Abstract
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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Synthese |
| Volume | 192 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| Pages (from-to) | 3313-3337 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| ISSN | 0039-7857 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Oct 2015 |
Keywords
- Faculty of Humanities
- Feeling of agency
- Comparator mechanisms
- Motor cognition
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Philosophy of action
- Philosophy of science