Phenom Cogn Sci (2008) 7:243261 DOI 10.

1007/s11097-007-9072-0 R E G U L A R A RT I C L E

The body in action

Thor Grunbaum

Published online: 15 September 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract This article is about how to describe an agents 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 agents experience of moving has an epistemic place in the agents 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 agents 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 ones 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. Keywords Bodily awareness . Intentional action . Epistemology of action . Sense of agency and ownership

Introduction This article is about how to describe an agents 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 agents experience of moving has an epistemic place in the agents awareness of her own intentional action. In The problem, I describe why this should be thought to be problematic. In Motives for denying
T. Grunbaum (*) Center for Subjectivity Research & Sect. for Philosophy, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: tgr@hum.ku.dk

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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 agents 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 ones 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.

The problem There is a problem about the role of the body in physical action. As in many other philosophical problems, there are two sides to this problem. The first side is this. It is intuitively appealing to think that our experiences of bodily movement in some way are involved in our awareness of what we are intentionally doing when we act intentionally. After all, when we perform physical actions, like uncorking a bottle of wine, we are doing something with our body, and when we do things with our body we can feel that we are doing things with our body. If I were to engage in some action, say, putting on my sun glasses, but felt no bodily sensations from my movements, I would abort the action in alarm not knowing what was going on. Or, if I were engaged in the action, and some other unexpected set of bodily sensations ensued, for example, sensations corresponding to waving ones arms enthusiastically from side to side, again I would be alarmed. In other words, there is a strong intuition in support of the claim that the experience of ones own bodily movements are somehow essential to ones appreciation of what one is intentionally doing. That is, at a first glance, the agents kinaesthetic awareness while acting plays some important role in her awareness of her own intentional physical action. The second side of the problem is this. Most philosophers of action and mind deny that bodily awareness plays any substantive role in the agents awareness of her own intentional action. We need to be careful here. The claim need not be that bodily awareness plays no role because when acting intentionally the agent is not aware of her body. Even though some philosophers do make this strong claim, the claim I want to focus on is rather that in acting the agents bodily awareness plays an enabling role but no epistemic or justificatory role.1 The point here is that even if we agree that bodily awareness is necessary for our intention formation and execution, and in that sense is an enabling condition for normal performance, we should still deny that it is by being aware of our bodily movements that we are aware of what we are intentionally doing. Bodily awareness does not justify our beliefs about what we are doing. In other words, even if we can form intentions and execute them successfully because of our awareness of our body, we have to accept that we do not know what we are currently doing because of any such bodily awareness. Hence, it might be partly because of my bodily awareness that I am able to uncork the bottle

For a discussion of the distinction between enabling and justificatory roles, see Falvey (2000).

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and to intend to do it now, but it is not because of my bodily awareness of moving thus-and-so that I am aware of uncorking the bottle now. In short our problem is as follows. Intuitively, it seems as if we are aware of what we are currently doing partly because of our kinaesthetic awareness and it seems that we do assign this bodily awareness some justificatory role in our understanding and ascription of intentional action. However, this is denied by most philosophers. People who have been thinking hard about this matter tell us that bodily awareness only plays an enabling role but no epistemic or justificatory role in our awareness of intentional action. In this paper, I will argue for the claim that awareness of ones own bodily movements plays both an enabling and an epistemic role in the awareness of ones own intentional action. But before presenting my case, let us first get a clearer grasp of some of the motives behind denying an epistemic role to the body.

Motives for denying epistemic role Some philosophers and cognitive scientists deny that bodily awareness plays any epistemic role simply because they deny that the agent has any awareness of her body.2 Their claim could be that we are only aware of our body when we attend to it and that our attentional capacities are limited. Therefore, when we perform simple physical actions like grasping a glass or posting a letter, we are attending to the object we are acting on and are unaware of our bodily movement. Albeit this view does deserve serious discussion, I will set it aside in this paper. As my discussion partner I will limit myself to views that as a minimum allows that normally, when an agent moves, she has some kinaesthetic awareness, regardless of where she places her attentional focus. More specifically the view that I am pitching my account against is the view that bodily awareness explains the agents ability to form and successfully execute intentions but that it does not explain her knowledge of her own current intentional action. The idea here is that the agent would not be able to intend and even less to execute the action of grasping that bottle in front of her, if she was not aware of how her body parts were placed in relations to each other and in relation to the bottle, and how all this changed in the course of executing the action. If the agent suddenly became completely numb, her action would break down. This is all very well, and seems to be confirmed by real life cases of people loosing their proprioceptive sense of their body, but it does nothing to prove the further claim that an agent is aware of her own current intentional action by being aware of how she is moving. It is not even partly because of my kinaesthetic sensations of hand movement that I know that I am grasping the bottle, and I cannot justify my judgement that I am grasping the bottle by saying that my arm is moving. In other words, bodily awareness plays no epistemic role in the content of the agents awareness of her own action. We can single out different motives for this dismissive view. First, there is the idea that the agents practical interest and understanding is at a distance from the

For such a position, see Jeannerod and Pacherie (2004) and Jeannerod (1999).

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details of her own bodily movements. The agent is immersed in doing something to the world, say, painting a wall yellow, so, effecting changes to the environment is what she cares about and is interested in. This means that the descriptions of the agents behaviour (under which it is intentional) that the agent appreciates and understands is world-involving and removed from the details of her body. It would be descriptions like dipping the brush in the paint, painting the wall, decorating my house, pleasing my wife, etc. It would be at this level that the agent could be said to be aware of her own action, and at this level that she understands and is able to enter into the exchange of asking for and giving reasons for action. The body does not enter into the agents practical deliberation, and she does not conceive of herself as performing this movement in order to put the brush in the bucket. Moreover, when being aware of painting the wall yellow, my awareness of moving my arm up and down does nothing to support my action-awareness. In so far as I am aware of moving my arm up and down, this awareness would go equally well with waving to my friend, doing gymnastics, etc. as it would with painting the wall yellow. Awareness of how one is moving is simply at the wrong level with respect to awareness of ones own action as intentional under some description.3 Second, there is the idea that not only is bodily awareness at the wrong level, it also has the wrong form. Awareness of ones action is awareness that one is doing something intentionally. I am aware of uncorking the bottle or of pleasing my wife. The content of agents action-awareness thus has a characteristic transitive structure of the agent acting with or on (or in respect to...) something. Ones awareness of bodily movement is different, it is thought. When I grasp the bottle I move my hand, which results in awareness that my hand moves. Here the content of my kinaesthetic awareness has an intransitive form: my hand is moving. The content of my kinaesthetic awareness is therefore thought to be neutral with respect to agency and could stay the same across cases of action and passive movement (as far as my kinaesthetic awareness goes, there need be no difference between stretching my arm while pointing at something and stretching it because of some accidental nerve twitch). Thus, in itself bodily awareness is not awareness of action. If we couple this assumption with the further assumption that the agents awareness of her own action is simple and non-inferential, then bodily awareness is effectively excluded from playing any epistemic role.4 Third, a motive for denying bodily awareness any epistemic role may come from the idea that awareness of action is spontaneous in the sense that it is simultaneous with or even precedes the point where the agent engages in her acting. Bodily awareness, being a form of sensory awareness, could not be like this. As a form of sensory awareness it has to await the workings of the sensory transmitters and the neural processing; it is delayed. Thus, if awareness of action was partly depending

This type of motivation finds a clear expression in Anscombe (2000, esp. pp. 5354). See also Moran (2004). Similar views are expressed by Gallagher and Marcel (1999).

Among people endorsing the claim that bodily movements are neutral with respect to agency we find OShaughnessy (1973), Hornsby (1980, Chaps. 13), Armstrong (1981, pp. 74f.), McGinn (1982, Chap. 5), Ginet (1990, p. 23), Pietroski (1998, 3), and Lowe (2000, Chap. 9). For the idea that actionawareness is non-inferential, see Anscombe (2000, p. 54), Hossack (2003), and OBrien (2003).

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on bodily awareness, agents would experience a certain time lack. But they do not; hence action-awareness must be epistemically independent of bodily awareness.5 Behind these three different motives for denying any epistemic role to kinaesthetic awareness lie not only specific assumptions about the nature of kinaesthetic awareness, but also different assumptions concerning the nature of action-awareness. It is thus assumed that the agents awareness has a content that is at a distance from the details of her bodily movement, that the agents awareness is simple and non-inferential, and that it is spontaneous. A discussion of these key assumptions would be important to a more complete account of the epistemology of action but fall outside the scope of this paper. Instead let me now turn to the description of bodily awareness.

Kinaesthetic awareness and control When I perform a physical action, I move my body and experience bodily movement. Let me now address the issue of how we best describe this kind of bodily awareness. Let bodily awareness be an umbrella term covering any awareness a person might have of her own body. This would include different types of bodily sensation (pain, itching, weird feelings in the stomach, etc.), dizziness, fatigue, as well as the experience of ones own bodily movement (here called kinaesthetic awareness). The question is how we best describe an agents kinaesthetic awareness. Some movements we make are active others are passive. Starting from this apparently innocent observation we often get the following false picture of kinaesthetic awareness. The observation makes it seem as if the activeness is something that qualifies some of our movements but not others. Our movements constitute a kind of common substratum for both our active and passive movements. The same movement could be present when I actively raise my arm and when somebody gives it a shove. If we furthermore think that our kinaesthetic experience is sensory feedback from sensory receptors in skin, muscles, and joints affected by the movement, it seems to force upon us the conclusion that the experience of movement is independent of the quality of activeness. Whatever the sense of activity or agency is supposed to be, it is not intrinsic to the content of the kinaesthetic experience which, therefore, is supposed to be in itself neutral with respect to agency.6 I think this conception of kinaesthetic awareness is false. I will not attempt to substantiate this claim (it deserves a serious and lengthy discussion on its own); let me just mention that as a phenomenological description it utterly misdescribes the
5 For this idea, see OBrien (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 dont take idea of time lack to constitute any real challenge to my proposal, and will not return to it again. 6

For references, see note 4.

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involved experiences and as a scientific account about the origin and processing of kinaesthetic information it seems to have been falsified.7 Instead of a substantive critique and refutation, let me offer an alternative description. On reflection we do not find that our kinaesthetic experiences are neutral with respect with agency. On the contrary, if we attempt to focus on the bodily experience of moving, we always experience our movements as more or less active. I want to emphasize two points. First, the content of the kinaesthetic awareness of an active movement is intrinsically active. The quality of being active is never something appended to a kinaesthetic content which is in itself neutral with respect to agency. We have an experience of activity not only in virtue of the ordinary pragmatic and purposive context of our kinaesthetic sensations, but the experience of activity is manifest even in the experience of movements occurring in contexts that are not obviously pragmatic. Take for instance those of my movements which belong to the class of what OShaughnessy calls sub-intentional action (1980, Chap. 10). This is the class of movements performed for no reason at all. That is, these movements are not executed in the context of trying to do something, nor are they themselves something the agent is trying to do; they are not intentional under any description. So, in the performance of these movements, we are not aware of any intention or trying. For example, I am at a lecture absorbed in the content of the talk. Suddenly, I notice that I have been moving my tongue around in my mouth for some time. In such cases, OShaughnessy tells us, we become aware not only that our tongue is moving, but also that we are ourselves moving it around. In other words, we become aware of an active movement. If OShaughnessys description of such cases is correct, then in such cases we cannot be aware of our active movement because we are conscious of an intention or a will to move or because we consciously try to move, since, as he describes these cases, we simply have no consciousness of intending or trying. We are only aware of the movement, so it must be this movement-awareness alone that is also an activity-awareness. If this is correct, then it appears that we have immediate experience of our own movements as something that is actively or passively happening. When somebody pushes my arm, I am not only aware of the movements of my arm, but also of whether this movement is active or passive. I do not have to consult any further experiential source in order to know if this was an active or passive movement. The conclusion is that we never live through kinaesthetic experiences that are neutral with respect to agency. Even at the level of sub-intentional kinaesthesia it is the case that our kinaesthetic experience is inherently experienced as active. The second point I want to emphasize is that the experience of active movement comes in degrees. The sense of agency is not a primitive onoff quality or qualia.8 If we compare our movement-experiences to each other, we can order our experiences in such a way that they form a continuum of experiences of bodily movement that
7

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.

The qualia view of agency is endorsed by Ginet (1990) and Hossack (2003). Recent neurophenomenological theories of agency come close to a qualia view; for example, Gallagher (2000) and Gallagher (2005, Chap. 8).

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are less and less active. Going from premeditated movements and passing by habitual actions, fast movement reactions to our surroundings, and conscious blinking of the eyes to truly passive movements such as in reflexes or when somebody pushes me. The experience of complete passivity might be a limit case, and when it occurs it is often as a shock, as the disturbing absence of control or agency. Ordinarily, we allow or at least predict the occurrence of a passive movement. But nowhere on this continuous agency-scale do we find mere movements, i.e., movements that are agency-neutral, a common substrate for both active and passive instances.9 The sense of agency or activeness intrinsic to the kinaesthetic awareness is best understood as a minimal sense of control.10 The sense an agent has of being the one guiding or controlling her own movement towards her goal. This is a minimal sense of control for it is a thin experience, hardly noticeable to the agent, and it need not involve any reflective, atttentional, or conceptual resources.11 Contrary to what seems often to be assumed, I do not think that an agents minimal sense of control or agency should be described as a quality attached or otherwise connected (be it intrinsically or not) only to the bodily movements. An agents minimal sense of controlling her own behaviour is a complex phenomenon qualifying the agents interaction with her environment in a way that can potentially involve any sensory modality. That an agents minimal sense of control of her own behaviour is more global than mere bodily motor control is shown by the following two examples. The first example is provided by cases of fast object-directed action that we find ourselves automatically completing even though we want to inhibit them. In order to test this situation experimentally, Pisella et al. (2000) designed an experiment where subjects were instructed to point to a green target and where, on some trials, subjects were instructed that if the target jumped they should stop their touching action. These trials were compared to trials where subjects were instructed to go ahead and touch the target. The result was that there was no significant difference in the corrective response between the two groups. Both groups corrected their movement in correspondence with the new target position almost equally fast. Thus, the subjects in the stop-trial could not help correcting their movement and touch the target. After touching the displaced target, subjects of the location-stop group were aware of their mistakes and spontaneously expressed strong frustration. Irrepressible motor corrections were thus driven toward the new target location (p. 730). Pissella et al. present us with what looks like a situation where the agents feel a certain loss of control. The agent is actively initiating an action, but in the course of carrying it out, conditions for its execution are no longer fulfilled, and the agent wants to stop it. This makes it apparent that she cannot stop it, i.e., she has no control over her movement which is controlled by some non-conscious automatic mechanism. She feels she is forced to complete the action even though she actively tries to prevent it. But the action is out of her hands, she is no longer its full controlling agent. If this is a viable description of the scenario, then I think this
9

For a similar continuum conception, see Husserl (1973, Beilage 25).

10

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 agents experience of bodily activity. See Frankfurt (1978).

11

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example elicits the fact that part of what it is to feel in control is a sense of being able to guide ones action towards its successful completion. This involves that if the agent becomes aware that her action is not on the right track, then she should be able to change or stop her action. In other words, I suggest that the notion of a minimal sense of control or agency involves some sense of ones conditional power to control: If the agent somehow registers that what she does is not what she intends to be doing, then she should be able to change or stop her action. This conditional structure of ones sense of control implies that the sense of control involves some form of continuous minimal sensory monitoring of ones behaviour. The second example is the case of blindsight. Perenin and Rossetti (1996) and Marcel (1998) investigated the ability of people with blindsight to process certain spatial stimuli presented to their blind field of vision. It was shown that the subjects processed information concerning the shape, orientation, and distance of the objects presented in their blind field. The subjects were thus able to grasp objects that they claimed they were completely unable to see. According to Marcel (1998), subjects insisted that they were not aware of the features of the object, even though their success in grasping the objects was well above chance level. They also expressed surprise concerning their own abilities. In another task, Marcel presented a word in the subjects blind field, showed them a list of words in their sighted field, and asked them to choose the word closest in meaning to the one presented in their blind field. Again the subjects claimed to be unaware of words presented in the blind field. Nevertheless, their success rate was above chance level. They were unable to give rational reasons for their choice of words, as one of the subjects said, she somehow felt forced to choose one word (p. 1574). In other words, it was not an experience of mere blind guesswork. It was more like the experience of being driven by a hidden force or unintelligible feeling. What might this situation be like for the blindsighted subject? Imagine the following scenario. In complete darkness, you are told, Catch this!, and you somehow skilfully catch the object. Each time somebody throws something at you from different directions you somehow manage to catch it. You have no idea of how you are doing it. You are aware of no sensory cues to act on, other than the verbal one. In a situation like this, you would intentionally initiate the action. Perhaps on hearing somebody telling you Catch this!, you just start to move in some accidental direction. In that sense you would have a sense of actively initiating the movement. You would, I suggest, nevertheless experience a certain loss of control of behaviour. You would experience that your arm was forced to move in a specific direction and that some strange, hidden power forced your fingers to curve in a certain way, etc. By contrast, in a normal catching-situation, you have visual contact with the object and by attending to the object you consciously allow the object to control certain parameters of your act. Direction and force of the movement, the finger-shaping, the timing, etc, is perfectly intelligible to you, because you can see or attend to the object of your action. Perceiving the object of action is thus important to our normal sense of control in ordinary object-directed intentional action. I want to take two points away from the discussion of these two examples: The first example shows, I submit, that control like the experience of control is a temporally extended and teleological business. In a particular environment I have to control my behaviour in such a way that it reaches its goal. This involves a constant

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sensitivity to environmental and psychological changes that might influence how I want to proceed. If my behaviour and experience of controlling it is to be attuned to such an environment, I must have a continuous awareness of my acting such that it is open to my changing or stopping it. The sense of ones own agency can therefore not lie merely in the sense of active initiation of movement. The second example shows us, I think, that the intelligibility to the agent of her motor action depends on perceptual access to ones environment. Even if we say that the agent does not explicitly control the finer adjustments of her motor behaviour directed at a particular environment, she does understand her motor behaviour because the environment is present or at least available to her. If she has no perceptual contact with her environment, her motor behaviour, the ground level of her intentional engagement with the world, will appear to her as unintelligible, and its success as a matter of pure luck. These two examples demonstrate, I submit, that a normal sense of control of ones physical behaviour in the course of ones ordinary dealings with the world is not merely a matter of a bodily sense of motor control. It might be true that intrinsic to the content of ones kinaesthetic experience is a sense of control (in some degree); this, however, is not the same as claiming that our normal sense of control is kinaesthetic. Our normal minimal sense of control of behaviour is more global, potentially involving any of the senses; the kinaesthetic awareness is a part of this global sense. However, even though the minimal sense of control has this broader, holistic structure, it is important to understand that for normally functioning agents, performing ordinary physical actions, the kinaesthetic experience plays a key role. The kinaesthetic experience has a constancy and continuous character that is not allotted to the other sensory modalities involved. The kinaesthetic experience is constant in the sense that it is involved in every normal bodily action in a way that, for example, vision is not. Some actions are performed in pitch blackness or with closed eyes. The kinaesthetic experience is continuous in the sense that it is present from the beginning to the end of the motor action in a way that, for example, auditory perception or vision is not. In many actions, we might temporarily not perceive the object. This special role of kinaesthesia in the holistic structure of bodily control can make it seem as if the minimal sense of control is almost exclusively related to the kinaesthetic experience. Let me sum up the main points of this section. 1. The kinaesthetic experience can in itself be an experience of activity. 2. This intrinsic sense of activity comes in degrees, ranging from a full sense of activity to the limit case of complete passivity. 3. This sense of activity is best described as minimal sense of controlling ones behaviour. 4. An agents minimal sense of controlling her behaviour has a holistic structure potentially involving any sensory modality. 5. The kinaesthetic sense of control has a special status in the normal sense of controlling ones behaviour. Hopefully, this should provide us with enough material to construct arguments in favour of the claim that kinaesthetic awareness has some epistemic weight with respect to our awareness of intentional action.

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Arguments for epistemic role I want to argue that it is partly in virtue of our kinaesthetic experiences that we are aware of what we are intentionally doing. I have two positive arguments and a negative one. Argument from control The first positive argument concerns our minimal conscious control. Our awareness of intentionally doing something is partly grounded on an awareness of control, at least a minimal sense of bodily control or agency. That is to say that to be aware of performing an intentional action is to be aware of something that you control, and this sense of control or agency does not have to be of a strong form involving conceptual resources and deliberate matching of intentions with observed outcomes. This implies that if you were aware of some behaviour of yours that you did not feel that you were controlling, then you would not be aware of your own intentional action. I think that implicit in our way of ascribing intentional action to other people (or infants or animals) there is the intuition that they should at least have a minimal conscious sense of controlling their movements. Take the fascinating case of anarchic hand syndrome. In this syndrome, a persons hand may perform apparently goal-directed and purposive movements, like grasping food from a plate on a neighbouring table in a restaurant. It may look like an intentional action, but in fact it is not. The person is not in control of the movements of her hand. She can only stop its movement by brute force, say, by grasping the anarchic hand with the other hand.12 Now, imagine that just before the anarchic hand embarked on its self-sustained, anarchic deed, the person desired to grasp the food at the neighbouring table and actually formed a conscious intention to do so, and furthermore, that this intention triggered the anarchic behaviour. It still would not be an intentional action. One problem is that the person lacked a sense of actively moving her hand, since she missed the sense of being able to stop or alter the movement. She missed the sense of being able to effectively cancel the first intention by a second. Engaging in a physical action of -ing is the experience of being bodily engaged in doing whatever it takes to , and this experience would be undermined if the bodily doing or engagement was out of conscious control. And if the person did in fact have such a minimal sense of bodily control, even though the action was in fact controlled by something else (a mad scientist or some mysterious brain function), the sense of control would have been illusory, and that would have been a different matter. We need the idea of a veridical sense of control in order to make sense of the difference between the normal action and the case of the anarchic hand syndrome. If the sense of control is just the illusion of control

12

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).

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created by the brain or as a post hoc construction by the subject, then we would expect the apparently successful and purposive anarchic hand-action to be accompanied by a sense of control.13 If this reasoning is correct, then awareness of intentional action involves at least a minimal sense of bodily control. Above I argued that the kinaesthetic experience in itself is a minimal sense of bodily control. Furthermore, I argued that the normal sense of bodily control is best described as a holistic structure. In this holistic structure of control, the kinaesthetic experience seems to have a special importance. Due to its constancy and continuous character, it is our primary way of monitoring the progress of our goal-directed behaviour. This means that for a normal subject, temporary and sudden loss of kinaesthetic sensations will immediately involve a loss of control. The rest of this argument is relatively simple: If in omitting our kinaesthetic experience from the normal cases of physical action we also omit our conscious minimal sense of control, then in omitting our kinaesthetic experience we would ordinarily lose our awareness of executing an intentional action. The argument thus involves the following steps: 1. Being aware of -ing intentionally is partly grounded on a sense of control (this implies that if the person has no sense of control, then she is not aware of her own intentional action). 2. Normally, having a weak sense of bodily control is partly to be considered as a kinaesthetic experience (this implies that normally if the person has no kinaesthetic experience (when she moves), then she has no sense of control). 3. Therefore, if the agent, when she moves, has no kinaesthetic experience, then normally she could not be aware -ing intentionally. 4. Therefore, normally, being aware of -ing intentionally is partly grounded on ones kinaesthetic experience. I am obviously not claiming that the kinaesthetic experience is all there is to our awareness of intentional action. Rather, I am claiming that it is normally an important part of it. Argument from ownership The second positive argument concerns the experience of ownership. Bodily sensations make me aware of my body and kinaesthetic sensations make me aware of my movement. This ownership feature is not an additional feature connected to the qualitative content of the sensation. On the contrary, a bodily sensation is always located in or on my body. To appear as located is to appear as located in or on my body. Where the sensation is, my body is as well. Between the body and the sensation there seems to be a truly dialectical relation. The body appears to us partly through our sensations of it, and our sensations appear as located on our body.14 This means that this kind of ownership experience is not of the reflective, attributive kind. Saying that the kinaesthetic experience is an experience of ownership, i.e., an

13 14

For this point, see Haggard (2005). For similar analysis of ownership, see Martin (1995) and Brewer (1995).

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experience of ones own bodily movement, is not to say that the kinaesthetic experience involves introspective use of the first-person pronoun. I do not have an experience and then ascribe it to myself, instead of ascribing it to someone else. The problem of self or other ascription does not even arise in our experience of our own movements. When moving I am never in doubt about who is moving and what part of my body is moving. Ownership, like the minimal sense of control, is thus inherent in the kinaesthetic experience. Our bodily involvement in the things we do is partly what makes them things that we do and not somebody else. That I am the one doing a task is ordinarily not an issue for in so far as the execution of the task requires bodily involvement, I have an implicit sense of ownership for the bodily doing involved in the task. I can, however, also feel that I am the one controlling things and events for which I have no implicit sense of ownership, for example, when I feel that I am the one drawing the line on the computer screen. But this feeling of instrumental control and instrumental ownership of the action of making the line on the screen is grounded on the implicit sense of ownership inherent in my kinaesthetic involvement in the task. Ordinarily, if I had no experience of kinaesthetic involvement in the making of the line, I would not think I was making it say, if I was doing nothing but looking at the screen or if I was bodily engaged in a completely different task. And if I come to doubt whether I am the one making it, I test my instrumental ownership, that is, I test whether I am the one controlling its production, by matching it to my kinaesthetic activity, for which similar problems of ownership do not arise.15 To some extent it seems that our attribution of intentional action as such relies on some notion of implicit kinaesthetic sense ownership of bodily movements. To say of somebody that she intentionally broke the window is to say of her that she was aware of breaking the window as something she wanted to bring about and succeeded in bringing about. Now, how could she be thus aware, if she were not aware of moving her body? It would be odd to say of her that she intentionally broke something, if she honestly denied ever having moved or if she denied being aware of moving whichever movements brought about the breaking of the glass, they were not mine. And similarly we would find it strange, if somebody insisted that she has done something but that she was not aware of having moved in any way. Explicit action-ascription thus normally relies on some notion of kinaesthetic awareness and the sense of ownership implicit therein. If the above reasoning is correct, then explicit self-referential knowledge about ones own action is partly made possible by a pre-attentive and pre-reflective, implicit form of bodily ownership inherent in the kinaesthetic experience. If this kinaesthetic experience and thereby also the implicit sense of ownership of the bodily movements are omitted from the execution of the basic intentional action, then there are no grounds on which to build any belief about what I did or am doing. Without an implicit awareness of my bodily involvement in the task, I would have no
15 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 selfattribution rests on an implicit sense of ownership. For ideas congenial to mine, see Bermdez (1998, Chaps. 57), and Zahavi (2005, Chap. 5).

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reason to judge that I was the one performing it, that I was responsible for what was going on. This argument has a structure similar to the first one. 1. Normally, being aware of -ing intentionally is partly grounded on an implicit sense of ownership of the bodily involvement in the intentional action (this implies that, normally, if the agent has no sense of bodily ownership, then she is not aware of -ing intentionally). 2. Normally, ownership of bodily movement is an intrinsic feature of the kinaesthetic experience (this implies that, normally, if the person has no kinaesthetic experience, then she has no sense of ownership of the bodily movements). 3. Therefore, normally, if the person has no kinaesthetic experience, then she is not aware of -ing intentionally. 4. Therefore, normally, being aware of -ing intentionally is partly grounded on the kinaesthetic experience. Again, to be sure, there is more to the awareness of action than the kinaesthetic experience, but it does, however, point in the direction that the kinaesthetic experience carries more epistemic weight in the action-awareness than is commonly assumed. Loss of kinaesthetic sensations These two arguments say that implicit, pre-reflective senses of control and of ownership of bodily movements are important for a subjects awareness of her own intentional action. Since such senses of control and ownership are exactly what characterise her kinaesthetic experiences, the kinaesthetic experience is important to her awareness of her own intentional action. Let me briefly discuss an obvious counter-example to this suggestion. We can imagine a person who is able to move but has lost all bodily sensations. He would thus be able to perform intentional actions, such as throwing something, but he would be unable to kinaesthetically feel his movements while performing such acts. Such a person would have no kinaesthetic sense of control and ownership. It seems as if I should be committed to claim that such a person could have no awareness of his own intentional actions. If that were in fact my claim, then my theory would be refuted by real life cases, such as the famous case of IW (Cole 1995). At the age of nineteen, IW suffered an almost complete loss of proprioception from the neck down. Nevertheless, he relearned to perform actions and he suffered no deficits in action-awareness (although his action-awareness was different from the normal one). In the face of this objection, some specifications have to be made. Firstly, I have not claimed that the kinaesthetic experience is a necessary condition for actionawareness as such. What I claim, though, is that normally our kinaesthetic experience does play an important part in our awareness of our own intentional action. This does not exclude the possibility that we can have forms of actionawareness where this part has been substituted for another one, for example mental concentration and vision. Take the case of IW. Despite his loss, he learned through hard practice to perform bodily actions again, but only through constant and intense

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visual guidance. Now, only if he visually perceives his limb, can he move it from here to there. This demands an enormous amount of mental concentration. He has to deliberately perform each simple movement, and since each simple movement demands that one perform other simple movements, he has to plan and co-ordinate every simple movement down to the last detail. No wonder IW has a genuine sense of ownership of his actions given all the mental concentration, all the mental acts and attention he has to exert in order to, say, scratch his own nose. When that is said, it seems pretty clear that IWs type of action-awareness is not of an ordinary kind, precisely because of his loss of kinaesthetic awareness. A second and related specification is that, as I described the kinaesthetic experience, it would normally be part of a larger whole of different sensory experiences. In this whole, the sensations from muscles, joints, and skin play a crucial role because of their constancy and continuity. This makes it understandable both how something, in the absence of kinaesthesia, can assume the role played by these sensations, but also how the experience must then be modified. If visual guidance has to take their place, then in order for it to be constant and continuous, the subject will have to attend to his movements and concentrate on not being distracted. This of course is not a normal situation, since normally I do not have to attend and concentrate constantly in order to be kinaesthetically aware of my movements. I therefore think that my account can easily comply with the objection that people without bodily sensations may still be able to perform intentional actions and to know that they did them. And I also think that my account can explain both why this is so and why their experience must be different from the normal experience and in what way it would differ. Thus, I hold the following claims. 1. The kinaesthetic awareness is not sufficient for us to be aware of executing intentional actions (the kinaesthetic form of control does not entail that we are trying to make the movement in question; recall OShaughnessys discussion of sub-intentional action). 2. The kinaesthetic experience is not necessary for action-awareness (demonstrated by the case of IW). 3. Normal action-awareness relies on this kinaesthetic sense of control and ownership in such a way that if the kinaesthetic sense of control and ownership is omitted, the action-awareness will be lost or seriously distorted. So, normally we are aware of what we are doing partly in virtue of our kinaesthetic awareness. Argument from omission Let me now turn to the third and negative argument I have in favour of the claim that the kinaesthetic experience has an epistemic role in our action-awareness, and not just an enabling role in making action-execution and intention-formation possible. It seems to me that there is some internal inconsistency or at least tension in the idea of a normal person who has a normal awareness of her own intentional action and an intact ability to perform them, but who has no kinaesthetic awareness of her own bodily movements that is, no implicit kinaesthetic sense of control and ownership.

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To be sure, like everybody else, I agree that kinaesthesia does have an enabling function. If I had no kinaesthetic sense of bodily location, I could not engage with and manipulate things in my immediate environment in the immediate and flowing way that is normally the case. But I suggest that kinaesthetic awareness does more than that. I suggest that it also contributes importantly to my awareness of my own action, in such a way that if we imagine that the kinaesthetic awareness was somehow allowed to play an enabling role but denied any role in our action-awareness, then our awareness of our own doing would be modified or impaired in such a way that we could no longer say that we had knowledge of our own intentional action. Let us try and imagine such a case in which the enabling role of kinaesthesia is somehow intact, but where it plays no epistemic role in our action-awareness. This would probably have to be a case in which the kinaesthetic location of body limbs and movement functioned completely non-consciously.16 In such a case, we could still say that kinaesthetic information allowed the agent to perform world-directed intentional action, but since it did this in a completely non-conscious way, it could not play any epistemic role in our action-awareness. The question is now, what kind of action-awareness would this be? Given this non-conscious kinaesthesia, let us say that I now try to grasp the glass in front of me. This trying would then trigger different neural mechanisms responsible for both moving my hand toward the glass and guiding this movement in an appropriate manner to its target. What could I be conscious of in this scenario? I could be conscious of what I am trying or intending to do and I could have conscious visual perception of a hand (that happens to be mine) grasping the glass. However, none of these features seem to be incompatible with a different scenario where I try to grasp the glass and at that very moment some external force (a neurosurgeon or evil demon or a competing unconscious desire) makes my hand move forward and grasp the glass. In this different scenario, I would still be conscious of what I am trying or intending to do and I would still visually perceive my moving and grasping hand. So, in the two scenarios we would arguably have conscious states with subjectively indistinguishable contents, but of course in the latter scenario we could not say that I had knowledge of what I was intentionally doing, since as a matter of fact it was not I that did it, it was not my intentional action. This is a variant of familiar arguments that make use of the idea of deviant causal chains and the epistemological worries such deviancy might elicit. What I want to suggest is that our concept of knowledge of intentional action is inconsistent with the idea that what is going on when we act is subjectively indistinguishable from a completely passive movement, a non-action. Let us say that knowledge of ones own action is a true belief about ones own doing acquired on the grounds of our action-

16 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.

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awareness. Being aware of ones own intentional action is a reason for believing that one is intentionally doing something. If, however, the action-awareness is subjectively indistinguishable from a corresponding non-action, then it is difficult to see how the action-awareness can so readily rationalise ones belief about what one is doing. I think that the idea of the kinaesthetic experience as an implicit form of constant and continuous bodily control and ownership is exactly what makes the difference between the action and the non-action case. If we accept the presence of an implicit, constant and continuous kinaesthetic sense of control, there would be a clear difference between the two scenarios. Imagine that some neurosurgeon triggered and controlled ones movement, no matter how the movement corresponded to ones intentions, the movement and its kinaesthetic feel would be different from the normal, non-deviant case, because one would not have the continuous sense of power to alter or stop the movement. I think we can extract the following reductio argument from the above discussion against the claim that kinaesthesia plays only an enabling role in the production of intentional action. The point here is to show that kinaesthetic experience does in fact play an important role in the epistemology of ones own action. 1) Cases in which a person is trying to while being simultaneously forced to and cases in which a person is trying to and therefore actually is -ing are explanatory and phenomenologically distinct. 2) If kinaesthesia plays only an enabling role for intentional action, then normally an agent is aware of -ing intentionally without being kinaesthetically aware of the involved movements. 3) If we omit kinaesthetic awareness, then we are left with non-conscious information concerning location and movement of the body and its parts, e.g., through a subpersonal body schema. This should be enough to enable the agent to perform intentional actions. 4) If (3) is the case, then the content of our awareness of action could include only: conscious trying to plus perceptual experience of a -ing. 5) If (3) is the case, then the content of our awareness of the deviant non-action could be: conscious trying to plus perceptual experience of a -ing. 6) Since there is no difference between the conscious contents in (4) and (5), there would be no conscious difference between the two cases. There would be no way for the agent to tell which case obtained, since from her conscious perspective they would be completely indistinguishable. 7) (6) and (1) contradict each other. 8) We are phenomenologically and conceptually committed to (1). 9) Therefore (2) must be rejected on the assumption that (6) follows from (45), (45) from (3), and finally (3) from (2). In other words, kinaesthesia plays more than just an enabling role. The kinaesthetic experience is what ensures that the behaviour of which one is aware is an active behaviour and that it is ones own behaviour. Take away this natural and implicit insurance and one will no longer be aware of ones intentional action. The right conclusion ought therefore to be that when it comes to the function of kinaesthetic experience in ones action-awareness, it is impossible to make a distinction between an enabling and an epistemic role.

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Concluding remarks In executing an intentional physical action, it is partly in virtue of her kinaesthetic experience that an agent is aware of what she is doing as an intentional action. Her action-awareness is therefore partly kinaesthetic in the sense that if we imagine that we were able to carefully delete the kinaesthetic contribution from the content of her awareness of her action while keeping everything else intact, even the success of the behaviour, we would not be left with an awareness of intentional action. We are still far from having a complete account of the agents awareness of her own intentional action and of the role of her kinaesthetic experience in this awareness. Acceptance of the idea that the kinaesthetic experience has some epistemic function in the content only opens the way for many more difficult questions. Answering all these worries is well beyond the scope of this paper which has the more limited aim of establishing that, against current orthodoxy, the kinaesthetic experience is epistemically relevant to our account of the epistemology of action. Let me end by briefly discussing how my account would answer two of the motives for denying any epistemic role to kinaesthetic awareness (see Motives for denying epistemic role). First, there was the denial motivated by the idea that kinaesthetic awareness is an awareness at the wrong level. An objection to my account could therefore be that agents normally do not know what they are doing by knowing how they are moving because the movement could be part of many different kinds of pragmatic situations. This objection is misplaced. I have not claimed that an agent can know what she is doing only by knowing how she is moving. On the contrary, I have claimed that it is partly in virtue of her kinaesthetic awareness that she knows what she is intentionally doing. We have to acknowledge that the content of the agents action-awareness comprises more than just the aspects of her behaviour under which it is intentional (done for conscious reasons).17 Second, there was the denial motivated by the idea that kinaesthesia has the wrong form and action-awareness is simple and non-inferential. An objection could consequently be that allowing kinaesthesia epistemically in on the picture commits me to a multi-factored and inferential account of action-awareness. The objection could be put like this. Being aware of what one is currently doing, say, being aware of writing ones signature, is an awareness one has while one is doing the action; thus, it is an awareness one has before the action is completed. It can therefore be described as an awareness of what one is trying to do or as an awareness of ones aim in acting. This type of content seems to be largely non-sensory in character: the agent knows what she is doing because it was her idea or decision to do it, and not because she is observing herself. Kinaesthetic awareness, on the other hand, is a sensory form of awareness. If we can imagine these two types of content in perfect isolation of each other, then how are they related in the content of ones actionawareness? Am I not forced to say that this content has an inferential structure? Many delicate and difficult issues are raised by this line of questions. Here I can barely scratch the surface. First of all, I would deny that the content of ones tryings or intentions can be individuated in complete separation from ones bodily doings.

17

For a related proposal, see Peacocke (2003).

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Moreover, I have in this paper argued that the kinaesthetic experience can in and of itself be an experience of agency. If that is the case, then it not obvious that kinaesthesia is a mere sensory process going on independently of ones control and intentions. The content of the kinaesthetic experience is not neutral with respect to agency. That might be, but we still have the problem of how these two types of content are related. How do we avoid an overintellectual account according to which the agent is aware that she intends to grasp that glass now, kinaesthetically registers that now she moves actively towards the glass, and therefore infers that she is intentionally grasping the glass now? My sketchy proposal is this. When we engage in action we do so by doing things that we know how to do. The ground level of our practical life consists of habitual practical patterns. This basic practical know-how is a condition for our ability to engage in more complicated actions or even actions that we have not tried to do before. Thus, at the most basic level of description of our intentional physical interactions with our surroundings lies familiar bodily skills. One aspect of this is that when we engage in some physical action we have more or less determined sensory expectations about the execution of the action in question. So long as our actions succeed as we expected and there is no large mismatch between sensory expectation and the sensory fulfilment in the course of acting, the kinaesthetic sensation will hardly be noticed by the agent. When things go as expected the body is recessive. The two aspects of the agents awareness, I have pointed to here, the intention aspect and the kinaesthetic aspect, are therefore not given as two independent contents inferentially related. The intention can be seen as having the function of specifying certain sensory expectancy patterns and the kinaesthetic experience as either confirming or disconfirming the expectation. If it confirms it, kinaesthesia will be recessive; but if it disconfirms the sensory expectations, the kinaesthetic experience will pop out. The way intention and kinaesthesia are related in ones action-awareness is therefore not as an experience of thinking something through, drawing the conclusion from premises which you grasp and understand. It is rather like the perceptual satisfaction or frustration implicit in listening to a melody: at any given stage in listening to a familiar melody you implicitly and automatically expect its development, and if the melody continues as expected your expectancies will be fulfilled effortlessly and unnoticeably, but if they are thwarted this whole process of expectancies and perceptual fulfilments will become manifest. This kind of fulfilment or confirmation is not a matter of drawing a conclusion. Similarly for ones awareness of acting, we strive towards a certain end and implicitly and automatically expect it to feel a certain way. This goes some way towards arguing that the content of agents awareness can have different aspects, some intentional other sensory, without denying the fundamental intuition that our awareness of our own actions is in some sense simple and non-inferential. The last word has not been said on this matter. We should open up the discussion of the role of the body in the epistemology of action. This is certainly a topic that would benefit from recent discussions of the interdependent roles of efferent and afferent processes on a subpersonal level and of intentions and sensations on a personal level.
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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