Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System

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MIT Press, Jan 25, 2002 - Psychology - 300 pages
What 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

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About the author (2002)

Alicia Juarrero is Professor of Philosophy at Prince George's Community College, Maryland. She is a member of the National Council on the Humanities, the governing board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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