TY - JOUR
T1 - The feeling of agency hypothesis: a critique
AU - Grünbaum, Thor
PY - 2015/10/1
Y1 - 2015/10/1
N2 - A dominant view in contemporary cognitive neuroscience is that low-level, comparator-based mechanisms of motor control produce a distinctive experience often called the feeling of agency (the FoA-hypothesis). An opposing view is that comparator-based motor control is largely non-conscious and not associated with any particular type of distinctive phenomenology (the simple hypothesis). In this paper, I critically evaluate the nature of the empirical evidence researchers commonly take to support FoA-hypothesis. The aim of this paper is not only to scrutinize the FoA-hypothesis and data supposed to support it; it is equally to argue that experimentalists supporting the FoA-hypothesis fail to establish that the experimental outcomes are more probable given the FoA-hypothesis than given the simpler hypothesis.
AB - A dominant view in contemporary cognitive neuroscience is that low-level, comparator-based mechanisms of motor control produce a distinctive experience often called the feeling of agency (the FoA-hypothesis). An opposing view is that comparator-based motor control is largely non-conscious and not associated with any particular type of distinctive phenomenology (the simple hypothesis). In this paper, I critically evaluate the nature of the empirical evidence researchers commonly take to support FoA-hypothesis. The aim of this paper is not only to scrutinize the FoA-hypothesis and data supposed to support it; it is equally to argue that experimentalists supporting the FoA-hypothesis fail to establish that the experimental outcomes are more probable given the FoA-hypothesis than given the simpler hypothesis.
KW - Faculty of Humanities
KW - Feeling of agency
KW - Comparator mechanisms
KW - Motor cognition
KW - Cognitive neuroscience
KW - Philosophy of action
KW - Philosophy of science
U2 - 10.1007/s11229-015-0704-6
DO - 10.1007/s11229-015-0704-6
M3 - Journal article
SN - 0039-7857
VL - 192
SP - 3313
EP - 3337
JO - Synthese
JF - Synthese
IS - 10
ER -