Time to act: The dynamics of agentive experiences

Elisabeth Pacherie (1)

1 IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod

Actions unfold in time, and so do experiences of agency. Yet, despite the recent surge of interest in the sense of agency among both philosophers and cognitive scientists, the import of the fact that agentive experiences unfold in time remains to this day largely under-appreciated. I argue that we should think of agentive experiences as continuants, whose contents evolve as actions unfold. I try to characterize these content-shifts, distinguishing two main dimensions of change, changes in scale or fine-grainedness and changes in tense, as well as the main action control and action specification processes that underlie them. I further argue that taking into account this temporal dynamics of agentive experiences can also help us better appreciate in what sense some of the apparently conflicting empirical models of the sense of agency proposed in recent years can be seen as complementary rather than as rival and help us refine integrative models.

Mots clés: content shifts; agentive contents; sense of agency; action hierarchy; temporal dynamics; content; shifts

Domaines: Philosophie

Elisabeth Pacherie. Time to act: The dynamics of agentive experiences. Patrick Haggard; Baruch Eitam. The Sense of Agency: Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience, Oxford University Press, 2015, 9780190267278. ⟨hal-01110286⟩