The Phenomenology Of Agency And Accounts Of Free Will

The phenomenology of agency is also called the experience of agency.It is about the question of "what it’s like to experience oneself as a free agent".Assume that we have the experience of agency.And assume that the content of the experience of agency is veridical.How should its content be understood?Experience-libertarian believes that the content of the experience of agency is in line with the description given by libertarians.While experience-compatibilism claims that the content of the experience of agency is as what compatibilism described.The different interpretations of the same experience have brought us difficulties in understanding its contents.After claim that both sides have problems,I will argue that an appropriate explanation of the content of the phenomenology of agency should be an account of revisionism.Experience-libertarian and experience-compatibilism set different veridicality conditions for the phenomenology of agency and provide their own answers.But they did not provide conclusive evidence to explain why the phenomenology of agency is not as what the other side described.The root of the problem lies in the fact that both empirical libertarianism and empirical compatibilism conceive agentive phenomenology through their respective "theoretical filters" and then give corresponding descriptions,without directly discussing the nature of agentive phenomenology and how we conceive it in our daily life.The revisionism theory of agentive phenomenology is to solve these problems,find out how we actually conceive it and put forward to answer the question that how we should conceive it.The discussion of the nature of agentive phenomenology is inseparable from an accurate definition of its notion.After distinguishing it from the phenomenology of bodily movement,I argue that agency and intentional action are closely related,and the accurate description of the phenomenology of agency is also inseparable from the core of its phenomenal characters:purposiveness,mineness,and voluntariness.The notion of the phenomenology of agency is therefore defined as phenomenal states which have the above-mentioned core characters and only instantiated by a state or process central to intentional action.Then I will argue that we,in fact,conceive agentive phenomenology as what libertarianism described.In addition to the argument for empirical libertarianism,a large number of experiments and reports have also proved that people’s intuition of the phenomenology of agency is libertarian.However,the inference to such intuition has two false premises:"Introspectively accessible features of our current states don’t uniquely fix a decision" and "We have access to the proximal influences on our decisions".Therefore,our intuition of the phenomenology of agency is unwarranted,which needs to be revised.Finally,I will argue that we should understand the phenomenology of agency in the way of "dual content".Part of its content is neutral,which can be veridical regardless of whether the free will is libertarian or compatibilist,while the other part is libertarian.The latter content is derived from the former.The dual content view enables us to affirm that the phenomenology of agency can be veridical even though we actually have some wrong assumptions of it.Because the veridical conditions of the two parts are different,and as long as one of them is satisfied,the phenomenology of agency can be veridical.The neutral content in the dual content also provides a direction for us to understand the phenomenology of agency,that is,its truth value has little to do with the truth of determinism but is related to the core of its phenomenal characters.