Consciousness and Action(2003: 48). We may, for example, be aware of the accuracy or inaccuracy of our movement just
as we are making it, and without the power to change it.
If this is so, awareness of the accuracy of movement may precede feedback of that
movement’s accuracy and, then some of the harmonious feelings associated with accu-
rate movement may derive from its accurate elaboration and selection within the
brain as well as, or even rather than, from peripheral sensory feedback resulting from
the movement.
(Cole and Montero 2007: 306)3 The Sense of AgencyConsciousness during action may be more complex than already indicated if it also involves a
sense of agency. This has become a controversial issue, however. Do we have, in addition to a
sense of what we are doing, and a variable consciousness of our surroundings, and possibly an
aesthetic feeling of pleasure that derives from kinaesthetic and control factors, also a sense of
agency that is separable from these other aspects?
Elsewhere, I distinguished between the sense of ownership (SO) for movement or action,
and the sense of agency (SA), and argued that both of these experiences, even if difficult to
distinguish in everyday intentional action, are dissociable in the case of involuntary movement
(Gallagher 2000; 2012). In that case, if you push me from behind, I can easily say that I am the
one moving, or my body is moving (SO), but that I was not the agent of that movement (no SA).
Phenomenologists thus argue that in voluntary action the agent has both SO and SA for the
action (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012), and that these are non- or pre-reflective, implicit aspects of
our consciousness of action. It’s important to distinguish between pre-reflective SO and SA, and
retrospective reflective judgments about ownership and agency (Vosgerau and Newen 2007).
The phenomenological claim is that SO and SA are non-reflective, occurring at a first-order
level of consciousness.
Mike Martin (1995) first used the term ‘sense of ownership’ in connection with an experi-
ence of one’s spatial boundaries. According to Martin, “when one feels a sensation, one thereby
feels as if something is occurring within one’s body” (1995: 267). This is not a matter of explicit
judgment, as if I were experiencing a free-floating sensation, concerning which I needed to
judge its spatial location as falling within my body boundaries. Rather, as Martin argues, the
experience of location is an intrinsic feature of the sensation itself. This experience just is the
SO for one’s body as a whole, so that I have SO for particular body parts only as being parts of
that whole body (Martin 1995: 277–278). SO is not a quality in addition to other qualities of
experience, but “already inherent within them” (1995: 278). I take Martin’s concept of SO to
be close to, if not identical to, the phenomenological concept to the extent that SO for one’s
action is an intrinsic aspect of proprioceptive and kinaesthetic experiences of bodily movement
(Gallagher 2017b).
José Bermúdez (2011; in press), however, in a critical discussion of SO, in contrast to Martin,
rejects the idea that SO is a “special phenomenological relation” (Martin 1995: 267), although
he accepts the importance of “boundedness.” He denies that there is a positive first-order (non-
observational) phenomenology of ownership or feeling of ‘mineness.’ In contrast to this “infla-
tionary” conception, which he attributes to phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty (he also cites
Gallagher 2005; De Vignemont 2007, 2013), he offers a deflationary account. “On a deflationary
conception of ownership the SO consists, first, in certain facts about the phenomenology of
bodily sensations and, second, in certain fairly obvious judgments about the body (which we can