Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex SystemWhat is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory"—the branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action, and between voluntary and involuntary behavior—has been unable to account for the difference. Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation—one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be prooflike—underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions—as historical narrative, not inference—follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility. |
Contents
How the Modern Understanding of Cause Came to Be | |
Causal Theories of Action | 7 |
Action and the Modern Understanding of Explanation | 25 |
Action as Lawful Regularities | 35 |
Action and Reductive Accounts of Purposiveness | 45 |
Information Theory and the Problem of Action | 59 |
Some New Vocabulary A Primer on Systems Theory | 85 |
Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics | 101 |
Dynamical Constraints as Landscapes Meaning and Behavior as Topology | 133 |
Embodied Meaning | 145 |
Intentional Action A Dynamical Account | 157 |
Threading an Agents Control Loop through the Environment | 177 |
Narrative Explanation and the Dynamics of Action | 199 |
Agency Freedom and Individuality | 227 |
References | 249 |
Index | 259 |
Constraints as Causes The Intersection of Information Theory and Complex Systems Dynamics | 113 |
Other editions - View all
Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System Alicia Juarrero No preview available - 2002 |
Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System Alicia Juarrero No preview available - 1999 |