The explicit sense of agency — as operationalized in experimental paradigms — is not a feeling, but is a judgment

The explicit sense of agency (SoA) is characterized as the unique and exclusive feeling generated by action or agency states (or the comparator process of the motor control system, to be specific), and (thus) this characterization assumes “cognitive phenomenology,” the assumption that non-sensory states like actions or agency states, all by themselves, generate a unique feeling akin to typical sensory processes. However, the assumption of cognitive phenomenology is questionable as it fails to account for the necessity of causal interaction between the sensory organ and the phenomenal object in the production of phenomenology or experience. Thus, this paper criticizes the explicit SoA — as opera-tionalized in experiments — by arguing that: (a) there is uncertainty in the explicit SoA operationalization (making the participants prone to judgment effects), (b) there are non-correlations or dissociations between agency states and explicit SoA reports, (c) explicit SoA reports are influenced by prior beliefs or online-generated heuristics, and (d) were the participants not uncertain about their agency (or the causal contingency between their actions and action-effects), they might not have produced non-veridical explicit SoA reports at all. Thus, this paper concludes that explicit SoA reports are not instances of (cognitive or agentive) phenomenology but are instances of heuristic judgment (under uncertainty).