argues that our proprioceptive source of knowledge of our action can be fallible, opposing what actually happens. He argues this indicates that such inner subjective awareness precedes our bodily movements, and this constitutes our minimal sense of ownership over our actions (this sense doesn't require that we consciously hold intentions or put in effort). This explains why having a goal or reason isn't sufficient for agency.
As a whole, readers interested in Anscombe's Intention or philosophy of action generally will love this anthology. Most of the papers are able to combine empirical, scientific findings and philosophical reasoning in an ideal and plausible way. Anscombe theorized without any appeal to cognitive science, and these papers nicely show that by doing so, we can draw an array of finer-grained distinctions of traditional concepts in philosophy of action; these distinctions help us ask more nuanced questions and make progress on understanding the nature of agency and our feeling of agency.
But in the case of anarchic hand syndrome, a patient is aware of what their own hand is doing, in a way that differs from their awareness of other people's actions, which happens on the basis of observation. It seems that the patient can 'feel' their own actions 'from the inside,' even if they're not in control. So another way to frame our question is, how should we characterize normal 'inner' knowledge, so that we can characterize the anarchic hand case as deviant? We can split this question into two further questions about the causal explanation we'd give to actions in the normal case, and about how we come to know or explain our actions as such. Some of the authors in this anthology set out to address, how are these questions related?
Another fascinating question pursued by some of the authors is, what can we learn about normal cases of action by studying abnormal cases? It turns out most of the philosophical and psychological literature of control, in action, define control in opposition to one of three different types of failure of control: pathological (e.g., anarchic hand syndrome), slips of action (e.g., everyday absent-mindedness), and infant failures of control (e.g., a child might automatically respond to commands in Simon Says even when they are told to inhibit responses). Is there a unitary phenomenon of control that can be identified, given the variety of these types of failures? Why do we find only the pathological cases surprising, and not slips of action?
When we explain actions, we can give person-level, reason-giving explanations (e.g., I pushed the boulder because I wanted to see if I was strong enough to move it), or causal explanations that appeal to subpersonal variables (e.g., I shivered because my body has an evolutionary adaptation to do so when it is below a certain temperature). But sometimes it also seems that we don't have reasons for doing something, and yet there is a certain person-level explanation: we represent the desired outcome and let this representation control our bodily motions. We can also make a distinction between reasons or motives that are activated by the environment v. by conscious deliberation. Making these distinctions paves ways for explaining these different types of failures of control. Generally, human infants' development into adulthood involves a progression from having their actions be controlled by contingencies of their environments, to controlling their actions themselves in the basis of grasp of rules or employing consciously-formed intentions.
How is it that we have special knowledge of our own actions, which differs from the type of knowledge we have of others' actions, and how should we characterize this special knowledge? Some proposals might be that we are aware of our trying to action, which has a phenomenal presence that is like proprioceptive sensations. Or, we are aware of our actions by virtue of having reasons for acting; we grasp these reasons directly, or hold them prior to action, in a way for which there is no analogue to be found in the case of observing others' actions.
Here are summaries of some favorite chapters. In "The sense of agency: awareness and ownership of action" Marcel argues awareness of what we're doing and our sense that we're agents of our actions are constitutively linked. This sense of agency is one form of self-consciousness of our bodies, and it serves as a special route through which we access information about ourselves. We lack this sense when it comes to other people, so we cannot access their intentions and understand what they're doing in the same way in which we can do with respect to ourselves. Marcel also explores what this sense of agency consists in. He argues that it is based in our awareness of ourselves being the source of action, in a way analogous to our awareness that we are the perspectival sources of visual information in the domain of visual perception. This is more and different than awareness that we are trying or of our intentions.
In "Intentional action and self-awareness" Roessler points out that when we perform some action, only under certain descriptions of it is it intentional (e.g., when my mouth moves upwards in a smile, this is intention under the description that I smiled to calm my friend down, but it is not under the description that the muscles of my mouth contract in a certain way). The author asks, how do we come to identify these descriptions that make our action intentional? Is it based in perceptual experience or some mode of introspection or proprioception? In "Action: awareness, ownership, and knowledge," Peacocke argues that our proprioceptive source of knowledge of our action can be fallible, opposing what actually happens. He argues this indicates that such inner subjective awareness precedes our bodily movements, and this constitutes our minimal sense of ownership over our actions (this sense doesn't require that we consciously hold intentions or put in effort). This explains why having a goal or reason isn't sufficient for agency.
As a whole, readers interested in Anscombe's Intention or philosophy of action generally will love this anthology. Most of the papers are able to combine empirical, scientific findings and philosophical reasoning in an ideal and plausible way. Anscombe theorized without any appeal to cognitive science, and these papers nicely show that by doing so, we can draw an array of finer-grained distinctions of traditional concepts in philosophy of action; these distinctions help us ask more nuanced questions and make progress on understanding the nature of agency and our feeling of agency.
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