After a long period of neglect, the phenomenology of action has recently regained its place in the agenda of philosophers and scientists alike. The recent explosion of interest in the topic highlights its complexity. The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework allowing for a more precise characterization of the many facets of the phenomenology of agency, of how they are related and of their possible sources. The key assumption guiding this attempt is that the processes through which the phenomenology of action is generated and the processes involved in the specification and control of action are strongly interconnected. I argue in favor of a three-tiered dynamic model of intention, link it to an expanded version of the internal model theory of action control and specification, and use this theoretical framework to guide an analysis of the contents, possible sources and temporal course of complementary aspects of the phenomenology of action.

Looking for the agent: an investigation into consciousness of action and self-consciousness in schizophrenic patients. Cognition, Elsevier, 1997, 65, pp.71-86. Looking for the agent: an investigation into consciousness of action and self-consciousness in schizophrenic patients AbstractThe abilities to attribute an action to its proper agent and to understand its meaning when it is produced by someone else are basic aspects of human social communication. Several psychiatric syndromes, such as schizophrenia, seem to lead to a dysfunction of the awareness of one's own action as well as of recognition of actions performed by others. Such syndromes offer a framework for studying the determinants of agency, the ability to correctly attribute actions to their veridical source. Thirty normal subjects and 30 schizophrenic patients with and without hallucinations and/or delusional experiences were required to execute simple finger and wrist movements, without direct visual control of their hand. The image of either their own hand or an alien hand executing the same or a different movement was presented on a TV-screen in real time. The task for the subjects was to discriminate whether the hand presented on the screen was their own or not. Hallucinating and deluded schizophrenic patients were more impaired in discriminating their own hand from the alien one than the non-hallucinating ones, and tended to misattribute the alien hand to themselves. Results are discussed according to a model of action control. A tentative description of the mechanisms leading to action consciousness is proposed.

This paper is concerned with the problem of self-identification in the domain of action. We claim that this problem can arise not just for the self as object, but also for the self as subject in the ascription of agency. We discuss and evaluate some proposals concerning the mechanisms involved in self-identification and in agencyascription, and their possible impairments in pathological cases. We argue in favor of a simulation hypothesis that claims that actions, whether overt or covert, are centrally simulated by the neural network, and that this simulation provides the basis for action recognition and attribution.In this paper we will be concerned with the problem of self-identification as it arises in the domain of action, which we will take to include both overt and covert or simulated actions.Talk of a problem of identification presupposes a contrast set, and the possibility that, in seeking to identify one self, one picks out something in the contrast set instead. With self-identification, two contrast sets must be considered: the world at large and the set of other selves. The problem of self-identification therefore divides into two sub-problems: self-world discrimination and self-other discrimination. We focus here on the latter problem. Our first aim is to show that there is a problem of self-other discrimination. Our second aim is to discuss and evaluate some proposals concerning the mechanisms involved in self-identification and in agencyascription, and their possible impairments in pathological cases.In the first section, we will examine some of the reasons why philosophers have paid little attention to the problem of self-other discrimination, and investigate the conditions under which this problem can arise. In section 2, we will concentrate on the identification of the self as a physical body. In section 3, we will present evidence that we are able to perceive the intentions of others. This will involve the idea of shared representations of actions, the nature and format of which we willWe would like to thank Tim Bayne, Jérôme Dokic, Pierre Jacob, Joëlle Proust, Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, and the participants at the Workshop on Simulation held in Paris in May 2003 for discussions and comments on earlier versions of this paper. We are especially indebted to Gregory Currie for his penetrating and helpful comments and suggestions on multiple drafts of this paper.

In this paper we defend the doxastic conception of delusions against the metacognitive account developed by Greg Currie and collaborators. According to the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by their subjects as beliefs: the Capgras patient, for instance, does not believe that his wife has been replaced by a robot, instead, he merely imagines that she has, and mistakes this imagining for a belief. We argue that the metacognitive account is untenable, and that the traditional conception of delusions as beliefs should be retained.

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A full account of purposive action must appeal not only to propositional attitude states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, but also to motor representations, i.e., non-propositional states that are thought to represent, among other things, action outcomes as well as detailed kinematic features of bodily movements. This raises the puzzle of how it is that these two distinct types of state successfully coordinate. We examine this so-called "Interface Problem". First, we clarify and expand on the nature and role of motor representations in explaining intentional action. Next, we characterize the respective functions of intentions and motor representations, the differences in representational format and content that these imply, and the interface challenge these differences in turn raise. We then evaluate Butterfill & Sinigaglia's (2014) recent answer to this interface challenge, according to which intentions refer to action outcomes by way of demonstrative deference to motor representations. We present some worries for this proposal, arguing that, among other things, it implicitly presupposes a solution to the problem, and so cannot help to resolve it. Finally, we suggest that we may make some progress on this puzzle by positing a "content-preserving causal process" taking place between intentions and motor representations, and we offer a proposal for how this might work.

This paper contrasts two approaches to agentive self-awareness: a highlevel, narrative-based account, and a low-level comparator-based account. We argue that an agent's narrative self-conception has a role to play in explaining their agentive judgments, but that agentive experiences are explained by low-level comparator mechanisms that are grounded in the very machinery responsible for action-production.

Philosophers have proposed accounts of shared intentions that aim at capturing what makes a joint action intentionally joint. On these accounts, having a shared intention typically presupposes cognitively and conceptually demanding theory of mind skills. Yet, young children engage in what appears to be intentional, cooperative joint action long before they master these skills. In this paper, I attempt to characterize a modest or 'lite' notion of shared intention, inspired by Michael Bacharach's approach to team-agency theory in terms of framing, group identification and team reasoning. I argue that the account of shared intentions this approach yields is less cognitively and conceptually demanding than other accounts and is thus applicable to the intentional joint actions performed by young children. I also argue that it has limitations of its own and that considering what these limitations are may help us understand why we sometimes need to take other routes to shared intentions