Alicia Juarrero.
Dynamics in Action: intentional behavior as a complex system.
MIT Press. 1999
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 nonaction,
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 explanations to be prooflike—underlies contemporary theories of action.
Juarrero 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.
