Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System

Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System

Juarrero, Alicia

Paperback

PhilosophyGeneral Psychology

ISBN10: 0262600471
ISBN13: 9780262600477
Publisher: Bradford Book
Published: Jan 25 2002
Pages: 300
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.58 Width: 6.03 Depth: 8.99
Language: English
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.

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