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DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-V001-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-V001-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/action/v-1

4. Agents’ experience and knowledge

When the Will features in accounts of action, it may be thought of, in Cartesian spirit, as something the operations of which are available only to introspection (see Introspection, psychology of; Private states and language). One of the ideas to which Ryle was objecting in his attack on volitions was the idea that for each visible action of a person there is an inner item accessible to them alone. Now, although we may not wish to describe our experience of agency in Cartesian terms, it seems undeniable that there is consciousness of voluntary agency. If volition is thought of as action’s conscious aspect, then it is not an invention of philosophers but a feature of everyone’s experience. So it could be correct to suppose that volition is a part of the phenomenon of action, even if it should be denied that each action has a volition as a part or as a cause.

A person who is doing something intentionally knows what they are doing – or, if they do not know this, they know at least what they are trying to do; and they know this without making observations of themselves of a kind that others can make. The experience of acting, which is the basis of such knowledge, is not just proprioceptive experience (it is not just experience got from information fed back from the body about the body when the body is moved). So the idea of a distinctive conscious state contemporaneous with an action seems correct. There is little agreement about how such an idea should be recorded in an account. Sometimes the content of the experience of acting is spoken of in terms of ‘exertion’, which can make it seem as though some actual effort were always required to move a bit of the body. But if the idea of experienced exertion is meant only to capture the fact that it would feel very differently to us if we did not move our bodies voluntarily, it is acceptable. Suppose that you were wired up in such a way that your efferent neural pathways could be so stimulated that your muscles would contract and your finger move when some other person determined that this should happen. Of course there would not be an action of your moving your finger in that case; but also, we think, the characteristic experience of agency would be missing.

Such experience, it might be thought, is present in all conscious creatures who do things – whether or not they are rational agents who do things intentionally. If that is right, it may be necessary also to record another kind of experience, which is peculiarly human now, and which may be called the experience of freedom, or the sense of alternative possibilities (see Free will §5). Thinking of agents as conscious subjects can remind us of how narrowly focused the philosophy of action becomes when it is concerned exclusively with questions of actions, events and individuation, basic acts and volitional theories (see Consciousness).

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Citing this article:
Hornsby, Jennifer. Agents’ experience and knowledge. Action, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-V001-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/action/v-1/sections/agents-experience-and-knowledge.
Copyright © 1998-2024 Routledge.

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