Shaun Gallagherterm judgments of ownership)” (2011: 162). His deflationary view is that an explicit experience
of ownership only comes up when we turn our reflective attention to our bodily experience
and attribute that experience to ourselves. But that involves adding something that’s not there
to begin with. “There are facts about the phenomenology of bodily awareness (about position
sense, movement sense, and interoception) and there are judgments of ownership, but there is no
additional feeling of ownership” (2011: 166).
For the phenomenologists, however, to say that SO is an intrinsic aspect of proprioception
and kinaesthesia is to agree that it is not an additional or independent feeling, but rather, a sense
“already inherent within” the phenomenology of bodily sensations. On the phenomenologi-
cal view, and in contrast to Bermúdez, this intrinsic aspect is pre-reflective in the sense that
one has this intrinsic experience of ownership without having to make a reflective judgment
about ownership. This can be read in the deflationary way, so that the phenomenologists can
agree that there is no additional feeling of ownership, or “perfectly determinate ‘quale’ associ-
ated with the feeling of myness” (Bermúdez 2011, 165), independent of the proprioceptive and
kinaesthetic sensations. In fact, this implicit self-experience is precisely what makes first-person
bodily (proprioceptive, kinaesthetic) awareness itself (i.e., prior to any judgment) a form of self-
consciousness. It’s what puts the ‘proprio’ in proprioception (Gallagher and Trigg 2016).
Parallel to Bermúdez’s argument about SO, Thor Grünbaum (2015) has offered a detailed
critique of the notion of SA, drawing a similar conclusion, namely that there is no separate and
distinct pre-reflective SA that acts as the basis for a judgment about agency. Grünbaum’s analy-
sis is focused on accounts of SA that make it the experiential product of comparator mecha-
nisms involved in motor control. Although he doesn’t deny the possibility that a comparator
mechanism may be involved in motor control, he challenges the idea that such subpersonal
mechanisms can generate a distinct experience of agency. Specifically, he interprets the claim
that SA is generated in this way to mean that SA is intention-free. That is, on such accounts,
SA is generated even if the agent has not formulated a prior, personal-level intention to act in a
certain way. Reaching for my tea as I answer my email does not require that I consciously delib-
erate and form a plan to do so. Even if it does not involve the formation of a prior intention,
however, it nonetheless counts as an intentional action and certainly involves a motor intention
and a present intention (or intention-in-action) (see Pacherie 2006, 2007). In this respect, pace
Grünbaum, it’s not clear that SA can be characterized as intention-free.^2
A more important challenge to the comparator model, however, involves the characteriza-
tion of SA found in a number of experiments. Grünbaum, for example, indicates a problem like
this in Daprati et al. (1997). They ask subjects to perform a hand movement and to monitor it
on a computer screen, which shows either their own hand movement, or a hand movement
made by someone else. Subjects are then asked whether what they saw was their action or not,
i.e., whether they had a sense of self-agency for the movement.^3 The results show that subjects
mistook the actions of the other’s hand as their own in about 30% of the cases; schizophrenic
subjects with a history of delusions of control and/or hallucinations misjudged 50–77% of the
cases. In this experiment, the subject is in fact moving his hand in each task. Grünbaum thinks
there is a confusion here about SA. To get clear on what the problem with this experiment is, I
suggest it is helpful to look at a similar experiment by Farrer and Frith (2002), who, in contrast
to Daprati et al., employ the distinction between SO and SA. In their similar experimental
design, the subject is asked to control a cursor on a computer screen using a joystick, and then
to judge whether the event on the screen was caused by their action or not. Again, in each case
the subject moved the joystick. Farrer and Frith claim this allows for a controlled dissociation
between SO and SA. They argue that SA varied depending on whether subjects felt they were
in control of what was happening on the computer screen, while SO remained constant since