Agency and self-awareness: issues in philosophy and psychology

Table of Contents:

1. Agency and self-Awareness: Mechanisms and Epistemology

2. The Sense of Agency: Awareness and Ownership of Action

3. Action: Awareness, Ownership, and Knowledge

4. Conscious Awareness of Intention and of Action

5. Consciousness of Action and Self-Consciousness: A Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

6. The Role of Demonstratives in Action-Explanation

7. Experimental Approaches to Action

8. Perception and Agency

9. Fractionating and the Intentional Control of Behaviour: A Neuropsychological Analysis

10. Dual Control and the Causal Theory of Action: The Case of Non-intentional Action

11. The Development of Young Children's Action Control and Awareness

12. Children's Action Control and Awareness: Comment on Frye and Zelazo

13. The Development of Self-Consciousness

14. Perceiving Intentions

15. The Sense of Ownership: An Analogy between Sensation and Action

16. The Epistemology of Physical Action, Brian O'Shaughnessy

17. On Knowing One's Own Actions

18. Intentional Action and Self-Awareness

Index.

Leading philosophers and psychologists join forces to investigate a set of problems to do with agency and self-awareness, in seventeen specially written essays. In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. Patients with Anarchic Hand syndrome sometimes find their hands perform apparently goal-directed actions which the patients disown, yet seem to be unable to suppress (for example, reaching out for someone else's food in a restaurant). On the face of it, these patients lack the kind of control and self-awareness we ordinarily take ourselves to have when acting intentionally. Questions raised by this phenomenon include: What is involved in being aware of an action as one's own? What is the nature of the control these patients are lacking and which characterizes normal intentional actions? What is the relation between a priori explanations of consciousness and self-consciousness, on the one hand, and empirical work on the information-processing mechanisms involved in action control, on the other? Questions of action control and self-awareness tend to be treated separately in both philosophy and psychology. The central idea behind this volume is that outstanding unresolved issues on both topics, and in both disciplines, can only be resolved by an interdisciplinary examination of the relations between them. The editors' useful introductory essay offers a guide to cross-disciplinary reading of the contributions, and makes connections between them explicit.