The feeling of agency hypothesis: a critique

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A dominant view in contemporary cognitive neuroscience is that low-level, comparator-based mechanisms of motor control produce a distinctive experience often called the feeling of agency (the FoA-hypothesis). An opposing view is that comparator-based motor control is largely non-conscious and not associated with any particular type of distinctive phenomenology (the simple hypothesis). In this paper, I critically evaluate the nature of the empirical evidence researchers commonly take to support FoA-hypothesis. The aim of this paper is not only to scrutinize the FoA-hypothesis and data supposed to support it; it is equally to argue that experimentalists supporting the FoA-hypothesis fail to establish that the experimental outcomes are more probable given the FoA-hypothesis than given the simpler hypothesis.
Original languageEnglish
JournalSynthese
Volume192
Issue number10
Pages (from-to)3313-3337
Number of pages25
ISSN0039-7857
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Humanities - Feeling of agency, Comparator mechanisms, Motor cognition, Cognitive neuroscience, Philosophy of action, Philosophy of science

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