•  51
    Is the wandering mind a planning mind?
    Mind and Language. forthcoming.
    Recent studies on mind‐wandering reveal its potential role in goal exploration and planning future actions. How to understand these explorative functions and their impact on planning remains unclear. Given certain conceptions of intentions and beliefs, the explorative functions of mind‐wandering could lead to regular reconsideration of one's intentions. However, this would be in tension with the stability of intentions central to rational planning agency. We analyze the potential issue of excess…Read more
  •  29
    On Hedden's proof that machine learning fairness metrics are flawed
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    1. Fairness is about the just distribution of society's resources, and in ML, the main resource being distributed is model performance, e.g. the translation quality produced by machine translation...
  •  59
    Transparency and the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis
    with Victor Lange
    Philosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.
    Many philosophers endorse the Transparency Thesis, the claim that by introspection one cannot become aware of one's experience. Recently, some authors have suggested that the Transparency Thesis is challenged by introspective states reached under mindfulness. We label this the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis. The present paper develops the hypothesis in important new ways. First, we motivate the hypothesis by drawing on recent clinical psychology and cognitive science of mindfulness. Secondly, we…Read more
  •  66
    Varieties of self-awareness
    with Dan Zahavi
    In K. W. M. Fulford (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Oxford University Press. pp. 221. 2013.
    This chapter argues that explicit self-conscious thinking is founded on an implicit form of self-awareness built into the very structure of phenomenal consciousness. In broad strokes, the argument is that a theory denying the existence of pre-reflective or minimal self-awareness has difficulties explaining a number of essential features of explicit first-person self-reference, and that this will impede a proper understanding of certain types of psychopathology. The chapter proceeds by discussion…Read more
  •  440
    Dimensions of bodily subjectivity
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (3): 279-283. 2009.
  •  45
    Measurement Scepticism, Construct Validation, and Methodology of Well-Being Theorising
    with Victor Lange
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.
    Precise measurements of well-being would be of profound societal importance. Yet, the sceptical worry that we cannot use social science instruments and tests to measure well-being is widely discussed by philosophers and scientists. A recent and interesting philosophical argument has pointed to the psychometric procedures of construct validation to address this sceptical worry. The argument has proposed that these procedures could warrant confidence in our ability to measure well-being. The prese…Read more
  •  53
    Responsibility for Forgetting To Do
    Erkenntnis 89 (2): 755-776. 2024.
    Assuming that an agent can be morally responsible for her forgetting to do something, we can use recent psychological research on prospective memory to assess the psychological assumptions made by normative accounts of the moral responsibility for forgetting. Two accounts of moral responsibility (control accounts and valuative accounts) have been prominent in recent debates about the degree to which agents are blameworthy for their unwitting omissions. This paper highlights the psychological ass…Read more
  •  44
    A new cognitive model of long-term memory for intentions
    with Franziska Oren and Søren Kyllingsbæk
    Cognition 215 (C): 104817. 2021.
    In this paper, we propose a new mathematical model of retrieval of intentions from long-term memory. We model retrieval as a stochastic race between a plurality of potentially relevant intentions stored in long-term memory. Psychological theories are dominated by two opposing conceptions of the role of memory in temporally extended agency – as when a person has to remember to make a phone call in the afternoon because, in the morning, she promised she would do so. According to the Working Memory…Read more
  •  31
    Measures of Agency
    with Mark Schram Christensen
    Neuroscience of Consciousness 2020 (1). 2020.
    The sense of agency is typically defined as the experience of controlling one’s own actions, and through them, changes in the external environment. It is often assumed that this experience is a single, unified construct that can be experimentally manipulated and measured in a variety of ways. In this article, we challenge this assumption. We argue that we should acknowledge four possible agency-related psychological constructs. Having a clear grasp of the possible constructs is important since e…Read more
  •  40
    Is Remembering to do a Special Kind of Memory?
    with Søren Kyllingsbæk
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (2): 385-404. 2020.
    When a person decides to do something in the future, she forms an intention and her intention persists. Philosophers have thought about the rational requirement that an agent’s intention persists until its execution. But philosophers have neglected to think about the causal memory mechanisms that could enable this kind of persistence and its role in rational long-term agency. Our aim of this paper is to fill this gap by arguing that memory for intention is a specific kind of memory. We do this b…Read more
  •  31
    Sensation of Movement
    with Mark Schram Christensen
    Routledge. 2017.
    Sensation of Movement explores the role of sensation in motor control, bodily self-recognition and sense of agency. The sensation of movement is dependent on a range of information received by the brain, from signalling in the peripheral sensory organs to the establishment of higher order goals. Through the integration of neuroscientific knowledge with psychological and philosophical perspectives, this book questions whether one type of information is more relevant for the ability to sense and c…Read more
  •  52
    The two visual systems hypothesis and contrastive underdetermination
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 17): 4045-4068. 2021.
    This paper concerns local yet systematic problems of contrastive underdetermination of model choice in cognitive neuroscience debates about the so-called two visual systems hypothesis. The underdetermination problem is systematically generated by the way certain assumptions about the representationalist nature of computation are translated into experimental practice. The problem is that behavioural data underdetermine the choice between competing representational models. In this paper, I diagnos…Read more
  •  39
    Sense of agency for movements
    with Mark Schram Christensen
    Consciousness and Cognition 65 27-47. 2018.
    In this paper, we argue that the comparator model is not a satisfactory model of sense of agency (SoA). We present a theoretical argument and experimental studies. We show (1) most studies of SoA neglect a distinction between SoA associated with movements (narrow SoA) and SoA associated with environmental events (broad SoA); (2) the comparator model emerges from experimental studies of sensory consequences narrowly associated with movements; (3) narrow SoA can be explained by a comparator model,…Read more
  •  213
    Anscombe and Practical Knowledge of What Is Happening
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 78 (1): 41-67. 2009.
    On the face of it, conflicting constraints are placed on agents' knowledge of their own action: it is demanded that that which is known is an event happening in the “outside world”, but that the way in which it is known is “from the inside”. I propose to look at the way in which Anscombe sets up this epistemological puzzle and attempts to solve it. I discuss two ways in which Anscombe proposes to dissolve the paradox of agents' knowledge, whereof the first one is rejected. Finally, I discuss dif…Read more
  •  161
    Perception and non-inferential knowledge of action
    Philosophical Explorations 14 (2). 2011.
    I present an account of how agents can know what they are doing when they intentionally execute object-oriented actions. When an agent executes an object-oriented intentional action, she uses perception in such a way that it can fulfil a justificatory role for her knowledge of her own action and it can fulfil this justificatory role without being inferentially linked to the cognitive states that it justifies. I argue for this proposal by meeting two challenges: in an agent's knowledge of her act…Read more
  •  99
    Seeing what I am Doing
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (2): 295-318. 2012.
    I argue against the view that an agent’s knowledge of her own current action cannot in any way rely on perception for its justification. Instead, I argue that when it comes to an agent’s knowledge of her own object-oriented intentional action, the agent’s belief about what she is doing is partly justified by her perception of the object of action. I proceed by first proposing an account of such actions according to which the agent’s knowledge is partly justified by her perception. I then discuss…Read more
  •  42
    Brain Imaging and Psychiatric Classification
    with Andrea Raballo
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 18 (4): 305-309. 2011.
    Fielding and Marwede attempt to lay down directions for an applied onto-psychiatry. According to their proposal, such an enterprise requires us to accept certain metaphysical and methodological claims about how brain and experience are related. To put it in one sentence, our critique is that we find their metaphysics questionable and their methodology clinically impracticable.A first fundamental problem for their project, as it is expressed in their paper, is that their overall aim is unclear. A…Read more
  •  146
    The body in action
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2): 243-261. 2008.
    This article is about how to describe an agent’s awareness of her bodily movements when she is aware of executing an action for a reason. Against current orthodoxy, I want to defend the claim that the agent’s experience of moving has an epistemic place in the agent’s awareness of her own intentional action. In “The problem,” I describe why this should be thought to be problematic. In “Motives for denying epistemic role,” I state some of the main motives for denying that bodily awareness has any …Read more
  •  17
  •  139
    Trying and the arguments from total failure
    Philosophia 36 (1): 67-86. 2008.
    New Volitionalism is a name for certain widespread conception of the nature of intentional action. Some of the standard arguments for New Volitionalism, the so-called arguments from total failure, have even acquired the status of basic assumptions for many other kinds of philosophers. It is therefore of singular interest to investigate some of the most important arguments from total failure. This is what I propose to do in this paper. My aim is not be to demonstrate that these arguments are inco…Read more
  •  79
    Psychologists and philosophers are often tempted to make general claims about the importance of certain experimental results for our commonsense notions of intentional agency, moral responsibility, and free will. It is a strong intuition that if the agent does not intentionally control her own behavior, her behavior will not be an expression of agency, she will not be morally responsible for its consequences, and she will not be acting as a free agent. It therefore seems natural that the interes…Read more
  •  49
    In a recent paper, Brogaard presents counter-arguments to the conclusions of an experiment with blindsight subject GR. She argues that contrary to the apparent findings that GR’s preserved visual abilities relate to degraded visual experiences, she is in fact fully unconscious of the stimuli she correctly identifies. In this paper, we present arguments and evidence why Brogaard’s argument does not succeed in its purpose. We suggest that not only is relevant empirical evidence in opposition to Br…Read more
  •  20
  •  91
    The Perception‐Action Model: Counting Computational Mechanisms
    Mind and Language 32 (4): 416-445. 2017.
    Milner and Goodale's Two Visual Systems Hypothesis is regarded as common ground in recent discussions of visual consciousness. A central part of TVSH is a functional model of vision and action. In this paper, I provide a brief overview of these current discussions and argue that there is ambiguity between a strong and a weak version of PAM. I argue that, given a standard way of individuating computational mechanisms, the available evidence cannot be used to distinguish between these versions. Th…Read more
  •  98
    The feeling of agency hypothesis: a critique
    Synthese 192 (10): 3313-3337. 2015.
    A dominant view in contemporary cognitive neuroscience is that low-level, comparator-based mechanisms of motor control produce a distinctive experience often called the feeling of agency . An opposing view is that comparator-based motor control is largely non-conscious and not associated with any particular type of distinctive phenomenology . In this paper, I critically evaluate the nature of the empirical evidence researchers commonly take to support FoA-hypothesis. The aim of this paper is not…Read more
  •  80
    First Person and Minimal Self-Consciousness
    In Sofia Miguens & Gerhard Preyer (eds.), Consciousness and Subjectivity, Ontos Verlag. pp. 273-296. 2012.
    In this paper, I present one possible way of arguing for the theory of minimal self-consciousness, namely, by an argument by elimination. Central to the argument are the following two claims: a) If a theory of consciousness cannot explain first-person self-reference, then the theory is false, and b) An anonymity theory cannot explain first-person self-reference. Consequently, the anonymity theory is false.