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By M. Allen, B.Sc.
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master
of Arts of the University of Hertfordshire.
De Havilland Campus.
Hertfordshire.
Copyright: no part of this dissertation may be quoted or reproduced without the author’s
permission and due acknowledgement.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Professors Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Hutto for their dedicated
the UH and UCF Philosophy Societies for many great nights of debate which contributed
heavily to this project. I would also like to thank Andreas Roepstorff and all of Interacting
Minds for their ongoing support of all off my research. Finally, many thanks to my partner
Julie for putting up with the existential and psychological repercussions intrinsic to these
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PREFACE
Intention and action are perhaps the most prevalent, interesting, and troublesome topics in
and more, the question of how precisely we manage to effective deliberate and act refuse to
go away. Recently these issues have captivated the empirical sciences and philosophers
alike, with brain cartographers and computer engineers weighing in on human action and
intentionality and working across disciplines to perhaps mark the dawn of a new paradigm.
Although this new era of research is not likely to solve the deepest questions of the
philosophy of mind, we can be sure that the advent of new technologies will bring with it
the same force of ideas that was originally introduced with the advent of the press,
television, or digital computer. At the same time, we will be faced with an ongoing
struggle to redefine our most intimate concepts, as new tools and the perspectives brought
Compulsion and freedom are two such concepts, and the present is but an attempt to
traverse a few key issues within them. With that being said, it’s worth noting that I started
this project with the original intention of doing something purely ‘methodological’.
Originally, I wanted to investigate the question of how one goes about doing something
empirical sciences; one cannot always sit from the sidelines speculating. You’ve got to dig
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CONTENTS Page
ACKNOLWEDGEMENTS ii
PREFACE iii
INTRODUCTION 1
CONCLUSION 47
REFERENCES 50
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INTRODUCTION
With respect to action and mental causality, Wittgenstein once pondered; ‘(imagine) some
leaves blown about by the wind saying ‘Now I’ll go this way . . . now I’ll go that way’ as
the wind moved them’ (Anscombe, 1957, p. 6). This is perhaps a rather depressing
sentiment regarding intention and action, as typically we’d like to take ourselves to be
reliable agents. Wittgenstein himself was conflicted as to the exact role of the mind in the
production of action, famously asking ‘What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm
goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?’ (Wittgenstein, 1958). What is left is the
conscious intention to move, yet the exact nature of prior intention and action remains a
In contrast to the pervasive metaphysical issues surrounding the link between intention and
examine the experiential component of intentional action, or the sense of agency (SA). I
will argue that while these analyses capture a variety of relevant details concerning SA,
they fail to acknowledge the essentially dynamic and socially embedded nature of the
phenomenology of action. To set the stage for my own arguments I will start by reviewing
some of the terms of the analysis of intention in the work of Searle and Anscombe. I will
account offered by Shaun Gallagher. One of the aims of this essay is to present a critique
of these contemporary views insofar as they offer accounts based only upon reflective and
environmental, and social factors. I will suggest that the prevailing contemporary models
1
of action-consciousness be revised to capture these features and that current theories fail to
account for the social and interpersonal aspects of the sense of agency.
To move forward on this main line of argumentation I will examine the phenomenon of
one specific example, the possibilities arising from some contemporary conceptualizations
action and agency. In this way I’ll examine the possible impact of social institutions and
practices on the experience of agency, and review some recent relevant developments in
multi-faceted, tiered, intersubjective and embodied. I further contend that SA, while clearly
final conception of agency thus entails a self-consciousness that varies widely among
situations and can be heightened or diminished by the subtle manipulations of the agent,
the body, and the socio-political environment – all of these elements from which SA
both embodied and hierarchical, perceptual and engaged-in-action, dissociable and yet
fundamentally embedded within the dynamic life-world. I will also argue that compulsion
2
is an important and underexplored target for action research, and its phenomenology
when we consider the connection between reflective and pre-reflective aspects of action-
consciousness. Before we turn to these considerations, let’s get clear about what we mean
Searle’s seminal contribution to action theory was his distinction between prior intention
distinction between prior intentions and intentions in action; both are causally self-
referential; and the action for example, of raising one’s arm, contains two components, the
experience of acting and the event of one’s arm going up’ (1983, p. 91). Searle further
developed this claim by observing that an action (like shifting gears during one’s drive to
work) can be intentional without an immediately preceding prior intention (e.g. I will now
shift gears).
Searle situated this argument through the deduction of the logical conditions of satisfaction
for prior intentions, those being that intentions-in-action are the necessary causal satisfiers
of prior intentions and thus fundamentally inherit their intentional character from the
normative and reflective considerations of the agent. This leads to the idea that
spontaneous actions inherit intentionality insofar as they are the satisfaction of some
appropriately related prior intention. For example, the intention-in-action of the daily
commute might serve as the condition of satisfaction for the underlying prior intention to
keep one’s employment; the prior intent, in the form of a conscious intention formation,
need not accompany each and every individual action. For Searle, an action is intentional
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insofar as it is ‘anything that can be the satisfaction of an intention’ (1983, p. 80). This of
course does not yet say anything about the production of a sense of agency; we’ll see
shortly however that the intentional component plays an important role in the experience of
SA.
Searle’s conception, while useful for delimiting the intention and its relation to acting, is
still somewhat sparse for the present considerations. To expand on his argument, we can
trace its origins to Anscombe’s (1957) thesis that intentional actions are defined by an
might formalize this definition thus: An agent φ-s intentionally iff a certain sense of the
question ‘Why?’ applies to A’s φ-ing. An example here will help us to understand the
appropriate application; consider the following question and two possible answers:
A1: ‘The cat moved and startled me into knocking it on the floor.’
For Anscombe, A1 is an example in which the question ‘why?’ is refused; the cat’s moving
is a cause of the action but it is not a reason for acting. The proper answer to a ‘Why?’
question is a reason. While a reason can be a cause, not all causes are reasons. The question
‘why’ therefore motivates a useful distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions
with respect to intention: all voluntary actions are intentional but most involuntary actions,
to the extent that they refuse application of the question ‘why?’ are not intentional.1
1
An example of an involuntary action that is intentional: If someone promises to hurt my family if
I do not do X, then I may intend to do X, but it is an involuntary action. I can answer the Why
question by saying, I did X because I did not want my family hurt.
4
This distinction relates to another important clause; an agent A φ-s intentionally only if A
φ-s knowingly. Anscombe argued that ‘(to say) a man knows he is doing X is to give a
description of what he is doing under which he knows it’ (1957, p. 12-13). This is because
you cannot intend to do something you know to be impossible. The intention to fly by
flapping your arms, lacking any possible satisfaction, is merely a poorly defined hoping-to-
fly. The prospective view of action thus entails that intentional actions are necessarily
descriptions of action, or, in short, the intentional components of actions. The possibility of
intent, although these reflective considerations need not show up at the phenomenological
level for each and every individual intention-in-action. While these considerations do not
necessarily explain the sense of agency, we can safely conclude that SA should in some
way relate to the presence of intentional actions, rather than unintentional movements.
due to a tricky problem that arises when we attempt to describe any given action.
Anscombe pointed out that any particular event can be described in a virtually infinite
variety of ways, many of which are irrelevant to the agent of an action (e.g. I’m taking a
drink vs I’m reaching for the cup vs I’m moving my muscles vs I’m activating neurons vs
I’m shifting molecules). Concerning an agent who drives his car to work absent mindedly,
according to Searle and Anscombe we can locate the intention of the act in the decision to
go to work, or perhaps in the general decision to work. The subsequent actions of starting
the car and shifting gears, but not of moving particular molecules, thus inherit their
intentional status from the existence of a related prior intent that is qualified by the desire
to go to work, the knowledge of how to get there, and perhaps even the non-observational
5
knowledge an agent has of his prior intention. If the agent then decides to quit his job, yet
still ends up absent- mindedly driving to his former work place, we can conclude that his
action lacks intention and consequently, that these actions should in some way undermine
Anscombe’s benchmark for the intentional, a given application of the question why, serves
to delimit the intentional from the merely active; she offers the example of actions for
which the answer to the question ‘why?’ is ‘I don’t know’, as in the case of the startled
intentional. We can begin to see here that an important component for the sense of agency
(insofar as it’s related to the presence of actual intentions) lies in the normative constraints
for actions; our sense of agency appears to be derived from the formation of intentions
claims that the class of intentional acts are those that ‘fall under a subclass of things that
are known by a man without observation’ (1957, p. 11-12). Anscombe is arguing that
intentional acts are known to be intentional without the need for inference. We do not
discover our intention to move our legs through the external observation of our legs
moving, but rather have direct, experiential non-observational knowledge of our intending
to move. Another way to say this is that our awareness of our own intention is ‘as subject’
Just as it would be nonsensical to say, ‘Someone has a toothache, is it I?’ it would be just
as nonsensical to say, ‘Someone intends to make a cup of tea, is it I?’ As the subject of the
2
These are Wittgenstein’s terms and they motivate a discussion of the concept of immunity to error
through misidentification (see Shoemaker, 1968).
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experience I have a non-observational, non-objectifying, first-person awareness of my
intention.
We can thus conclude that the intentional act corresponds to movements (whether in
characterize the action as consistent with some prior deliberation or stance, and that only
certain descriptions of a given event can be considered intentional, specifically those that
of the external world. As we will see, these basic clarifications serve to modify
capture the relationship between intention and action within a neat conceptual organization,
subgoals, and bodily actions that satisfy those goals. We will closely examine DTI, while
keeping an eye to its potential limitations, in order to see how the model might be modified
Pacherie states that her key working assumption is that ‘the processes through which the
involved in action specification and control’ (2007, p. 2). DTI is thus a prospective theory
of SA3, and we can evaluate its merits and flaws in light of the previous considerations
3
A prospective view holds that SA is generated in either the deliberative (practical reasoning)
processes preceding an action, or the bodily component of the action itself, or a combination
7
inherited from Searle and Anscombe. DTI fundamentally views the experience of acting
causation, the sense of initiation and the sense of control. As we will see, Pacherie grounds
these claims within her overall theory of SA, dissociating the formation and execution of
intentions into a hierarchy of three interconnected components: the future (F-) intention,4
present (P-) intention, and motor (M-) intention. We will investigate each of these and their
She thus bases DTI on the ‘idea that the representations formed at each of these three levels
[F-, P-, & M-intention] play a role… in the guidance and control of the ongoing action’
(2007, p. 3) and that ‘according to a very influential theory… motor control is achieved
through the use of internal models… the two main kinds of internal models are forward
and inverse models’ (2007, p. 3). Thus the transfer of goal-related information and the
their resulting phenomenology are the product of simulating the consequences of a given
action and reverse-modeling the prerequisite movements needed to achieve a given goal.
This model, which originates in the motor-control literature, generalizes to higher levels of
thereof. Prospective meaning here that a feeling agency arises with or prior to the act itself, rather
than after. This contrasts with a retrospective view which takes SA to be the product of a
retrospective, normative inference (see Wegner et al (2004) for a retrospective view of SA).
4
Pacherie has taken to calling these ‘Distal Intentions’ (DI) in her recent work.
8
voiced by Gallagher (2007) in the context of his recent arguments against simulation-based
Gallagher argues that an account that involves the idea of ‘naked intentions’ at the
phenomenological level is incoherent. For Jeannerod and Pacherie (2004), intentions are
qualifiers.
This is related to the discussion of mirror neurons or ‘shared representations’ in the brain.
Mirror neurons are activated when I act or when I observe someone else act. In that sense
they are considered neutral with respect to who is acting –that is, neutral with respect to
who the agent is. Accordingly, Georgieff and Jeannerod (1998) have argued that in the
brain the operation of a ‘who system,’ a specialized brain mechanism, is fundamental for
action. That is, since intentions are represented in the mirror system as ‘neutral’ with
and Pacherie (2004) then claim that this same articulated processing is reflected in our
experience of action. ‘We can be aware of an intention, without by the same token being
aware of whose intention it is…something more than the sole awareness of a naked
When the naked intention one is aware of yields an overt action, the extra
information needed to establish authorship may be found in the outside world. The
question “Is this intention mine?” would then be answered by answering the
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question: “Is this my body performing the corresponding action?” (140).5
These claims, for Gallagher and recently Legrand (2007), are suspect insofar as they
conflict with what is phenomenologically the case, namely, that we never experience naked
intentions. Mary either sees John opening the door, or she has a non-observational
awareness that she herself is opening the door. The experience of one’s own intention has
question ‘Is it I who am opening the door?’ never comes up in this regard. Legrand (2007)
and Marcel (2003), respectively, have gone so far as to question the agent-neutral status of
already provide a basis by which to discriminate between self and other-produced actions
On the phenomenological view then, the assertion that we experience our own intentions in
an agent-neutral way is highly suspect. This however, does not eliminate the explanatory
value of DTI for our phenomenology of agency if one restricts its claims to the reflective
actions and their consequences. This does however open DTI to a new avenue of attack, as
Pacherie clearly intends for the conceptual and simulation-like elements of the P-intention
5
‘We claim that it is like this with the perception of intention: when Mary watches John open the
door, she is primarily aware of an intention to open the door, rather than being primarily aware that
John intends to open the door. Similarly, when Mary herself intends to open the door, she is
primarily aware of an intention to open the door, rather than being primarily aware that she herself
intends to open the door. Let us call this awareness of an unattributed or ‘naked’ intention’
(Jeannerod & Pacherie, 2004, p. 116).
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to play a central role in the production of a sense of control and a sense of initiation for an
unfolding action6.
monitoring i.e., to claim that I only or primarily experience agency for my actions when I
simulate or theorize about my future goals in order to control or initiate them (e.g.
Wegner). Rather we should construct a model that demonstrates the impact of the reflective
on the pre-reflective and vice versa. Pacherie seems to miss the importance of what
observational’ awareness.
The question is then, to what extent does explicit (reflective) action monitoring alter and
shape our pre-reflective action-consciousness – that is, our awareness of action without
monitoring and adjustment, one must wonder how our rich experience of agency in cases
lacking such reflective considerations (i.e., the vast repertoire of pre-reflective actions) can
be produced. 7 Pacherie indicates that it is the unconscious M-intention that generates our
sense that ‘nothing has gone wrong’. To examine this possibility, we first turn to a closer
6
‘In a nutshell, our awareness of our movements rests for the most part on our awareness of the
predictions made at the level of P-intentions and on the comparison between these predictions and
consciously available exteroceptive feedback. When the action unfolds smoothly, this awareness is
typically extremely limited. Action specification and action control mechanisms at the level of M-
intentions operate automatically and remain outside the subject's subjective experience’ (Pacherie,
2007, p. 12).
7
More on this shortly; see my section on the phenomenology of compulsion.
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Future intentions, for Pacherie, correspond to Searle’s prior intentions and share the
important features of Anscombe’s theory of intentional action insofar as they concern high-
conceptual in nature, dealing primarily with knowledge concerning the means to a desired
outcome and it’s relation to an overarching goal. For example, consider a man sitting in his
office pondering what needs to be done. First he begins to consider what he has already
done, and from this deduces what is still left to do. Upon realizing that he has still to do his
laundry, he decides to do the task on his way home, thus forming an F-intention. As a final
point, F-intentions do not involve specific sensorimotor considerations, but rather are high-
level goal-representations. It is then the role of the P-intention to translate the intention into
The P-intention is intended to capture the process and phenomenology by which concept-
level goal representations are transformed into context-sensitive actions. P-intentions are a
central pillar of DTI, as they ‘integrate a broad range of both conceptual and perceptual
information about the current situation of the agent, the current goal and the context of
action to yield a situated action plan’ (Pacherie, 2007). The role of the P-intention in
integrating intentional goal-related information with motor processes is crucial for DTI, as
strong empirical evidence, cited by Pacherie, indicates that the content of the sensorimotor
Motor control (neural comparator) processes are thus thought by Pacherie to enter into
action-consciousness only in the form of an error signal, or as Pacherie puts it they ‘are
nothing more than the faint phenomenal echo arising from coherent sensory-motor flow’
(ibid, p. 9) that are manifest only when comparison of efferent and afferent processes go
12
awry. The role of the P-intention is then to detect this ‘error signal’, analyze the actually
unfolding action, and select the appropriate context-specific action commands needed to
get the movement back on track. Of course when she says the ‘P-intention’ is doing all of
this, Pacherie means that we are, as she envisions each of these processes as unfolding at
the personal level of conscious awareness and consequently, as constituting the primary
Gallagher gives several examples of actions in which I might lack an F or P-intention, such
as when I spontaneously answer a knock at the door or drive absent-mindedly to work, yet
retain a phenomenal sense of agency (SA1) for these actions. Although Pacherie primarily
gives a definition of the P-intention that is reflective in nature, I argue, in the next section,
that we might tweak the P-intention to include what Gallagher considers the pre-reflective
‘intentional aspects’ of SA1. What is essential if the P-intention is to be a part of our pre-
reflective experience is that it controls an action without taking the body ‘as object’, but
rather takes it ‘as subject’ where my goals and subgoals are themselves performative
extensions of my body. We are going to explore this possibility in detail in a moment, but
for now we might examine a quote from Pacherie’s earliest explication of DTI where the
The agent exercises rational control over her action insofar as (1) she is in a
position to judge whether or not this way of accomplishing her action is likely to
control) and (2) she is also in a position to judge whether or not it brings about
2006, p. 150).
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Here the P-intention is plainly characterized as actual conscious thoughts regarding my
action, where I explicitly judge the ongoing success of my actions and adjust them
accordingly by explicitly selecting new action plans. This sort of explicit representation of
both my body and the world is as-object and reflective. While the contribution of reflective
cognition that is close to the action itself is certainly an important contribution in the case
where my action goes awry, or in an unrehearsed case such as my first trip mountain
cognition. What I would like to suggest is that by tweaking or ‘fleshing out’ the P-
intention, with a focus on embedded situational control and dynamic bodily movement, we
can begin to bridge the gap between pre-reflective and reflective action consciousness and
retain the useful elements of the P-intention. The P-intention is useful precisely because it
explains the variable content of action-experience in the face of evidence that M-intention
that communicates between the purely reflective F-intention and the sub-personal M-
intention. The key idea is that my non-reflective attention orienting to self-related salient
environmental features both motivates and sustains my intentional behavior (see the next
motivated to distinguish the P-intention into its reflective and pre-reflective aspects.
The contribution of the reflective P-intention, as in the case when I literally stop and
deliberate about how best to implement an F-intention, is relatively simple in that the
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certainly contributes to a reflective sense of agency (SA2) by providing first person
evidence that we have some control and have something to do with the outcome of an
action. We can also agree with Gallagher that this conscious monitoring itself generates an
efferent or minimal sense of agency for the act of control. 8 But can there be such a thing as
a pre-reflective P-intention?
What can be said about a pre-reflective P-intention? Consider the following. As I sat at my
desk pondering this question, I had a clear F-intention to work out my answer. In the
process of working it out, I suddenly leapt out of my chair and began pacing about, and I
neither made an explicit intention to do so (I never thought to myself, I should get up and
walk around) nor deliberated over whether this might help my thought. Rather, pacing is
pace pre-reflectively, as my conscious attention is fully take up with the problem on which
in my pacing; I see the wall and don’t walk into it, but turn just in time to avoid collision,
all the while thinking hard about the problem at hand. To the extent that this monitoring is
conscious rather than non-conscious, it certainly functions like a P-intention (I intend not
to collide with the wall, for that would certainly upset my thinking, etc.). Pacing and
thinking go together in this case, and the P-intention for pacing likely serves the sense of
What I am suggesting here is that the P-intention and its contribution to action-
consciousness should not be equated to purely a reflective action monitoring nor to purely
8
Briefly, Gallagher (in press) suggests that the formation of an intention (F- or P-) is itself an
action, and should then involve its own sense of agency.
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pre-reflective intentions.9 In either case I will experience authorship. Rather, in many cases
and vice versa. One source of the pre-reflective sense of agency is my bodily movement;
Pacherie’s ‘motor intention’ (M-intention) plays a unique role in her exposition of DTI.
Not only does she describe the M-intention in terms of its basic underlying mechanism
(forward and inverse modeling), but she sees the general idea of these models as playing a
unifying, connective role between the F-, P-, and M-intentions, encompassing the
formation and execution of intentions. The complete translation from reflective cognition
Figure 1: Forward Modeling and the Sense of Agency (from Haggard, 2005)
The forward and inverse modeling framework (see figure 1) is a computational model
9
Later we’ll explore in detail some examples of pre-reflective P-intentions, using examples from
sports and other regular activities.
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the computational basis of online action execution (e.g. Jordan & Wolpert, 1999; Wegner,
2004; Wolpert, 1997). This model is intended to capture the basic information processing
by which we are able to simulate the consequences of our actions and reverse-engineer the
To give a brief overview of these comparator models, the key conception is that as prior
intentions are translated into specific motor commands, an efferent copy of the command is
generated and used to create a ‘forward model’ that compares intention to the issued motor
command, and predicts the appropriate sensory state that this command should generate if
the action is executed successfully. Then, as sensory (re-afferent) information from the
actual execution of the action reaches the system, the comparator verifies that the action is
on track. The same mechanism can compute an ‘inverse model’ to calculate the most
likely commands for generating a specific action. The essential role of the comparator is
thus to compare intention, efferent commands and sensory feedback in real time. If the
models align then the action has been executed in accordance with the original intention,
and the agent experiences a basic implicit sense of authorship for the action, or at least a
sense that nothing has gone wrong. If the comparison reveals a discrepancy between actual
and predicted feedback however, an ‘error signal’ is generated, that Pacherie suggests is
then brought into conscious attention/awareness and dealt with via P-intention action
monitoring. Action monitoring at this level would correspond to the agent’s reflecting over
the goal (F-intention), directing attention to the action (P-intention), and correcting the
Imperative to the function of the P-intention is Pacherie’s observation that the sensorimotor
representations of the M-intention are ‘in principle inaccessible to consciousness’ and are
as a result unable to provide the contextual action-related content necessary for the a sense
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of control for an unfolding action (e.g. turn the handle, hit the brake, smile now). Rather
than providing an explicit consciousness of the action then, the ‘output’ of the M-intention
serves as an error signal that motivates the formulation and execution of a P-intention. DTI
would then appear to claim that this is the limits of pre-reflective action consciousness,
with our present-centered action consciousness being effectively locked out of the fine
tuned sensorimotor dynamics of the action itself and characterized primarily by reflective
consciousness.
To support the claim that motor representations are subpersonal, Pacherie relies on recent
consciousness of these alterations (Fourneret & Jeannerod, 1998; Slachevsky et al., 2001).
ambiguous action occurs only when the alteration exceeds 15°. These findings support the
an action, but rather provide only a sense that something has gone awry, the function of the
P-intention is crucial for selecting specific actions needed to remain consistent with the
unexpected manner.
product of the motor system’s control of an action and the sense of initiation generated by
forming an intention. Our sense of agency, for Pacherie, is created any time we engage in
action planning, sensorimotor monitoring, and motor activity and is relational insofar as
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these elements of control, initiation, and awareness are differentially manipulated. Taking a
cue from Gallagher’s critique of DTI, I suggest that the P-intention might not only include
reflective action monitoring and control but also forms of pre-reflective awareness in
‘smooth coping’ that themselves contribute to a sense of agency. To explore this possibility
Gallagher, in collaboration with neuroscientist Manos Tsarkis (Tsakiris et al. 2007), and
based on the work of Tsakiris and Haggard,10 developed an account of the content and
sources of what he calls ‘SA1’ or the pre-reflective sense of authorship. As I’ve mentioned,
grounds that the F- and P-intentions, described as deliberation and conscious control
processes, do not explain our pre-reflective sense of agency. To clarify the sort of
integration we’re here striving toward, we’ll briefly review this debate in order to see both
points of contention and commensuration. Gallagher, in brief, argues that many actions
which Pacherie agrees (her concept of a ‘faint phenomenal echo of authorship’ (2007, p.
12) in the case of smoothly unfolding action), and attributes like Gallagher, to the function
of the comparator.
Although Gallagher doubts the P-intention’s ability to constitute our pre-reflective action-
consciousness, he does argue that in cases where the P-intention does arise (such as an
unfamiliar action) it’s deliberative and monitoring functions are likely to enhance SA1,
10
See Fotopoulou et al. (2008); Longo et al (2009); Tsakiris, Prabhu, & Haggard (2006) for more
on this.
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What is being argued in Gallagher’s model then is that the purely reflective aspects of the
F- and P-intention cannot constitute our pre-reflective action consciousness, which itself is
a necessary condition for SA. Rather SA arises out of the complex collusion of reflective
and pre-reflective processes (see figure 2), with dynamic communication occurring
This communication will be important later when we examine compulsion, but for now we
can accept Gallagher’s critique and move towards integration in which P-intentions include
both reflective and pre-reflective elements. What we are primarily interested in here is
getting the constitution of SA1 correct, as we want to specifically explore the dynamics of
the model via recent work by Haggard (2005) and Tsarkiris (2007). SA1, on Gallagher’s
the difference between a sense of agency and sense of ownership for actions, Gallagher
20
invokes the image of an individual who has been pushed from behind in contrast to an
individual who has just taken a step forward. In the first case, we can assume that the
person would report feeling that ‘his body moved’ (he would have a sense of ownership for
the movement, and would say that he moved) but that, due to the lack of efference, he
would not report ‘authoring the action’ as he would in the case intentionally taking a step
forward (Gallagher, 2000). The phenomenology of action for Gallagher is thus grounded in
conscious of our action authorship as long as our motor system is healthy, in contrast to
pathologies.
Gallagher’s primary concern with DTI is that there are many instances in which I can have
SA without any prior deliberation, as in the case in which I suddenly jump out of my chair
to answer a knock at the door. Gallagher does note that certain intentional and situational
control-aspects enter into SA1, supporting the idea that a less judgment-oriented P-
intention might function between the boundary of reflective and pre-reflective action. We
will shortly explore the complexity of a P-intention dynamically conceived, but what I
have been suggesting here is that we might better view the P-intention not as purely
reflective or pre-reflective, but rather as marking the murky transitional boundary between
Still, I will argue that there are elements of both DTI and Gallagher’s SA1 that appear
the integrative model pictured above, in which Gallagher’s comparator process colludes
environmental and social factors that, as we will shortly see, directly impact the sense of
agency. If the DTI is to be ‘fleshed out’ or altered to better explain why things like F- and
P-intentions contribute to SA1, we must explore in detail some cases in which the
Even for an integrated conception of the P-intention, when an action goes awry, it’s role is
to determine what has gone wrong, to bring it back in line with the related F-intention, and
to execute the appropriate actions, all of which contributes not only to SA2 but to our
online SA1. Haggard’s recent work strongly supports this view, as he has found that
intentional binding11 is modulated only by the presence of an actual intention rather than
cortices. The intentional or control related aspects are thus crucial elements of comparator
The intentional aspect (what gets accomplished, or fails to get accomplished, by the
action) and the motor (or efferent) aspect (the sense that I am causing or controlling
my bodily movement) enter into SA1…These aspects, and SA1 more generally,
remain pre-reflective in so far as neither of them are things that I reflectively dwell
11
Intentional binding is a demonstrated phenomenon in which participants’ estimate the subjective
time between an intention and its worldly effect as being a shorter duration for intentional as
opposed to non-intentional movements (see Haggard, 2005).
22
upon, and indeed, as I arrive at my office I have forgotten most, if not all, of the
Our experience of an action appears to fall within a continuum between the case in which I
follow a clear DTI-style path from F- to P- to M-intentions, the case in which I act totally
and those circumstances in which neither extreme holds. The possibility of such a middle
ground should then lead us to question the dividing line between reflective and pre-
I’ve gone into the analysis of the sense of agency in some significant detail. I’ve done this
not only to show the complexity of this analysis, but also to set the stage to be able to show
that even this complexity is not sufficient to the phenomenon. Whether we take Pacherie’s
have argued, some combination of these, the basic explanandum of the P-intention is
phenomenal experience, comparators and efferent signals, etc.). The processes under
discussion seem to play out entirely ‘within the head’. I will argue, however, that if action
occurs in the world, this kind of analysis requires a phenomenological ‘fleshing out’. To
better characterize the dynamics between action, world, and action-consciousness, we turn
now to Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty helps to illustrate the inadequacy of deeming action as merely being the
We need some notion of living action, or of action in the life-world, to flesh out the above
23
account of SA. The life-world, following Merleau-Ponty, is not a static object to be acted
upon by a Cartesian observer but rather a performative extension of the dynamic body. We
For the player in action the football field is not an ‘object,’ that is, the ideal
term which can give rise to an indefinite multiplicity of perspectival views and
of force (the ‘yard line’; those that demarcate the ‘penalty area’) and
which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the
actions do not unfold in static relationship between observer and object but rather in the
dynamic relationship between the agent and its world. The actions I take structure my
intentions and alter my experience of my living body, and moreover, they do so in real
time.12 Merleau-Ponty is arguing that action and the experience of acting are necessarily
grounded in a pragmatic kind of relationship between the player and the field; as the player
moves the field’s significance and visuospatial properties will remain in dynamic
fluctuation with that of the player’s intentions and the properties of the field itself.
The field is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his
practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction
of the ‘goal,’ for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the
12
‘…those actions in which I habitually engage incorporate the instruments into themselves and
make them play a part in the original structure of my own body’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 104).
24
How are we to conceptualize the living experience of an intention then? If we think of
intentions as dynamically co-created by the environment and the agent, are we diluting the
many; why bother with the fancy descriptions of phenomenology if we can rely on
traditional conceptual distinctions found in philosophy and psychology (or even folk
with a difficult challenge; if intentions are themselves specified in co-relation to the world,
in what sense are they intentions, which we usually conceive of as internal mental states?
Surprisingly the answer may actually lay in the functions and transitions of the P-intention,
Merleau-Ponty is clear about what we cannot take the P-intention to be, namely a complete
we are faced with a more subtle relationship between the essentially objectifying nature of
deliberative intention, in which I take my world as an object to be acted upon, and the
living execution of the intention through my body – the only possible causal satisfier of my
intention. We are now faced with a question concerning the relationship between
consciousness and action, or the dividing line between reflective and pre-reflective action.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that this relationship is not as neat as Pacherie might prefer, but
rather indicates a P-intention that is neither fully reflective nor fully pre-reflective. To what
extent does intentional behavior then require an explicit consciousness of action or,
25
It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At
this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and
the field and establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn
169).
Not only is the perception of the field a function of the living body, but also, the field as
phenomenological view intentions are forward-integrated with the action of the body. Thus
the intention and goal are ‘nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action’ and each
On the one hand, in this regard, Pacherie’s phenomenology of action is troublesome insofar
as her construal of intention and intention-in-action appears to view our living intention in
as-object rather than as conscious movement through a world loaded with significance, and
affordances dynamically shaping my own future intentions. On the other hand, we can also
begin to see why the sub-conscious workings of motor-schemas are not problematic for a
Pacherie.
These considerations do not radically damage her overall conceptual organization, but
rework it from the inside so that we can begin to see how the F- and P-intentions might be
26
with a slightly more embodied analysis of intention that follows the lines drawn by
What might an ‘embodied’ version of the relationship between prior intent, agency-
consciousness, and action look like? One illustrative example is found in Andy Clark’s
now famous description of a baseball fielder catching a fly-ball. On Pacherie’s view, the
fielder might consciously translate the cognitive F-intention ‘win the game’ into the
simulative P-intention ‘catch the ball’ and then constantly monitor the position of the ball
in order to calculate (using a forward model) the precise movements needed to catch the
ball.
recent research has indicated that the fielder is able to catch the ball not by projecting the
absolute trajectory of the ball but rather by naturally exploiting inherent sensorimotor
dynamics of the fielder’s body. The fielder catches the ball, Clark argues, by ‘simply
running so that the optical image of the ball appears to present a straight-line constant
speed trajectory against the visual background (Clark, 2008, p. 18).’ The ‘calculations’
necessary to catch the ball are not performed solely within the sterile environment of the
comparator or in a plan drawn out by prior intent; they rather take place in a distributed
network that includes the agent’s body and the environment, informed by the task at hand.
This view of action is remarkably similar to that expressed by Merleau-Ponty; actions are
27
A few considerations are of importance here. First, the example of catching a baseball is
not here meant to characterize all actions, but rather to serve as a metaphorical example of
the relationship between intention and action. An action like catching a baseball, may for
example differ from that of writing a research paper or there may even be great differences
between a completely naïve, as opposed to expert player catching the ball, in the sense that
the more complex an action is, or how familiar I am with the action (how much practice I
have with it) will likely increase the need for explicit, deliberation and observational action
control, an important point we’ll explore further in a moment. For now, the suggestion here
is that generally speaking, in contrast to the top-down account provided by DTI, the P-
dynamic feedback from the actions and the world themselves collude to inform both SA1
and SA2.
If the teleological aspects of intentions inform our pre-reflective action, perhaps we can
reflection, the concept relates to the phenomenological notion of the living body insofar as
it denotes the basic relation between things I am intending to do and my awareness that it is
I who is intending them. Merleau-Ponty describes this as the role of the implicit body-
structuring my relation to the world. Anscombe recognized however, that the observational
knowledge and reflective monitoring central to the P-intention play an important role in
28
My knowledge of what I do is not by observation. A very clear and interesting
case of this is that in which I shut my eyes and write something. I can say what
I am writing. And what I say I am writing will almost always in fact appear on
the paper. Now here it is clear that my capacity to say what is written is not
derived from any observation. In practice of course what I write will very likely
not go on being very legible if I don’t use my eyes; but isn’t the role of all our
observational knowledge in knowing what we are doing like the role of the eyes
The intention with which I act (which we might here understand as the intentional aspect of
information, and this information provides a valuable means by which we can fine-tune
and progressively improve our relation to the world. This is perhaps what Pacherie means
to highlight with her account of the P-intention, yet we can also argue that Anscombe’s
own understanding of NOK, while progressive for her time, lacked the sort of embodied,
In addition to this clarification, there is more we can say about the role of experience in
For Merleau-Ponty’s football player, the movement of the player through the field
dynamically shapes whatever P-intention he may form in playing, i.e. to shoot this goal or
slide-tackle some opponent, and these individual actions in turn alter the perceptual
29
intentions might be formed in the course of the game. Here we might consult another
tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal
Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, discussed at length the role of experience in shaping the
way the world presents itself to me and the effects of expertise on my action execution.
Let’s imagine I’m on my way to a speed-dating function, and that I’m 6 feet tall.
Additionally, I’ve lived my entire life amongst entirely 5-foot tall peers and thus consider
myself to be a rather tall, strapping lad. Now imagine that upon entering the room where
the speed-dating is going to occur, I notice (as they turn to gawk at me) that all the women
in the room are 6.5 feet tall. Assuming I’m sensitive to the difference, it’s clear that I might
now experience a rather different sense of agency for whatever I’m going to do to get a
date, than I would if I had entered a room where all the women were 5-feet tall. My prior
experiences are here shaping the affordances for action I perceive in the group of women,
and whether I consider myself tall or short enough to get one of them to go out with me can
really only be specified in relation to the specific circumstance I find myself in, and the
13
Husserl gave a famous example of this in terms of a layman and an archeologist that both arrive
in Greenland. For the layman, Greenland may be a confusing, unfamiliar, and bewildering place.
For the archeologist, Greenland instead represents a complex sociocultural history that is rich with
meaning and action-affordances (Husserl, 1970, 2nd Investigation).
30
relation of that circumstance to my previous actions. Any situated reflective considerations
(P-intentions) I might undertake (which girl to talk to, whether or not to order a drink, or
two) will start from this point, and whichever action I choose (insofar as I perceive it as a
successful action) will then shape my ongoing perception of my chances to win a date.14
The notion that agents pre-reflectively inhabit a world implicitly shaped by the body is a
would be a mistake however, to throw out the phenomenological baby with the
reductionistic bath water. Pacherie’s model does not exclude a place for certain aspects of
contributing to both SA1 and SA2. Furthermore, her model shares more in common with
both make heavy use of the notion of an inherent neural mechanism that compares efferent
and afferent sensorimotor information to produce, in one fashion or another, our minimal
sense of agency.
of the pre-reflective relation of body and world, presents an ambitious and effective
schema for the relationship between purely pre-reflective action and the deliberative
processes that undeniably underlie some of our intentional acts and co-create our sense of
agency. To further this analysis, we’ll examine the phenomenology of compulsion in order
14
Of course, I may have worked out an entire strategy for just such a case (F-intention), which
would then further structure my perception of my chances and consequently, the P-intentions and
M-intentions I’ll engage in.
31
to show another important dimension that is so far missing in the previous discussion; the
To explore the relationship between the reflective and pre-reflective in detail, we’ll
involved in drug addiction) in order to shed light on the nature of every day action-
we can begin to understand the essential relationship between SA1 (the pre-reflective
components of action-consciousness). But we will also be able to see from this example
that even this integrated account of the sense of agency is not sufficient, and that we need
to extend the account to include the environmental and especially social aspects.
beliefs and desires concerning broad-level life goals, i.e. the pursuit of health, liberty, and
happiness. Imagine that this individual, never having desired to become a drug addict, and
in full possession of the belief that drug taking behaviors are negative behaviors, enters an
environment in which his peers are consummately using heroin. Upon entering this new
social environment, the agent finds himself surrounded by peers quite happy to inject
mind-altering drugs (heroin, in this case) into their veins. For the sake of argument, our
agent also wants to fit in and be a part of his social group, and so he eventually gives in and
tries an injection.
32
At this particular moment, let’s focus in on our actor’s body. As he lifts the syringe to his
arm, it is safe to assume that his motor system generates an efferent copy for each
individual action. If we accept the comparator model of the SA1, it seems true that
throughout the unfolding of this action his system made use of congruent forward/inverse
SA1. It is also true that he had a positive prior-intention to live well, be happy, and so
forth. Insofar as he actually made a decision (‘inject heroin’ or perhaps ‘stay close to my
friends’), he also formed a proper P-intention that enabled him to ensure the drug was
properly injected. Thus our agent, as he partakes in drug taking behaviors that conflict with
his overall intentions, could be said on both DTI and minimal conceptions of agency (SA1)
This however seems somehow incomplete. It seems much more likely something might
have felt off the moment he lifted the needle to his arm. This could cash out at the
stance that drugs are contra the good life might alter the presentation of the needle or room
such that while he does not stop to reflect on his akrasia he may feel a certain will-related
anxiety. 15 Perhaps the needle is perceived as more menacing, or he feels a certain anxiety,
recklessness) that tints his SA116. Perhaps it’s merely something in his body, a sudden
flush and increased heartbeat; the effects of a sudden dump of cortisol into the blood
stream by the brain. The point is simply that, in the presence of a functioning motor
initiates (P-intention), his SA1 will diminish. One possible explanation is that his P-
15
If he did stop to reflect, he might flee the room or at least debate the issue.
16
This is similar to the case in which we find ourselves wandering in the kitchen, quite sure we
came for something but completely unaware of our specific intention.
33
intention, which is means-end coherent with his F-intention to maintain his friendships, is
in conflict with the F-intention to live well. We might call this an intention-intention
disturbance, in which two mutually desired reflective or pseudo-reflective acts compete for
satisfaction, creating a conflict where the agent must form P- and M-intentions in what is
This sort of conflict would certainly undermine the agent’s pre-reflective sense of agency,
and even more so should the agent resolve the conflict by actually injecting the drug. In
this case, there would be multiple sources for a positive sense of agency; the formation of
the F-intention to maintain one’s friendships, the P-intention to inject the drug, and the
sensorimotor processes of efference and re-afference from the actual act of injecting the
drug, as well as multiple negative sources for a sense of agency; the social status of heroin,
his peers’ behavior, the desire to conform, and the needle itself. If the balance tips too far
in one direction, the agent is almost certain to experience some loss of agency. Working
examples of strong positive and negative influence, where the presence of a strongly
positive signal (I am injecting heroin) has an overall negative affect; if there is a strong
innate bodily agency for simple motor acts, then one would feel a strong sense of
immediate authorship for a highly self-disruptive act, and the net effect should then be
negative. Thus far these effects remain pre-reflective; we can however increased the
amount of reflectivity before, during, and after the act and presumably increase the
34
The actual world-agent dynamics now become highly relevant for determining the actual
course of agency-loss; as the act itself becomes habitual and true addiction develops, the
link between immediate and extended agency may itself sever, with the agent possessing
little to no self-control for drug related stimuli. At this juncture the agency loss is near
catastrophic; the drug taker can no longer successfully control or initiate immediate
intentions (‘hold off this injection until after work’) nor reconcile this fact with their life-
narrative. The agent’s dreams and long-term intentions have largely been set aside, or they
reminiscences over the agent’s pre-drug life or post drug future are now likely to only
further undermine the self-as-agent narrative (SA2). The addict is now not unlike an
injured animal that has fallen into a mud pit; without strong and determined external
assistance, escape from the negative spiral becomes less possible with every act.
The sense of agency is thus very complex, as multiple sources can come in conflict with
one another depending upon the totality of an agent’s prior intentions and the actual motor
acts he engages in.17 What is important here is thus not only the content of the intentions,
but also their context and the particular dynamics between SA’s varying sources. Certainly
my drive to work will not (typically) undermine my SA1, yet if I find myself in an
impulsive mood and inject heroin when I get home, I will feel out of control as I commit
the act (diminishing SA1) and thereafter (diminishing SA2). This highlights that
something is missing from both DTI and the minimal model, and we’ll discuss some
17
This last point is crucial, as it points towards the actual acts-in-the-world as a source of agency.
In a nutshell, different acts should have different experiences of agency, regardless of the presence
of F-, P-, and M-intentions.
35
Of course, in the case of the naïve drug taker, the fact that his motor system is functioning
informs us that at some basic level, he maintains a sense of SA1 insofar as if we were to
ask him what he was doing, he’d say I am injecting drugs. The loss of SA1 is thus initially
incomplete, falling short in kind and severity from the radical disruption we’d expect to
find in a severe case of paranoid schizophrenia. The next time the agent forms a drug-
action consistency, we could easily expect his reflective sense of agency (SA2) to in turn
be diminished. Each of these examples is meant to show that it is the dynamic between the
variable sources for agency that itself results in whatever action-consciousness comes
about from particular actions, and that these dynamics can be disrupted in a variety of ways
depending upon the agent and the particular world the agent is a part of.
We can conclude that his continuing actions of piercing his skin and depressing the plunger
in some way dramatically undermine his SA1 and SA2. We can now explore a third
possibility: suppose that merely being in the room with his peers, prior to any drug-taking,
However, this supposition entails that we reject the thesis that the sense of agency can be
located solely in the deliberative process or the computations of the comparator. The
physical and social environment may have an effect on SA. If even prior to injecting any
drugs, the agent experiences some diminishment in the sense of agency, what are some
possible sources for this experience? Recalling our example of speed-dating, we might now
begin to consider the role that interpersonal factors play in structuring our sense of agency.
Actions are embedded in contexts that are both physical and social. Intention formation is
itself a process performed within a social context where possibilities are defined by social
through a real-time allocation with respect to agency.18 At the individual level, the kinds of
considerations vital, not only to the deliberative process, but even to the comparator model
are not divorced from social factors. Consider, for example, the many studies of the neural
correlates of the sense of agency that involve the contrast between sense of self-agency and
sense of other-agency (e.g. Chaminade, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2005; Farrer et al., 2003).
Simply put, if I want to interact with you, your intentional state becomes a crucial element
in my comparator’s ‘sensory input box’. This view excludes neither the reflective nor the
pre-reflective; it allows room for both ongoing reflection upon actions and the pre-
reflective awareness of action. It allows for this, and at the same time it takes seriously the
idea that the subject is in-the-world, embodied and embedded in a social environment that
If the sense of agency is relational and not dependent on any singular process, one might
object that action-consciousness seems to rely on the explicit re-evaluation of our actions.
Perhaps it is retrospective evaluation that ties it all together and creates a sense of agency
This objection however, does not consider that the specific mechanism driving agency
re-evaluation of past actions but rather, a direct and immediate loss or diminishment of
SA1 due to the conflict dynamic between SA1 and SA2 at multiple levels, as previously
indicated. Phenomenology supports this claim; our pre-reflective experience takes the body
18
In the sense that a joint-activity requires an ongoing negotiation in terms of whom the group is to
allocate agency to and how much agency should be shared amongst particular agents (leaders, sub-
leaders, followers, etc) for a given task as well as more complex dynamic/temporal considerations
depending upon the task at hand.
37
as subject, rather than as object. The body as subject is not the object of retrospective,
reflective introspection, but rather continually structures our engagement with the world.
The phenomenal sense of agency then is not necessarily generated in retrospection, but is
rather a fundamental property of bodily activity that is dynamically shaped in the agent-
world relation.
To further clarify my argument, I would like to suggest that the above vignette captures an
aspect of our everyday activity. We can draw this conclusion from our everyday
phenomenology, in which many of the actions we engage in on a daily basis are not
explicitly intentional in the clear sense that we reflectively create a deliberative action plan
that we then endorse and translate into activity; rather they are characterized as pre-
reflective (Gallagher, in press). This is not meant to suggest that the reflective is not
essential for a healthy intention-action dynamic, rather the previous examples show the
Take for example the sweatshop worker, laboring tirelessly for little to no personal
incentive beyond survival. Here the mundane, pointless nature of the worker’s daily task
can have a deleterious effect on the sense of agency. And like our drug user, we can
anticipate the efferent SA1 to conflict with the intention to live well, where every act of
sweatshop labor further cements for the man that he will never fulfill his dreams.
Eventually, we’d predict a breakdown of both SA1 and SA2, as the tireless litany of
man’s life has become one solid line, and he may feel on his deathbed as if he’s been little
more than an automaton for the duration of his life. This kind of alienation, driven by
38
structures of economic and social arrangements, robs such individuals of their sense of
agency.
Again, we can start to see the influence of society and interpersonal affordances on our
over the thought of sitting through a pointless faculty meeting, but we do it because we
have to. We might feel a sense of unease as we enter a party full of tall beautiful women, or
lose ourselves in the kiss of our lover in a sort of euphoric agency-loss. Many young adults
faced with the grim prospects of finding a job in a failing economy can relate to the sense
of dread and possibly helplessness that accompanies the process of a job search.19 In all of
these examples, social arrangements and social forces, or simple intersubjective relations
We’ve come full circle now – we can now see how the reflective considerations of the F-
We’ve also seen, through examining the interrelations of SA1 and SA2, that there are
Pacherie et al all fit too neatly within the head – either mind or brain – and exclude out of
the box phenomena like social affordances. In most accounts of the comparator, while
marking off a box for ‘sensory input’ is quite convenient, the approach excludes from the
debate a vast array of important considerations, these being primarily the specific relation
19
Another example of a ‘social affordance’ or important contributor to SA not accounted for by
DTI or SA1; a Colleague recently related a situation his daughter, a peace-worker in station in
South Africa, described, relating how indigenous locals refused the possibility that they might grow
their own sustainable gardens. They thought it was impossible for them to do so because they had
become convinced, under apartheid social structures, that they were ‘lazy’ and therefore simply
could not do anything of the kind. They were content to conceive of things this way and to continue
to rely on government, which simply reinforced their sense of their own inability to create a garden
without state assistance.
39
between a given prior intention and it’s bodily satisfaction, the institutions that support and
extend the limits of agency, and the interpersonal practices and social affordances that
Although we may possess the appropriate prior-intentions to live well, and our actions can
have shown that the summation of these elements does not necessarily account for a full
sense of agency. To the extent that our actions begin to lose immediate, interpersonal, and
break down. This insight reveals the full scope of the multi-faceted and dynamically
Having made claims about this fuller scope of the sense of agency, involving
investigation of compulsive actions, we might ask what in the brain contributes to these
neuroadaptations to discover cases in which the relation between our prior intent and
embodied sense of agency conflict. Still, it makes for a fuller investigation if we turn to the
report of the established addict, who might commonly claim a loss of agency; ‘it was the
drugs that made me do it.’ Clinical psychology recently provided an effective model of
contributing to agency-loss.
40
The incentive-sensitization (IS) model hypothesizes that pathological addictive behaviors
occur whenever an agent has engaged in drug-taking behavior such that the salience of
drug related behaviors and stimuli are altered, become increasingly significant to the agent,
and eventually alter the agent’s perceptual world to the point where normal hedonic stimuli
no longer compete with drug-related stimuli (Robinson & Berridge 2000; 1993). The
perceived world for the addict, on the IS model, has become one of singular motivations, in
IS has found strong empirical and theoretical support in recent years, rising out of
symptoms (purely aversive theories). Hedonic and aversive views are in decline however,
having recently lost favor in light of evidence indicating that compulsive drug-related
behaviors correlate neither with the degree of pleasure reported by users nor with
drugs alters neural systems critical for processing motivation and reward related stimuli.
duration and intensity to drug associated stimuli. The brain regions associated with craving
behaviors are not believed to mediate the euphoric effects of drugs, or drug liking, but
41
Recent PET and fMRI studies of addiction and drug-taking behavior have localized the
intention and action; findings have correlated drug-craving with signal increases in the
nucleus accumbens region, parahippocampal, and lateral prefrontal cortices (Breiter et al.,
1997). Grant et al (1996) found correlations between self-reports of craving and activation
in the prefrontal cortex, amygdale, and cerebellum while Wang et al (1999) reported
similar correlations of self-reports with activation of the orbito-frontal cortex, insula, and
cerebellum. In a further study, researchers found that heroin-related cues activated regions
of the midbrain (periaqueductal grey and ventral tegmental) that consistently predicted
prefrontal cortex (Sell et al., 1999). Importantly, the regions mediating IS are inscribed
within those that process action specification, executive control, and social cognition.
regarding the neurology of stress. Although early theorists largely assumed stress to be a
fMRI investigations of stress has overturned this hypothesis (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004).
To briefly review, contemporary stress research indicates that in stressful situations, hyper-
hormone cortisol. Once in the blood, this powerful chemical results in a strong
physiological response (cold sweats, increased blood flow, increased blood pressure, etc)
brain regions (DLPFC, ACC, etc) leading to increased thoughts about the stressor that can
in turn further increase cortisol responding. These regions are also heavily implicated in
42
Following their quantitative meta-analysis, these authors find ‘that uncontrollable threats to
the goal of maintaining the ‘social self’ trigger reliable and substantial cortisol changes’
and that across studies, the factors of “controllability” and “social evaluation” interacted to
explain more than two-thirds of the empirical results (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004).
Threats to the social self can thus be understood as threats to the salient environmental or
interpersonal factors of our agency, in terms of what I can control and how I expect others
to evaluate my actions. The point is that being with others, e.g. my drug-taking friends
(possible loss of control, pressure to use, etc.). The finding that primary factors driving
others supports my argument that interpersonal factors are heavily implicated in the sense
of agency. The agency loss of the drug taker or speed-dater might then be partially
accounted for by the acute stress response, which is essentially tied into external social
What can we conclude from this evidence? First, compulsive actions appear to depend in
the agent; as behaviors alter neurology, the phenomenal field is altered, and this alteration
in turn alters behavior and neural mechanisms in a reciprocal feedback loop. Similarly, as
intentions alter actions, actions alter intentions. That this salience-mediating mechanism is
instantiated in regions of the brain thought to code for intentional deliberation, social
navigation, and action, reinforces the idea that situational salience (that is, the salience that
we find in certain environments, certain people, etc.) contributes to intention formation and
the sense of agency. This relationship is again triadic, for the neural correlates of decision
43
making and cognition are integrally tied into those responsible for social, interpersonal,
and agency-related cognition, which are themselves tied up within those responsible for the
As Damasio has extensively argued (Bechara, Damasio, & Damasio, 2000; Damasio,
1995) the case of Phineas Gage should remind us that that the rational deliberative
processes many view as integral to intention formation and control of actionare innately
social; damage the prefrontal regions associated with them and you will find no overt
detriment in the patient’s behavior. The deficit is there however, and will make itself
known the first time the agent is required to make a decision with any social significance;
intersubjective beings become utterly meaningless for patients like Gage. Another way to
put this would be to say that the presentation of social saliencies and affordances have flat-
Returning to our original vignette, we might now better explain the neurophenomenology
The IS view of compulsion argues that rather than relegating the effects of drug-taking
behavior to the realm of hedonic or aversive behaviors, we might better understand them as
altering the basic salience of worldly incentives. Although it is well established that the
neurobiological effects of drugs like heroin and cocaine are decisive in the long-term
alteration of these networks, the fact that these neurobiological effects occur not only at the
extremely subpersonal level of the lower and midbrain, but also in those regions associated
with narrative and decision making, again highlights the role of social affordances in the
44
In taking drugs, the addict’s comparator mechanism is operating efficiently insofar as it is
forward modeling his actions. The tension arising between present action and prior intent
and action might here be clarified as a tension between situational salience, for example,
the specifics of the environment, the presence of his peers, the behavior of his own body,
and the prior-intentions laid down by the agent previously. Any further actions taken by the
agent along this path will clearly continue to alter his fundamental access to the world by
means of the comparator’s intimate integration within the social cognitive and pre-
reflective brain networks. The addict’s life world has ceased to be specified solely by his
prior intention but is now being dynamically shaped in relation to his peers’ behavior
morality and motivation; the agent’s prior motivations no longer fit within the reality he
We need not restrict these mechanisms to the extreme case of drug addiction. What I want
to argue here, in fact is that through the lens of compulsion we can begin to see how many
of our ordinary intentional actions are but one intentional description away from feeling
trade on mechanisms similar to those mentioned above. The list of candidates for
specific locations (a certain car or apartment), tools (different utensils or a certain article of
clothing), and specific peer groups might all be stimuli culprits for alteration of the IS
45
related brain networks when coupled with any compulsive, habitual behavior (e.g. drug
taking, nail biting, etc). We might even suggest that our own prior intentions might become
a source for a sub-compulsive alteration of these networks, tingeing our world with the
moment. We may get locked up into our own self-made, or socially constructed, habits and
How does compulsion mirror our everyday capacity for, and consciousness of, action? To
begin with, as we have already noted, one does not need the radical example of brain-
altering drugs to find a mechanism for compulsion. The mere act of driving to work each
morning, should I no longer take pleasure in the stimuli associated with it, can be quasi-
compulsive in the sense that I must make the trip in order to conform to my learned desire
to be a productive citizen. As I drive each and every day to work, the old pleasures of
moving my body in such and such a way begin to give way to my forward-looking
knowledge; perhaps I have just learned I’ll never be up for tenure and now find myself lost
In this case, each individual movement towards my place of employment will erode my
sense of agency a bit more; it may be a growing implicit sense that my action is furthering
longer satisfy my desires (SA2). Like the drug addict who slowly finds his brain displaying
a world that is devoid of salience save for drug-related stimuli, my own world in quasi-
Social arrangements and social affordances play a large part in this. Even in the presence of
both appropriate prior intent and bodily control we may be prevented from attributing to
ourselves the proper role of agent. Thus it could be the presence of my supervisor (or a
46
certain environment, or a work place) that robs me of my sense of agency, just as the peers
and paraphernalia of the addict replace his sensible salience with a drug-laden life-world.
Sartre gave this an extreme expression, ‘hell is other people’, and this may be very true not
only for the drug addict. But this also goes the other way, insofar as the good in the world
is also the product not only of individual intentions but of a collective world-crafting.
CONCLUSION
we’ve seen that the prior intention is formative in shaping our subsequent action, and our
experience of that action. It may be the case the communicative and narrative practices are
the foundation of this, lending a concrete quality to my extended agency, as when I dream
partner.
Our intentions thus depend upon our experience, but also constrain our action-
consciousness and guide us when we are in-action. In fleshing out the minimal sense of
agency, with the help of Merleau-Ponty, we’ve found that the process of intention
formation is itself not static, but rather a dynamic function of our being-in-the-world.
comparator processes and teleological control, as well as prior intention formation and
conscious control of action, and the external factors of society and interpersonal relations,
We then also developed an expanded definition of the sense of agency through the
constructing an integrated explanation for actions in which the sense of agency is impaired
or altogether absent, ultimately deriving from the empirical data a refined philosophical
explanation. Our final model of agency is then one that is dynamically embedded in the
world through physical and social affordances, embodied in agents that stand in certain
Let me note some of the limitations of the above analysis. For example, the experience of
compulsion is itself likely to be as complex as the sense of agency, and here we have only
explored the minimal relations between the two. There is thus extensive work to be done
evaluating not only the phenomenology of compulsion, but also the specific ways in which
compulsive experiences emerge. Here we can mention the sense of ownership as well; a
phenomenon that I have ignored due to the limitations of space, but that we can be
reasonably sure plays an important role in experiences of both compulsion and agency. The
notion of ownership itself, one might add, can likely be analyzed into intersubjective
components in a similar vein as the present investigation. It is also essential to note that the
view of agency as intersubjective does not end with the analyses presented here. Ongoing
research is exploring the contributions of social institutions (Gallagher & Crisafi, 2009)
and meta-cognitive processes (Synofzik, Vosgerau, & Newen, 2008a, 2008b) to the
varying conceptions of action consciousness we have here explored. Finally, as we can see
in the recent debates on free will (Wegner 2004, Habermas 2007, etc.) there are profound
ethical implications involved in the conception of the sense of agency on which we have
48
To conclude, what can we now understand about the sense of agency? We can certainly
now see that whether or not we experience or attribute agency to ourselves depends
crucially on the world in which we live, and the peers with whom we engage. This
extended model of the sense of agency suggests that within my daily routine there are a
plethora of ways in which my culture and its institutions shape my ability to act affectively,
and are thus important in my ongoing sense of myself as author. Intentionally speaking, the
field of possibilities from which I can select my future actions depends crucially on the
physical environments and social practices within which I am embedded, and my overall
sense of myself as agent will depend upon my ability to evaluate my own position within
these systems and act accordingly. The difference between compulsive and willful actions
thus arises from a milieu of factors; if I am no longer able to project myself into the future
my ongoing bodily actions will be in constant contrast with the possibility of experiencing
49
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