The Sense of Agency and the Epistemology of Thinking
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The Sense of Agency and the Epistemology of Thinking Casey Doyle1 Received: 10 September 2019 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper motivates a constraint on how to explain the “sense of agency” for conscious thinking. It argues that a prominent model fails to satisfy the constraint before sketching an alternative that does. On the alternative, punctate acts of conscious thinking, such as episodes of inner speech, are recognizable as our deeds because they are recognizable as parts of complex cognitive activities, which we know nonobservationally in virtue of holding intentions to perform them.
1 Introduction In the parlance, the “sense of ownership” refers to the phenomenon of taking one’s bodily parts and movements or mental states as one’s own. The “sense of agency” refers to the phenomenon of taking one’s bodily movements or mental acts as one’s own doings.1 Each sense divides into two types, according to its object: senses of bodily ownership and agency and senses of psychological ownership and agency. This paper concerns only one of these: the sense of psychological agency, specifically the sense of agency over one’s own acts of conscious thinking. The sense of agency under discussion here is the phenomenon of taking some stretch of conscious thinking as one’s own doing. Thinking is a broad category, encompassing such activities as imagining, reasoning, comparing, planning, searching one’s memory, and the like. “Conscious thinking” refers to any such activity that is realized in conscious experience. Perhaps not all thinking is conscious and not all parts of a single episode of thinking need be conscious. For example, you might plan a vacation off and on over the course of a week, but only some parts of that are manifest in conscious experience. Because the phenomena are diverse, it helps to focus on a paradigmatic case: inner speech. 1 The literature on the senses of ownership and agency is extensive. For ownership see Martin (1995), the essays collected in Roessler and Eilan (2003), Zahavi (2005), and Musholt (2015). For the sense of agency, in addition to the essays discussed below, see Bayne (2008).
* Casey Doyle [email protected] 1
Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York, USA
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This is a process of auditory imagining that unfolds over time, that occupies one’s attention, and that is explicitly there before the mind’s eye (or ear). As Hulburt et al. put it, “the speakings are generally apprehended to be in the person’s own naturally inflected voice, in the same rhythm, pacing, expressivity, tone, hesitations, and style as external speaking” (2013, 1482). Not all conscious thinking is realized in inner speech, of course. One reason to take inner speech as a paradigm is that it occurs frequently and effortlessly, and when it occurs it is, for the most part, obvious to the subject. It is what Hulburt and Heavey call a “pristine inner experience” (2018, 168). Still, there is considerable controversy about how to understan
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